GERARD WHELAN,
Madam,- Fintan O'Toole's column (November 19th) was a welcome salute to a brave man and woman, as well as a usefully astringent antidote to the "rare ould times" nonsense about The Rose Tattoo case which is already evident even in some of the obituaries which have appeared for Carolyn Swift since her death on Saturday.
As I write it is too early to know the result of Michael D Higgins's attempt to raise the matter today in the Dáil, but I feel strongly that his (and O'Toole's) mention of a possible State apology to Swift and Alan Simpson, very welcome as these sentiments are, should not pass without some qualifying comment.
After spending very nearly two full years researching the available documentation on The Rose Tattoo case, Carolyn Swift and I reached concrete conclusions about the causes of the State's assault on the Pike Theatre. These conclusions are fully laid out in Spiked, the book I wrote about the case. Gaps in the available documentation, however, meant that our conclusions as to the State's motivation for the assault simply could not be presented in the book as proven fact - something I went to some pains to make plain in the book itself. They were the only logical conclusions we felt able to reach on the basis of the evidence we found - but the book does not claim to prove that they are so.
What does seem pluperfectly and demonstrably clear and provable, however, is that the form taken by the State assault on the Pike was not simply groundless, but that it was known to be so: that the Irish State quite deliberately used a convenient law, guaranteed to cause maximum damage in the society of the time, to attack innocent Irish citizens for its own political ends. Whatever one's opinion of our conclusions about State motivation, the evidence of massive State abuse of its own supposed laws seems overwhelming.
I have no doubt that any State apology would be welcomed by all of Alan Simpson's children to whom Spiked is dedicated. But given what we now know of our State's modus operandi (now as well as then) I feel the worth of any merely verbal apology would be precisely nil. And since I discussed the matter many times with Swift herself I feel obliged to point out that she was of exactly the same opinion - "They made a big public apology," as she said to me more than once, "to the children from the industrial schools. Then they went away and limited the inquiry."
Carolyn Swift was very, very clear on what she wanted: she wanted an explanation which she believed would only come with the full release of all surviving relevant papers, both from The Rose Tattoo file (as Fintan O'Toole states in his column) and (as we ourselves became convinced) from the State files on the Irish Censorship Board for that period.
Spiked is - at least in part - a plea for precisely such a release. It seems to me that this would be a far more meaningful form of apology than any potentially empty formula of words from a State which has already proven itself (to say the least) less than straight in its dealings with Alan Simpson and Carolyn Swift - to name but two. Yours, etc.,
GERARD WHELAN, Enniscorthy, Co Wexford.