‘I lied to my dad on his deathbed — but I’m still waiting for his official apology’
Fifty years after the Arms Trial rocked Ireland, Captain James Kelly’s daughter is still fighting for him, writes
‘IAM the woman who lied to her father on his deathbed. The question, I suppose, is why?” asks Suzanne Kelly rhetorically. Fifty years after her father, Captain James Kelly, was at the centre of events that led to that landmark in Irish history known as the Arms Trial, she, like others, is still engrossed in the subject. It is an episode that has consumed the political establishment, involving as it did the then Taoiseach Jack Lynch, his nemesis Charlie Haughey, ministers Neil Blaney, Jim Gibbons, Kevin Boland, her father and a cast of characters that included powerful civil servants, lawyers and gardai.
“My father wanted the State to admit it had done him and his family wrong; but the State would never do that; it was more comfortable covering up what happened and classifying my father as an over-the-top raving partisan who treacherously abandoned his allegiance to the Army and the State,” she maintains.
“Yet he yearned for this acknowledgement. He was in the last throes of lung cancer.
He was gasping ‘Did it come?’. I said ‘yes, it did’, because it needed to be said. And if the State did not want to do the right and generous thing, then I would do it myself on its behalf.”
Suzanne Kelly, who has lived all her life with the fallout from the Arms Crisis and the Arms Trial, does not regret lying to her father that the State had at last acknowledged that he was, after all, only following orders.
“It is difficult to describe. I was acting as a woman with feeling rather than thinking deeply about it at the time. He was gasping for breath and wouldn’t let go of life until I gave him that reassurance,” she says.
One of six children, five of whom emigrated because, she maintains, of the family’s entanglement with those events, she had “a special bond” with her father and no qualms about easing him into the afterlife with the false assurance he had secured what he spent a lifetime fighting for.
An attempt to import arms on board an Aer Lingus passenger plane in early 1970, in which Capt Kelly, then working for Army Intelligence, played a crucial part, led to the Arms Trial. He along with Charlie Haughey and John Kelly from Belfast and ‘arms dealer’ Albert Luykx were charged with illegally attempting to procure arms. (Charges against Neil Blaney were dropped after a District Court found there was insufficient evidence against him.)
The first trial collapsed and summing up the retrial Judge Seamus Henchy told the jury that their verdict came down to whether they believed the evidence of the then Minister for Defence Jim Gibbons or the sacked Minister for Finance Charlie Haughey. One of them, he said, had committed perjury.
They chose to believe Haughey and all four defendants were acquitted. Kelly’s defence, led by Tom Finlay SC and Peter Sutherland BL, was that his part in the importation of arms was sanctioned by his superiors in Military Intelligence, the Irish Army and that the Minister for Defence Mr Gibbons was aware of his activities. Like a good soldier he was following orders.
But in a Dail debate in late 1971 Mr Gibbons, referring to Capt Kelly and his boss, the head of Army Intelligence, Colonel Michael Hefferon, said: “Allegations of knowledge (of the plan to import arms) on my part are completely without foundation and are blatant lies.” He said at the time he regretted having to say what he did about the two men, but he had to, because the Dail was being used “as a sounding board for every rumour and yarn”.
Despite the not guilty verdict and the resurgence in later years of Mr Haughey, James Kelly, who had resigned his army commission, remained obsessed to his dying breath with receiving a State pardon that never came.
“Mother was delighted when the trial ended, she shed tears of joy and wrote in her diary that all had changed and life was going to go back to what it was,” Suzanne Kelly says of her mother Sheila. But it never did. Her father Jim, as he was known to friends and family, couldn’t get another job. For a time he ran the family pub in Bailieboro, Co Cavan, but his daughter says they were harassed and humiliated by the State and eventually lost their home — and attempts were made to deny him his army pension.
“I think I regret that it consumed so much of his life,” she says. He was 40 at the time. When he died 32 years later from lung cancer, it was still uppermost in his active mind.
“He was a good father, a great father, but he could have done other things. He loved military history — he was editor of the Army magazine An Cosantoir before joining Army Intelligence. He could have been an academic. All that changed and he didn’t get a chance to do all those things. He was absolutely devoted to clearing his name.”
Over the intervening years the Arms Trial, with its murky plots stretching from Bailieboro to shady arms dealers in Frankfurt and Antwerp — and the question of who knew what and when — has itself become a twilight zone. The labyrinth of allegations, doctored evidence, lost files and the colourful cast of characters have added to the air of smoke and mirrors that pervades the story of 1970.
For Suzanne Kelly, once an eminent tax consultant, at the heart of it is the lost life of her father and the unjustly tarnished reputation of Col Michael Hefferon, the head of Army Intelligence who turned from star State witness to implacable defender of her father.
She recalls how, in May 2003, her father had taken a defamation case against publishers Gill & Macmillan and former Taoiseach Dr Garret FitzGerald over his claims in a book that the jury in the Arms Trial was intimidated and its verdict “perverse”.
Kelly was awarded €50,000 damages with €20,000 costs. Outside the court he was telling reporters “this is a great vindication” when one of them asked, “what year did the Arms Trial take place?” Suzanne says her father hesitated, but didn’t answer.
“My husband (Dr John Keane) was watching it on the news and said, ‘something is wrong with your father’. Eventually he was diagnosed with lung cancer and given six weeks to live. We didn’t believe it because he was still physically healthy, but within a week he couldn’t take a tissue out of the box. It was six weeks to the day when he died.”
She now lives in Athlone, where her husband is a wellknown doctor. But Suzanne hasn’t worked for nine years because of chronic illness. The couple’s daughter, Monique, has graduated in physics from Oxford and is working in Cambridge.
Former RTE journalist Michael Heney has recently published a book on the affair, The Arms Crisis of 1970: The Plot That Never Was, which is “amazingly accurate” she says. “The detail he goes into is amazing, documents everything. I thought I knew most of it but there were elements in the book that surprised me, I was stunned from time to time. It gives the evidence to believe Jim’s story and establishes his account of that time.”
Suzanne Kelly lied to her father about the official apology that never came, but still hopes for one of sorts. She says: “You dream of the perfect apology, like David Cameron’s apology for Bloody Sunday, but that won’t happen. All we want is confirmation that a wrong was done to him and to Col Hefferon.”
‘My father just wanted the State to admit it had done him and his family wrong — but the State would never do that. It was more comfortable covering up what really happened — and classifying my father as an overthe-top raving partisan who treacherously abandoned his allegiance to the army and the State’