Revelation about Brian Stack’s murder was sinister and self-serving By Gerard Howlin

IT’S all about hope.

If you run out of hope, you run out of road. Hope comes many ways. Last week it came for the family of the late prison officer Brian Stack after a detour with Gerry Adams to an undisclosed location in a blacked out van. The party that sells the most hope wins.

Brian Stack was a prison officer in Portlaoise in the 1980s. The so-called Troubles were at their height. A lot of so called republican prisoners were in gaol there. In 1983 he was shot outside the National Boxing Stadium on Dublin’s South Circular Road. He died after a harrowing, debilitating 18 months of brain injury induced distress and dependency.

At the end of the detour last week, Adams brought Brian Stack’s adult sons into a room in a bungalow.

He introduced them to a man. The man read them a statement saying that IRA volunteers had shot their father. It was not an authorised IRA action. The delinquent provisional has been disciplined.

The Stack family now know for sure, what they always knew for a fact. The IRA assassinated their father.

It’s a funny thing about the National Boxing Stadium. It wasn’t a glamorous place in the 1980s. Boxing, bingo and show bands kept it going. Brian Stack went for the boxing. It is between what was then a Presbyterian Church and Griffith Barracks. The barracks is now Griffith College. The church is now a mosque and a Muslim primary school. Across the road from the former church and current mosque used to be a fine synagogue.

Brian Stack was shot in Little Jerusalem. Just up the South Circular Road is Clanbrassil Street, the heart of the once thriving and poor Jewish community. Leopold Bloom of lore lived on Clanbrassil Street. His mythical perambulations encompassed all thereabouts.

Óglaigh na hÉireann was garrisoned on the South Circular Road on the night that crime of capital murder was committed. Óglaigh na hÉireann, the legitimate, lawful army of this republic was in Griffith Barracks, named after the founder and first leader of Sinn Féin.

It is ironic that first the synagogue and then the mosque were built by people who came from far away to build a better life for themselves here. Those Jews were fleeing the pogroms of the czars across the Russian empire.

They knew all about summary justice on that stretch of the South Circular Road before Brian Stack’s assassin arrived and reminded them. Singled out for who they were, they were scapegoated to satiate the self-loathing of the people around them and to make a cruel, enfeebled regime seem capable of something, they fled here for a haven.

It is a great reproach to modern Ireland that during the decades early in the century, while there was still time, we did so little. Then it was too late; time had run out for them and us. That small Irish Jewish community around Clanbrassil Street and its environs, legendary in literature, is largely gone now. In its place is gentrification and a new Muslim community. Portobello as the upwardly mobile around the South Circular like to call as much of it as is credible, is posh now. And amidst the aching trendiness of newly acquired aspiration is a large, highly visible and clearly devout Muslim community. On Friday’s they go to prayers in great numbers. They are from all corners of the Muslim world; an Islamic United Nations.

You could walk along that stretch of road most days and think that not a lot happens. But all of humanity, from all around the world have walked where Brian Stack fell. Epic battles have been fought as a metaphor for life in the boxing ring inside. And when making ends meet wasn’t a metaphor for anything, generations of women went to the bingo, to get away from the men.

There is a cursoriness, a casualness and a cynicism about how for 30 years responsibility for Brian Stack’s death was concealed. There was a brazenness, an arrogance and a visceral contempt seeping from every pore of the process that gave his faithful family a belated, but calculated admission last week.

One unnamed man, talking about another unnamed man, took responsibility with one hand and took it away with another. The assassin wasn’t authorised, the miscreant was disciplined. These are men who feel now, as they did then, that they have power of life and death.

They dare to sit in the judgement seat, to pronounce sentence, to carry it out. We the sovereign people must apparently abide by their processes. We will get what justice we can in their kangaroo court and be grateful for it.

For the Stack family their original sentence was 30 years of denial. Now that denial is abrogated, but extenuated. It is couched in self-serving propaganda about a prison regime in the 1980s and implicitly denigrates Brian Stack’s memory.

If a religious order issued a statement about the industrial schools or the Magdalene laundries such as issued about Brian Stack last week, clergy if not lynched in the streets, would certainly be lynched in the media. Expletives from bankers convulsed the airwaves for weeks.

But cold blooded murder of a servant of the state, the mental torture of his family for decades after and the cold manipulation of his death to justify the unjustifiable is to perceive in its authors’ untrammelled ego.

AND WHAT of the supposed IRA member who was supposedly unauthorised and supposedly disciplined. It could be all complete untruth. But if it is true, it is worse. Under the law, Brian Stack lived to uphold, that man is innocent until proven guilty. He is entitled to due process.

That is the difference between a republic governed under law and a pogrom. People can’t be singled out because they are Protestants living in isolated rural areas west of the Bann. They can’t be singled out because they are Catholics who choose in the past to join the RUC. But then that was then and this is now. We have to move on and we should. But last week wasn’t progress. It wasn’t reconciliation. It wasn’t truth. It was sinister. It was manipulative. It was dirty.

There is a haunting danger that Gerry Adams in doing what he did last week, was doing all he actually could for the Stack’s. If that is truly all he could do, he is living in the belly of the beast he created. He is serving a life sentence. For Brian Stack who was struck down in Little Jerusalem, his suffering is dignified by the faith of his family. If you are ever walking on that stretch of the South Circular Road, take your time. All of life has thread that pavement.