HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS, VICTIMS & FAMILIES CALL FOR INVESTIGATIONS

THE PAST IS NOT A FOREIGN COUNTRY- IT IS PRESENT

I am Osgur Breatnach. I am 74 years of age. I am a father, a grandfather and a great grandfather.

As a young man in my 20’s. I was a journalist and editor of a small national newspaper. Married with one child. I looked forward to a good life. I was not to know one morning in March 1976 that I was going to be framed for a crime I had nothing to do with.

I am the victim of a miscarriage of justice.  What happened to me started in 1976 and therefore may be regarded as an historic case.

It surely wouldn’t happen nowadays. I wonder.

Ireland is a different country nowadays, and it is said the past is a foreign country.

Unfortunately, for people like me and many others who have suffered gross injustices and have never received either apology or acknowledgement, if there has been no inquiry, if there has been no accountability for false arrest, assault and torture, perjured evidence given to the Courts, imprisonment and loss of freedom, loss of reputation and continuing post traumatic psychological damage to one’s health, life and relationships, the case is not historic.

It is present. It didn’t happen in a foreign country it is happening now in Ireland.

I am not the only victim of gross abuses of personal rights. There have been many. 

A great many cases of victims of injustice are accounted for in the media over the decades even before the 1970’s and in the decades since. They all share the same features. No wrongdoing has been acknowledged. There is no inquiry. No one is held to account.

STATE SUBVERTING ITS OWN LEGITIMACY

What is not recognised by many is that the scope of damage caused by these cases is wider and deeper than the profound and permanent damage caused to the innocent victims of State abuse.

When as a young person, a journalist with good life prospects your life is hijacked and permanently distorted by processes involving criminal conspiracy and perjury which results in catastrophic consequences, all attention is focussed on that person.

But what is in effect ignored is even greater. In a constitutional democracy where the Courts are intended to be independent of the Executive power, the Courts are entitled to rely upon the evidence of the police. Judges rely on Garda evidence every day. We expect the Gardai to give truthful evidence.

When cases are discovered that false evidence is given, the State which fails to act swiftly to protect the integrity of the Courts and legal system is guilty of critically damaging subversion of its own legitimacy.

SAY NOTHING, DON’T ASK. DON’T LOOK. 

There was never any appetite for inquiry by Irish governments over the years.

Had there been in the early 70s it might have prevented, for instance, the torture, framing and wrongful jailing of Martin Conmey in the Una Lynskey Murder case.

It might also have prevented the murder by enraged relatives of innocent man Martin Kerrigan, falsely, maliciously, and criminally, blamed of involvement by Gardai. No inquiry into garda behaviour followed.

The 1970’s! This is the time of the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and other infamous British cases and the hundreds in the North, including the Hooded Men. Rightly, the Irish government took a case against the UK in European courts for torture.

At home, at the same time, the Irish governments encouraged the spawning of an evil phenomenon within An Garda Siochana which it nurtured and protected and continues to protect.

The Sallins Case focuses on perhaps the greatest miscarriage of justice in recent Irish criminal history. I refer to the Government targeting of a registered political party by the FG-Labour coalition with the arrest of 40 members, torturing of over 18 and the framing of six for alleged involvement in the Sallins Mail Train Robbery.

Insisting on our innocence, the only evidence against us were false incriminating statements dictated by Gardai after days of torture.

There was never a shred of any other evidence corroborating the alleged ‘voluntary confessions.’

TORTURE MENU

The torture we endured consisted of incommunicado detention, no or delayed legal access; deprivation of sleep and water; reduced diet; prolonged beatings, including by instruments, inducing prolonged pain and fear; resultant physical and mental exhaustion, severe anxiety, disorientation and loss of consciousness; threats to life, to set up assassinations, to arrest family members, to break up families and to place children in care.

Following the longest criminal trial in Irish history, partly by a sleeping judge, despite sustained medical evidence to the contrary, the court ruled our injuries were self-inflicted or with each other’s connivence.

But in my case, according to Garda evidence, I was only ever in their presence. So, the court inferred, I beat myself up so badly I had to be hospitalised.

We were sentenced to 33 years between us. On appeal, we were not allowed to argue we were tortured. But two of us were found to have been oppressed and had our sentences and convictions quashed. ‘Oppression’ is psychological torture according to the UN.

PRESIDENTIAL PARDON

Nicky Kelly, having jumped bail towards the end of the trial, returned to Ireland to clear his name and was thrown into jail to complete a 12-year sentence. After years of campaigning, including a 38-day-hunger strike, he was released. Awarded a Presidential Pardon he was compensated.

Fellow accused and I were not. The State refused to accept any wrongdoing. They withheld crucial evidence from discovery. There was no independent public inquiry as demanded by international law, by the prisoners, by human rights organisations and the general public. No garda, civil servant, or politician was ever held to account.

KNOWN FROM THE BEGINING

What has emerged since is information which established that none of us had anything to do with the mail train robbery. The reality is that this was not discovered when Nicky Kelly was granted the Presidential Pardon. It was known all along, from the very beginning.

There was evidence in the Garda investigation file which undermined and in effect made nonsense of the so called “Confessions.”

This material was not furnished to the Director of Public Prosecutions when the charges were laid against me and the other men. It was secreted. It was covered up.

ANOTHER GARDA CRIMINAL OFFENCE

In addition to perjury there is deception in information given to the DPP. That is a criminal offence. It’s a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

But this is still not openly acknowledged. It’s still being covered up. We might as well be living still in the 1970’s.

So, may I move forward to the 1980’s?  and to the Kerry Babies case. Numerous members of the same family sign false so-called confessions to murdering a baby. We now know their allegations of torture to be true and that they were innocent and that no baby was murdered on their farm. No inquiry follows into the Gardai. The state pattern of cover-up continues. The so-called Murder Squad/ Heavy Gang is disbanded only to be re-instated shortly afterwards.

COLD CASE COVER-UPS

Recent Una Lynskey  and Kerry Babies Cold Case Reviews refuse to investigate the Heavy Gang.

Say nothing, don’t ask. Don’t look. For God’s sake, don’t inquire!

What facilitated the abuse, torture and framing of prisoners in the past, and we may very well hear of new cases in the present and future, was the use of the so-called 100- year-old emergency Offences Against the State Act to facilitate incommunicado detention; torture explained in court as ‘general conversations with prisoners’; frame-up trials before juryless courts with politically appointed judges, divergent rules of procedure and evidence and, most importantly, state failure to hold any impartial public inquiry, failure to hold politicians and civil servants to account, and the de facto amnesty and promotion for criminal Gardai.

Calls for a public inquiry echoing over 49 years and the year-old petition for a public inquiry signed by every Irish human rights organisation, and echoed by Amnesty International and Fair Trials International, remain unanswered. Silence is weaponised.

All these cases are described as historic. The consequences are not. Failure to hold independent public inquiries for the hundreds of prisoners tortured down the years, constitute daily, ongoing, cruel, and inhuman treatment by the Irish Government, in itself a breach of the UN Covenant Against Torture and is contrary to the European Convention of Human Rights, both signed up to, and ignored, by the Irish Government. It is also an attack on the right of the Irish people to Truth.

The ongoing state cover-up is not historic, it is the worse crime, which continues to be committed, daily.