Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)

I do not know how much the Minister of State knows, or even remembers, about what occurred in 1976 and thereafter following the robbery by the IRA of €150,000 from a train at Sallins, County Kildare. It was an audacious robbery at the time that hit all the headlines. What did not really hit the headlines afterwards was the Garda Síochána arrest, torture and beating of confessions out of six men. There was also a sleeping judge in the Special Criminal Court who subsequently died, a retrial thereafter, convictions and the overturning on appeal of those convictions. There has been a failure since to acknowledge the miscarriage of justice and the cruel and inhuman treatment of the men. The Minister of State might know of Nicky Kelly, who went on the run during the first trial and returned when the convictions of two others were overturned. He ended up having to go on hunger strike because all appeals failed, despite the fact that the others had their convictions overturned. Eventually, the only way to free him was to pardon him. These men are elderly at this stage with broken health. It is not just about those who are convicted. There were others who did not receive the full sentence of the court who were broken and tortured.

Nobody can deny the world has moved on from the 1970s. Oversight and transparency is the name of the game, in many ways, and are more respected. There is intolerance of any type of misbehaviour or criminal acts in An Garda Síochána, not only by members of An Garda Síochána but by the public and the political sphere. At the time, however, there seemed to be an acceptance of it. RTÉ broadcast a documentary a number of years ago, "Crimes and Confessions", which outlined the existence of a Garda "heavy gang" that seemed to be a law unto itself and seemed to have the cover of the political masters of the time. That has been followed up recently by a podcast by the Irish Independent newspaper, which further outlined the failures in this instance and the need to address these failures.

It is not just myself asking. Obviously, the men themselves, namely, Brian McNally, Nicky Kelly, John Fitzpatrick, Mick Barrett and Osgur Breatnach, have relentlessly campaigned to get the State to acknowledge the truth of what occurred to them. Last year, Claire McEvoy, acting co-director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, stated:

The human rights violations inflicted upon the Sallins Men by An Garda Síochána and accepted by other parts of the Irish criminal justice system were part of a systemic pattern of human rights violations endemic across many years in Ireland’s history. The Irish State has systematically failed to address their treatment and the systems which enabled this treatment to occur.

This, in a nutshell, is why there needs to be an inquiry into this.

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