Sallins Survivor Seeks Closure in Court with All-Island Republican Support
Sallins Man Osgur Breatnach, a survivor of the Irish State's most authoritarian era yet, will head to the Criminal Courts of Justice on Tuesday 21 July to have his wrongful prosecution formally certified a miscarriage of justice.
On Tuesday 21 July at 10:00 am, Republican intellectual and artist Osgur Breatnach will enter Court No. 16, the Criminal Courts of Justice at Parkgate Street, eircode D08 K6YH, to seek a certificate that confirms that his prosecution in connection with the 1976 Sallins train robbery was a miscarriage of justice.
The granting of such a certificate, as per section 9 of the Criminal Procedure Act 1993, will give Mr Breatnach the option to apply to the Minister for Justice, currently Jim O’Callaghan, for compensation, or to sue for damages.
According to the Court of Appeal’s legal diary, the judges who will hear his application 114CPA/25 are John Aloysious Edwards, Isobel Kennedy, and Paul Burns.
Mr Breatnach has the guidance of pro-Republican West Belfast solicitor Kevin Winters, whose firm KRW Law has long advocated for those injured by the State’s inability to comply with its own laws and deliver timely justice, including singer Raymond Quinn and the Ludlow family of Louth.
The career of Mr Winters mirrors that of Mr Breatnach’s great-grandfather, James J. Walsh, a Parnellite solicitor who represented two Fenian defendants in the 1882 Phoenix Park Murders case.
Mr Breathnach and his fellow Sallins Men Nicky Kelly and Brian McNally were framed and prosecuted by the Irish Government at the height of the Troubles, when the State used the excuse of increased paramilitary activity to suspend Irish citizens’ right to a jury trial and expand the powers of An Garda Síochána.
The particular session of the non-jury Special Criminal Court that prosecuted the Sallins Men ran from 1972–1986, and was simultaneous with the existence of the ‘Heavy Gang’, a secretive Gardaí unit that used psychological and physical torture to induce false confessions [1]. The Sallins Men were targeted by these entities due to their affiliation with the Irish Republican Socialist Party.
Aged 83, Mr McNally passed away six weeks ago on Saturday 6 June, having never seen the complete restitution Mr Breatnach and his supporters seek to finally achieve.
A timeline of the Sallins Men’s case is available here, and Osgur Breatnach’s personal website can be accessed here.
[1] Błażej Kaucz, “Ireland, Church, and Emergency Legislation,” in The Militarisation of Behaviours (Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2022), 95.
