Des O'Malley, Changes made "in accordance with law"
The former Progressive Democrats leader, Des O'Malley, issued a detailed denial today that he had anything to do with altering the statement of a witness in the 1970 Arms Trial. Mr O'Malley, who was Minister for Justice at the time, said that the changes were not made by him or by the Department of Justice but by the lawyers drawing up the Book of Evidence. After studying twelve sets of statements in the National Archives, Mr O'Malley concluded that all were heavily edited in a roughly consistent manner before they appeared in the Book of Evidence. He pointed out that many of them were edited more heavily that that of Colonel Hefferon.
Tonight, however, one of the defendants in the trial claimed that Mr O'Malley's statement changed nothing. Captain James Kelly said that the fact remained that Colonel Hefferon's witness statement had been changed in such a way that it no longer exonerated him. He said that none of the other statements referred to by Mr O'Malley had been altered in this way.
The controversy over the handling of the Arms Trial was revived by a Prime Time programme last month. The programme claimed that a witness statement by the retired Director of Military Intelligence, Colonel Michael Hefferon, had been changed, apparently in order to strengthen the prosecution case in the trial. Today, Mr O'Malley issued a detailed and lengthy statement, based on research in the National Archives. He said that Junior Prosecuting Counsel in the case, Aidan Browne, and a solicitor from the Chief State Solicitor's Office, Edward Durnin compiled the Book of Evidence.
Mr O'Malley rejected what he described as the thrust of the Prime Time programme - that changes were made to Colonel Hefferon's statement in a manner favourable to the prosecution. He claimed that other statements were changed in a way that disadvantaged the prosecution.
He said that the changes were made in order to comply with the rules of evidence, by excluding hearsay, opinion and irrelevant material. He also denied that there is a close co-relation between marks on the original statement allegedly made by Mr Berry and the subsequent changes. He also attacked what he described as "cowardly, anonymous allegations" made in a second Prime Time programme last week against Jim Gibbons. He said that he could not imagine anyone less likely to commit perjury than the late Jim Gibbons. "The facts of the Arms Crisis of 1969 and 1970 speak for themselves and history will get it right when we are all dead and gone," he said.
In another development, the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, has told MPs at Westminster he was disturbed by what he said were attempts by Irish journalists to cast aspersions on former Irish government ministers who "had tried to break from the Haughey faction" at the time of the arms crisis. Mr Trimble was speaking during a short debate on the release of official documents in Britain and Ireland covering events at the time.
