The ticking clock dilemma

Posted by Jim on November 24, 2015

McGurk’s Bar activist, Robert McClenaghan, writes on the reality of
Britain’s inability to face up to its human rights abuses, and how this
now becomes his own ticking clock dilemma.

I was with other family members in west Belfast to hear about the
current situation with the Stormont House Agreement and how families who
lost loved ones during the conflict are yet again abused by the British
state. Britain does not want to deal with its past.

I found out the British Government are using what they call “National
Security Issues”to allow them to hold onto documents and files which
they think are too important to British National Security Interests to
give to families of those murdered or injured during the conflict.

And it does not matter to them if your son, daughter, father, mother,
was IRA, UDA, UVF, UDR British Army, INLA, IPLO, Ulster Resistance, or
civilian Protestant, Catholic or Dissenter.

Every single family is being refused the truth because of British
National Security Interests.

My Thoughts

Firstly, when we talk about Legacy Issues, Dealing with the Past or
National Security, we lose sight of the human beings we are actually
talking about. The victims are faceless and nameless. They have no
family and left nobody behind that mourns for them every day. They do
not exist. And neither do we.

This brings me to my own personal case which I would like to share with
you as it has been on my mind recently.

I call it the Ticking Clock Dilemma.

On the one hand we have the British Government steadfastly refusing to
tell the truth about its involvement in the conflict here for fear it
may reveal terrible dark crimes committed in its name by the British
Army, the RUC, the UDR and MI5 as well as its gangs of agents recruited
to wage war as a counter to the IRA campaign to destroy the State of
Northern Ireland as they saw it.

On the other hand of the Ticking Clock Dilemma is my Dad, Sam.

Sam is 86 years of age and I love him to bits. On December 4 1971 my
Dad’s step-father, Philip Garry, was murdered along with 14 other
innocent men women and children in McGurk’s Bar in the New Lodge area of
North Belfast. He was having a quiet pint when the bomb exploded. My
grandfather was 73 years of age at the time of his death. 73.

Within 12 hours of the murders in McGurk’s Bar, the RUC made up the
story that my grandfather was a bomber, an IRA man who along with the
others blew themselves up as part of an IRA own-goal.

I was 12 at the time and I am 56 now.

We have been waiting for nearly 44 years for the authorities to tell the
truth.

The Ticking Clock Dilemma for my Dad is this:

On Friday the 24 October the Chief Heart Consultant in the RVH told Sam
that he has only one artery to his heart left working and it is being
kept open by a small metal tube called a stent. The rest of his arteries
have all collapsed and cannot be repaired. They sent him home from
hospital saying there was nothing more medically could be done for him
and it was now in Gods hands how much longer he had left to live. I
cried when he told me as now I know my Dad is living on borrowed time.
One artery is now doing 100% of the work and sooner or later it is going
to stop and Sam will be dead.

The Ticking Clock for the British is that they want to waste as much
time as possible before they are forced by public opinion to tell what
they did as part of the conflict here.

They are refusing to hand over to my Dad crucial documents relating to
McGurk’s Bar.

My Dad along with other McGurk’s Bar families have taken the former PSNI
Chief Constable Matt Bagott and the present Chief Constable to court to
overturn a report by the failed and discredited Historical Enquiries
Team which was sanctioned by the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The
HET’s report lied and said that the RUC did nothing wrong in December
1971 when they blamed the IRA for the atrocity and not the real culprits
the UVF.

This is despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary discovered and
presented to the by our campaign to the police from the state’s own
files. They have it in front of them in black and white. They deny us
other information which they are attempting to deny us access to for 84
years.

What delay means

I mention all this because i want to highlight our particular case to
prove a general point which is simple.

My Dad and other families cannot afford any further delay in getting the
British Government to admit not only what happened at McGurk’s Bar in
1971 but also hundreds and hundreds of other cases.

The RFJ website estimates that 365 people where murdered by the British
State and a further 1100 where murdered on top of that by the UVF and
UDA and Ulster Resistance as a result of a policy of collusion with the
British State.

The McGurk’s Bar case is one of the first cases of the British State
using counter-gangs to try and defeat the IRA, and to deter the
Nationalist community from supporting the IRA. The control of the
narrative in the aftermath which presented the bombing as an own-goal
was a classic psychological operation. It is a psychological operation
which continues to this day.

The McGurk’s Bar fell into a timeline. It did not explode in a vacuum.

The Ticking Clock dilemma persists as the British State tries to cripple
the coronial system, or the proposed Historical Inquiries Unit, and it
still refuses to allow any information that they do not like to see in
the public domain to be shared with anyone.

The British want to see the clock tick longer and further into the
future. My Dad Sam does not have the luxury of time. Something has to
give. Either my Dad’s heart or the British State.

The blockages in my Dad’s heart can be compared to the blockages put in
the way of the truth. We all must do our best to unblock them. Sam needs
it before it is too late. Thousands of other family members need it too.