Forty years ago gardaí interviewed hundreds of gay men as they hunted for a killer – and they still do

“That’s me in the back,” says Bill Foley, sitting on a large sofa in the living room of his Ranelagh home.

A nearby book has a photo of a happy couple on the back cover and a man and woman running carelessly on the front.

“Out for Yourself” reads the title of the book in green font. “Lives of Irish lesbians and gays,” reads the subtitle below in black.

The book, which dates from 1986, was written and edited by a group of activists at the Dublin Lesbian and Gay Men’s Collective, including Foley.

One chapter is about the murder of Charles Self on January 20, 1982.

Self, a gay set designer, worked for RTÉ. But the short chapter is mainly about An Garda Síochána’s investigation into his murder and how it became a campaign to harass gay men.

The police never found Self’s killer. But they interviewed many gay men as part of the search.

Article from August 18, 1982 in Irish Press the newspaper reported that a senior Garda officer said “thousands of people have been questioned about Mr Self’s murder”.

Gay activists now and then said police interviewed, photographed and fingerprinted 1,500 gay men, while security said the case involved “over 1,500 jobs,” which included interviews.

“What murder has 1,500 suspects?” Foley says, resting his blue glass on the back of the sofa.

Gardaí have withheld everything they have collected. “As this is an ongoing active criminal investigation, all material collected is being held pending possible prosecution,” a spokesman said.

Now that they know the Gardaí still have the files of all those old interviews, older gay activists who remember the aftermath of Self’s murder are debating what should happen to those recordings.

“It became clear that the investigation was more concerned with building a dossier on gay men than with solving the murder,” says the chapter on Charles Self in Out for yourself.

There is a picture of a picket outside Pearse Street Garda Station on March 13, 1982. Foley and other activists organized it to protest against Garda harassment, he says.

Foley, who was in his early 20s and working as a paralegal at the time, says they contacted labor unions, women’s groups and political activism groups.

The guards never interviewed Foley, he says, probably because he had a partner (who subsequently died).

“I suspect they were looking at single men,” says Foley, who keeps framed photos of himself and his partner, both looking sharp and young, on a small table next to a white chair in a bright room overlooking his garden.

The photo of the protest in the book shows three guards standing on the steps of a Garda station keeping watch over the protesters. Two guards have their hands in their pockets. Right in front of them stands a woman carrying a small child.

Behind her, another woman holds a sign that reads: “Need the killer, not the victims.”

Says Foley: “They kind of just let us get on with it. We were making a perfectly legal demonstration outside the Garda station; I think that actually embarrassed them.”

At the time of Self’s murder, Cathal Kerrigan was living in Fairview.

He and his partner at the time, Máirtín Mac an Ghoill, were staunch political activists involved in a group called Gays Against H-Block/Armagh, which was active between 1979 and 1982 in support of hunger strikes by prisoners at H-Block Prison in Northern Ireland, including Bobby Sands.

Their activism was controversial enough to attract the attention of guards often, Kerrigan said recently, sitting outside the Love Supreme Cafe in Stoneybutter and eating a sandwich.

“Mairtin was already known to the police because he was a much deeper activist than I was,” says Kerrigan.

After Self’s murder, after learning that guards were mass-interrogating and fingerprinting homosexual men, Kerrigan and other activists organized and distributed a leaflet.

“Since the murder of Charles Self, at least 500 gay men have been questioned by the police and the Special Branch. And what were they asking us about? Very little about the murder; a lot about our personal lives,” it said.

It continues to advise readers of their rights. “Do not give your fingerprints or allow yourself to be photographed. If you have already made a statement or been photographed, consult an attorney immediately,” it reads, for example.

On the morning of 1 March 1982, Kerrigan was arrested “under section 30 of the Offenses Against the State Act”, according to a letter from then Taoiseach Charlie Haughey in response to his complaint about his arrest and the treatment of him by guards.

He was released that night, and security did not ask him about Self’s murder, Kerrigan says.

“They claimed that an event had occurred that was criminally related to terrorism, and they wanted to know if I was involved,” he says.

But he always wondered about the timing of it all, and how it coincided with the massive investigation of gay men into Self’s murder and his activism and organizing work against it, Kerrigan says.

He wondered if the guards wanted to scare people into stopping.

