A Question On Brian Stack…..?

There’s no doubt that SF leader Gerry Adams is under enormous pressure over the IRA killing of Portlaoise prison warder Brian Stack.

The latest development sees FG Taoiseach, Enda Kenny piling it on, demanding  to know who it was in the IRA that Gerry Adams introduced to Stack’s son, when he smuggled him in the back of a van to a secret and undisclosed Border rendezvous so that they could discuss his father’s death.

I strongly suspect from my own, admittedly limited dealings with an Taoiseach that in this and in other cases of IRA excess, Mr Kenny’s primary interest is in digging up dirt on Mr Adams for party political purposes and that truth and justice for the Stack family may be of secondary importance.

I am thus inclined to view the Taoiseach’s exertions on behalf of the late prison warder’s family with a somewhat jaundiced eye.

Nonetheless, who Adams took the Stack family member to meet is an interesting question, for sure, and more than Mr Kenny would dearly love the answer. But here’s another question, one that I haven’t seen asked, much less answered or even addressed by the Irish media, and it is this.

What was it that Brian Stack did to provoke the Provos into killing him, and by so doing risk an almighty confrontation with the Irish state? It must have been something pretty hairy, I would guess, for the IRA to have ignored General Army Order No. 8 and to place Sinn Fein’s burgeoning electoral ambitions in the South in some peril.

I suspect the answer lies in events that took place in Portlaoise jail in the early 1980’s.

If anyone out there is of sufficient vintage and seniority in the IRA at the time to provide an answer, please feel free to contact this site, safe in the knowledge that your identity will be never be disclosed.

I think we all deserve to know. Don’t you? After all, it is what started this whole thing….