James Kelly
Published by the author at 30 Curzon St., Dublin 8
ISBN 0 9535992 0 5, £11.95, p/b
This is the second version of this story by James Kelly. The first, Orders for the Captain, was reviewed in Lobster 15. Kelly was a senior officer in the Irish intelligence service who became involved in an attempt by the Republic’s government to buy deniable weapons for the Catholics in the North in 1970 when there appeared to be a serious threat of pogroms against them. The gunrunning scheme was exposed – possibly by MI6 – and when the politicians involved got cold feet, the Irish state tried make Kelly the sacrificial lamb. He resisted and triumphed in court. This is a detailed account of those events, as far as I can see differing from its predecessor only in the presence of some bits and pieces of official documentation not available before. As a case study in the essential duplicity and cowardice of career-minded politicians sheltering behind ‘the interests of the state’, this would be hard to better. Pity it didn’t get a more thorough proof-reading. Little errors like ‘M5 and M6’ for MI5 and MI6 shouldn’t devalue the rest of the content but they do.