People might dismiss that as grandiosity or paranoia, he says, smiling. “But I think it’s safe to say that it’s quite likely that there’s some potential connection.”

Newspaper reports of the time followed the investigation and criticism of how guards handled it.

“Some of Mr Self’s associates were members of the homosexual community,” said an article in the Irish Independent, attributing the information to Detective Michael Sullivan.

Thus gardaí “visited a number of gay clubs in Dublin to make enquiries,” said the January 25, 1982 article.

Det. Supt. Sullivan denied a claim by David Norris that gardaí had asked the National Gay Federation to hand over its membership list, it said.

Article from March 25, 1982 in Irish Press raised the concerns of gay activists about the way the guards were handling the investigation and how it had become an opportunity to create dossiers on gay men.

It reported a public meeting held in Dublin the previous evening “called to discuss the alleged harassment of gay men by gardaí during the investigation”, it said.

At the meeting, Eamon Sommers, then president of the National Gay Federation, is reported to have said that “people are being pressured specifically because they are gay and asked questions that are not related to the crime”.

In an article dated March 23, 1982, Irish Press, the guards deny the allegations. “The claims are completely false. No one was coerced into making a statement and no intimidation was used against anyone to my knowledge,” Superintendent Hubert Reynolds is reported to have said.

Foley, the Ranelagh man, says he remembers reading in the papers that gardaí had said after the protest outside Pearse Street Garda Station on March 13, 1982, that they would get rid of the personal information they had collected about gay men such as part of a homicide investigation.

“But we were never confident as a community that this actually happened,” says Foley.

Indeed, at the public meeting on 24 March 1982, Mike Kelly of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties “said that what concerned him was the difficulty of ensuring that the documents from the inquiry would be destroyed”, according to Irish Press article.

“We must seek assurances from the gardaí, from the Minister for Justice and, if necessary, from the Taoiseach himself to ensure that all irrelevant evidence is destroyed,” the article quoted Kelly as saying.

But 40 years later, gardaí apparently still hold the information gathered through the 1,500 or so interviews with gay men they conducted in the course of their investigation into the still unsolved murder of Charles Self.

The invasive nature of the questions gardaí ask people then makes the data even more personal, Foley says.

People talked about the intimidation during interrogations, he says. “They were asked about their sex life and what they do in bed and they were made fun of for it, you know? All of this is obviously irrelevant to the investigation.

Foley points to a scheme recently proposed by the Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee TD of Fine Gael, which aims to wipe out the criminal convictions of gay and bisexual men prosecuted for consensual sex.

This is an opportunity, Foley says, for the Ministry of Justice to make sure gardaí have people’s data collected as part of the investigation into Self’s murder. “I think it can be included because this investigation was a violation of human rights.”

A Justice Department spokesman did not say whether it would consider destroying the data. The task force created by McEntee to consider the expungement proposal recently released a progress report, they said.

Kieran Rose, a gay activist and member of that taskforce, says the scheme is to give gay men who are spied on and arrested by police while having sex, sometimes in the privacy of their own homes, a chance to write it off as criminal past.

Transcripts of interviews and files of gay men collected after Self’s murder document the oppression of queer people and should not be destroyed, Rose says.

Rose says she has a story. “So I think the interviews and everything that was done with gay men is a huge historical resource. It would be just fascinating to consider them as a research project.

The Guard must give the public access to the records but keep people anonymous, Rose says.

It indicates the clothing scheme and its use for survivors of mother and baby homes. The state could consider something similar here, he says, though there might not be much the guard can do if he says the case is still active.

Kerrigan, the man who was arrested in Fairview, is with Rose in asking for public access to the records instead of destroying them.

He says they could give people – or if they’ve betrayed, their relatives – the ability to destroy their information or archive it and make it available to the world.

This is history, Kerrigan says, and if treated delicately, these historical documents should be preserved. “People need to be able to see how they were treated and what happened,” he says.

A Garda spokesman said: “Any person who wishes to apply for details of their personal data held by An Garda Siochana can apply for the same under the Data Protection Act; the process for this is through An Garda Síochána, the Data Protection Unit.’

But the right to access personal records under the law is limited in some cases, they said, such as when the release of data could undermine or harm a criminal investigation or prosecution.

They did not say whether that applied to the personal files of gay men interviewed as part of the investigation into Self’s murder.