In 1983, Brian Stack, an off-duty prison officer was shot by the IRA in cold blood on a Dublin street.
Brian survived the attack but succumbed to his injuries within 18 months, leaving a wife and three young sons.
Austin Stack was 14 when his father passed away, but he has never forgotten him nor has he ever given up hope of bringing his murderers to justice.
Over the years, he has held secret talks with Gerry Adams and members of the IRA, but to date no one has been convicted of the crime.
This book is an account of a son’s ongoing quest for justice, and his determination to set the record straight.
My Dad was Chief Prison Officer in Portlaoise Prison during the Troubles in Ireland.
Portlaoise Prison is a maximum security prison and at the time house some of Ireland’s most notorious terrorists.
My Dad was shot in the back of the head by a gunman as he left the National Senior boxing Championships in Dublin’s National stadium on March 25, 1983.
He didn’t die that night but survived for 18 months with severe brain damage and was paralysed from the neck down.
He eventually passed away as a result of his injuries on September 29, 1984. The IRA and other terrorists groupings at the time issued statements denying responsibility for the attack.
However I always suspected the IRA were responsible due to them having the motive of escape, the ability to mount such an attack and the secrecy that surrounded it afterwards.
These suspicions were further confirmed by some colleagues of Dad’s that I met in the early 1990s.
The initial investigation by the Gardai seemed to go nowhere and as a family we were not kept up to date on the investigation until we started to pursue the matter in 2006.
We had received some information from a journalist that detailed physical evidence and fingerprints that had been recovered in the initial investigation.
The Gardai admitted to having this evidence but claimed to have mislaid it and they started a new cold case investigation which yielded 296 recommendations which were essentially failures in the initial investigation.
We were not given access to this report however a new investigation was launched based on the report.
In 2012 the Gardai told us that they did not believe the IRA were responsible which led me to pursue Sinn Fein and Gerry Adams to get an admission of responsibility.
This culminated in my brother Oliver and I being brought in a blacked out van up the mountains on the Louth/Armagh border to meet with an IRA representative in 2013 where they gave us an admission.
However, they claimed for political reasons that it was not a sanctioned operation. I challenged them on this as I had information to the contrary.
The Gardai continue to investigate the murder and the Garda Commissioner issued an apology to the family in 2019 for the failings of the current and previous investigations.
This book seeks to get justice for my Dad and details the lengths that my family has gone to in order to achieve that.
Justice for my Father, published by Bonnier Books, will be available from March 13
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