Oliver Kelly: BELFAST SOLICITOR Oliver Kelly, who has just died, was a leading defence lawyer in the 1970s and 1980s.
He qualified as a solicitor while interned in 1971. A few years later, the late Pat Finucane was one of his first apprentices.
Most of his clients were working-class people from the Catholic areas of west and north Belfast, caught up in upheavals of time. Kelly understood being caught up in those upheavals, because he was interned for two separate periods in the early 1970s.
His defence work was controversial and not lucrative. "It was never in Oliver's nature to run from anything controversial," was how colleague and friend Pat Fahy summed him up.
Oliver fought some important cases. His best-known client was Paul Hill of the Guildford Four, wrongly imprisoned for bombings in England in the 1970s. He represented defendants in five "supergrass" trials in the early 1980s, when former republicans gave evidence for the prosecution in return for reduced sentences.
This work was risky. The UDA gang which murdered Pat Finucane also planned to kill Kelly.
He featured unwillingly in one of the more dramatic incidents of the Troubles. He was held hostage with other lawyers and warders when eight IRA prisoners shot their way out of Belfast's Crumlin Road jail in 1981.
Oliver was born on July 13th, 1946, to John Kelly, a printer, and his wife Maggie (née Maginess). The family lived at Adela Street off Carlisle Circus, between the Shankill and New Lodge districts.
It was a sign of the more mixed nature of society at the time that a neighbour of the Kellys, who was a Catholic, became a high-ranking RUC man. His mother was a close friend of Maggie Kelly.
Maggie Kelly was a republican. She was a member of Cumann na mBan, the women's wing of the IRA. One of her friends was Winifred Carney, who had been James Connolly's secretary and fought in the GPO in 1916. Maggie Kelly's republicanism was passed on, with Oliver's older brothers John and Billy becoming founders of the Provisional IRA and John being a defendant with Charlie Haughey in the arms trial of 1970.
Kelly spoke Irish at home, raising his family as Irish speakers. He was involved in establishing Bunscoil Phobail Feirste, the North's first Irish-language primary school, and Lá, the now-defunct Irish-language daily newspaper.
The GAA was a life-long passion.
Kelly was an ordinary Belfast man, highly convivial, he liked a bet on the horses.
He is survived by his children Caoimhe, Diarmaid, Cathal and Sorcha, his grandchildren Éabha and Orlaith, and his siblings Jimmy, Rite, Mary, Rosie and Margaret. He was predeceased by his brothers John and Billy.
Oliver Kelly: born July 13th 1946; died April 22nd, 2009