Truth about Sallins robbery: ThePost.ie


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Truth about Sallins robbery
Sunday, October 15, 2006 - By Nicola Cooke
The IRA received almost £1 million (€1.27 million) from the Sallins train robbery in 1976, but the 17 men who carried out the raid never got a penny, according to a new book on the robbery.

In an interview with the book’s author, journalist Patsy McGarry, one of the robbery’s main organisers recalled rehearsing the heist for six weeks before it took place, and having to push a white getaway van up a hill in Lucan, Co Dublin, such was the weight of the stolen money. The gang robbed the Cork-Dublin mail train near Sallins, Co Kildare, on March 31, 1976. Reports at the time suggested that £200,000 was stolen, but it has since emerged that the amount stolen may have been up to five times that.

Four members of the Irish Republican Socialist Party – Osgur Breatnach, Nicky Kelly, Brian McNally and John Fitzpatrick – were arrested in connection with the robbery. They allegedly confessed to the robbery during interrogation in Garda custody.

While awaiting trial, Kelly jumped bail and left the country. He was tried in his absence along with Breatnach and McNally, before the non-jury Special Criminal Court. The three were found guilty on the basis of their confessions, and sentenced to between nine and 12 years in prison.

Kelly returned to the country in 1980 after Breatnach and McNally’s convictions were quashed on appeal, expecting to be acquitted, but he served four years before being released on humanitarian grounds.

He received a presidential pardon in 1992.

In the book, While Justice Slept: The True Story of Nicky Kelly and the Sallins Robbery, McGarry interviewed, for the first time, a number of the people who actually robbed the train.

‘‘I interviewed one of the leaders, who is now about 60, but who carried out raids for the IRA for over 12 years,” McGarry said. ‘‘He was known to the gardai at the time, and said that, ten minutes after he returned from the Sallins job and had gone to bed, the guards were at his door. They asked him his whereabouts in the previous few hours and he told them he had been asleep.

“All they would have had to do to prove otherwise, he told me, was touch the warm bonnet of his car.”

According to this man’s account, the money was driven to the North in a white van and was used as a fund for the dependants of political prisoners.

The book, which will be published in the coming weeks, details Kelly’s hunger strike, the prison conditions he endured and his fight to have his name cleared.