Sir Basil Kelly was the last Attorney General of Northern Ireland. He served before the imposition in 1972 of direct rule from Westminster, after which Attorneys General of England and Wales filled the office.

As Attorney General from 1968 onwards he was in the eye of the storm arising out of the disorder resulting from the civil rights demonstrations and the reaction to them of the security forces and some Protestant Ulster Unionists.

Catholic politicians in the Stormont parliament, led by Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin, charged Kelly with partiality in favour of Protestants and the police when deciding on prosecutions, throwing in his face his membership of the Orange Order. Kelly dismissed the charges as “vicious, unjust and dishonest”.

In August 1971, when the Government of Brian Faulkner made the far reaching decision to introduce internment without trial directed only at terrorists within the nationalist Catholic community, ministers relied in part on Kelly’s statement that the police had been unable to furnish him with any information suggesting that a subversive organisation existed within the Protestant community.

In 1983, as a judge of the non-jury Diplock court, clad in a bullet-proof vest and protected by armed soldiers, Kelly convicted 22 alleged republican terrorists on the evidence of a fellow terrorist “supergrass” called Christopher Black. Black testified for the prosecution in return for immunity for himself. When sentencing one of the accused, Kevin Mulgrew, to 963 years in prison on a multiplicity of charges, Kelly said: “I do not expect that any words of mine will ever raise in you a twinge of remorse.”

The convictions, which followed a trial of 120 days, were overturned on appeal in respect of 18 of the accused, including Mulgrew. Prosecutions based on the evidence of “supergrass” witnesses were later discontinued.

These episodes suggest that Kelly was a hardline “law and order” Unionist who was insensitive to the concerns of the minority Catholic community. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Few Unionist barristers had such close and constant contacts with Catholic lawyers and litigants. Few Unionists politicians were as keen as Kelly was on dismantling the sectarian bias of the northern Irish state. No judge was more protective, on and off the bench, of the rights of the accused.

John William Basil Kelly, invariably known as Basil, was born in May 1920 in Monaghan, one of the three counties of Ulster not included in Northern Ireland under the Government of Ireland Act passed that year. The family farm was burnt out by republicans shortly afterwards, and the Kelly family moved to Belfast and set up a small bakery. It was an austere home with a strong work ethic. Basil went to the Methodist College in Belfast.

During the Second World War there was no conscription in Northern Ireland, and Kelly acceded to his mother’s wishes that he, an only son, should continue with his studies at Trinity College Dublin, where he read law and played inside left on the college soccer team. He was called to the Bar of Northern Ireland in 1944.

Without connections in influential legal and commercial circles in Belfast, he cut his teeth in the western counties of Northern Ireland where he won the trust of Catholic solicitors who briefed him regularly, in defiance of the usual practice, across the pervasive sectarian barriers.

Most of his early practice was on behalf of plaintiffs in personal injury cases or criminal defendants. His thoroughness, clarity and exceptional powers of cross-examination won admiration, and his practice broadened after a few years. He took silk in 1958 and became Crown Prosecutor successively for the counties of Fermanagh, Tyrone and Londonderry.

The way to judicial preferment in Northern Ireland was through the Stormont parliament and the office of Attorney General. Kelly got himself elected for the safe Unionist seat of Mid-Down in 1964. One of his first interventions in parliament was to move a resolution condemning a sectarian demonstration organised by Ian Paisley in Belfast in 1966.