Four decades after the fatal shooting of one of Ireland’s most senior prison officers at the height of tensions linked to the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Irish government will issue a formal state apology on Wednesday to the victim’s family for repeated failures in official investigations into his killing.
Brian Stack, a 49-year-old father of three who served as chief prison officer at the high-security Portlaoise Prison, was attacked in March 1983. He had just finished attending a professional boxing match in central Dublin and was crossing a nearby street when an assailant shot him in the back of the neck. The attack left Stack completely paralyzed, and he succumbed to his injuries 18 months later. To date, no individual has ever been convicted or held legally accountable for the murder.
Over the course of the investigation into Stack’s death, Irish national police (An Garda Síochána) launched three separate probes into the killing, all of which failed to secure a conviction. A subsequent review of the first investigation by Ireland’s serious crime review team uncovered 194 separate errors and omissions in the original investigative work, a detail Austin Stack, the victim’s son, shared publicly in comments to BBC Radio Ulster.
For years, Stack’s family has waged a persistent public and private campaign to uncover the full truth of his killing and hold official bodies accountable for their missteps. Despite multiple meetings with successive Irish ministers for justice over decades, the family has repeatedly been denied access to the full serious crime review team report, with authorities citing its status as an internal government document.
On Wednesday, Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin will deliver the formal state apology during an official sitting of Dáil Éireann, Ireland’s national parliament. Ahead of the plenary proceedings, Martin and current Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan will hold a private meeting with the Stack family at Dublin’s government buildings.
Austin Stack told the BBC that the long-awaited official apology carries profound meaning for his entire family, particularly his 80-plus-year-old mother. “It’s a great sense of comfort to particularly my mother and to myself and my two brothers, because the state is officially owning up to the errors and the omissions that happened,” he said, adding that the apology also serves as long-overdue vindication of his father’s character and service.
“My dad was doing a very difficult job at a very difficult time in our history,” he said. “He was awarded the Irish Prison Service’s highest bravery award for that work that he was doing. And this is further vindication of him and his good name.”
The path to Wednesday’s apology has been decades in the making. It was not until 2013, 30 years after the attack, that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) formally admitted responsibility for killing Stack, following years of sustained pressure from the family. That same year, the family met with then-Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and a former IRA commander, with Adams offering his personal regret over the killing to the family.
In 2019, then-Garda Commissioner Drew Harris issued a personal apology to the Stack family for the institutional mishandling of the murder investigation. Most recently, in 2023, Gardaí notified the family that the case file, which had been held by the Director of Public Prosecutions for years, would be returned to investigating police to open the door for new investigative work.
Stack remains the only Irish prison officer killed in an act of political violence linked to the Troubles, decades-long period of sectarian and political conflict centered in Northern Ireland that claimed more than 3,500 lives between the late 1960s and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.