The lawyer and the loyalist ... how a Catholic barrister turned the UVF towards the path to peace
Kevin Boyle, a civil rights campaigner from Newry, forged an unusual relationship with Billy Hutchinson while he was serving two life sentences. In his new book, former foreign correspondent Mike Chinoy says the double-killer’s release on licence helped begin steering the paramilitaries away from violence
By the early 1980s, Kevin Boyle was a professor of law at NUI Galway and becoming increasingly well-known for his work as a human rights lawyer. One particularly controversial case involved Nicky Kelly, a member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), convicted in 1978 with two other men of robbing a train and stealing £200,000. The Kelly case became one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in modern Irish history.
Although Kelly and his co-defendants repeatedly declared their innocence and claimed they had signed confessions after hours of violent police interrogation, they were convicted. Anticipating the verdict, he fled to the US three days before sentencing. Kelly and one other defendant were sentenced to 12 years in jail. A third got nine years.
Five months later, the Provisional IRA, to which Kelly did not belong, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the robbery. In May 1980, Kelly’s co-defendants had their convictions overturned on appeal.
Confident that his conviction would also be reversed, Kelly returned home — only to be arrested and jailed, with the Irish Supreme Court upholding his conviction. On May 1, 1983, Kelly began a hunger strike.
Concerned that Kelly’s death would cause a political crisis, Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald privately asked Boyle to file a case with the European Commission on Human Rights.
“The hunger strike was an incredible embarrassment to the government,” Boyle’s former Galway student, Gerard Quinn, who helped research the case, recalled. “The government was in a fix. Kelly was in a fix. And Kevin was reached out to as a way of trying to create some neutral space whereby Kelly could get off the hunger strike and the government could get off the hook.”
Boyle, in collaboration with Mary Robinson, who would become Ireland’s president in 1990, spent the next three weeks assembling a case for the commission, outlining how Kelly’s treatment violated the European Convention of Human Rights.
On June 7, 1983, the 38th day of Kelly’s hunger strike, the document was sent to Strasbourg. By this point, Kelly’s physical condition was rapidly deteriorating. Doctors gave him a week to 10 days to live.
That night, shortly after the application had been sent to Strasbourg, Kelly agreed to end his hunger strike. In a letter to Kelly, Boyle expressed relief that the hunger strike was over and stressed that an avenue to justice now existed.
In their submission, Boyle and
Robinson argued that “it is inhuman treatment under Article 3 to require him to continue to serve a sentence of 12 years penal servitude for a crime he did not commit, following a trial where false evidence forced from him was the sole basis of his conviction.”
The document also singled out Article 52 of Ireland’s Offences Against the State Act. This required anyone arrested under the Act “to give a full account of their movements if demanded”. Refusal to co-operate could result in six months in jail. The article effectively eliminated the right of the accused to remain silent.
With Kelly’s interrogators alone having the power to decide if his answers were acceptable, Boyle and Robinson argued that the sole purpose of a relentless interrogation over more than 60 hours “was to have him admit against his will to involvement in an offence he did not commit”.
In Strasbourg, officials at the European Commission were impressed with the case. “They were extremely well researched and compelling,” recalled Michel O’boyle, a lawyer then working at the commission, who had also studied with Boyle. “They demonstrated quite clearly that Kelly’s case had been treated in a different way from those of the co-accused.”
Yet, when the commission issued its decision on May 17, 1984, the application was deemed inadmissible — on a technicality. Having been asked on such short notice by Fitzgerald to bring the case, it had been submitted slightly later than the six months after the final decision by a local court that the Strasbourg regulations allowed.
But Boyle and Robinson did not give up. Two weeks later, they submitted a confidential memorandum to the Irish government, stressing that “we consider that, if the case had not failed due to the six months’ rule, these arguments, or some of them, would have been seriously examined by the European Commission of Human Rights” and strongly appealing for Kelly to be pardoned.
Two months later, Justice Minister Michael Noonan announced that Kelly was being released on “humanitarian grounds”. After four years and two weeks in prison, Kelly was a free man. In 1992, Mary Robinson, by now Ireland’s president, issued Kelly a formal pardon.
Two days after Kelly’s release, Boyle joined him at a Press conference. Stressing that the Irish government would have found it very difficult to defend its stance in Strasbourg, he emphasised that the continued use of Article 52 would probably lead to more cases before the court.
On this point, he was right. It would take 24 more years, but, in 2000, the court, in a case brought by Kevin’s old comrade from the civil rights movement, Michael Farrell, ruled that Section 52 “destroyed the very essence of (the) privilege against self-incrimination and (the) right to remain silent”.
Not long after Nicky Kelly had
❝ Kelly returned home — only to be arrested and jailed
❝ Mary Robinson issued him a formal pardon in 1992