Posted by Jim on April 2, 2014
How many more articles like this one have to be published by sincere, honest and decent republicans as well as by Gerry McGeough and countless others for Irish Americans to OPEN OUR EYES and to start questioning the fact that all of these decent people are telling the truth as to the real facts of what is happening in the north under Sinn Fein’s watch. It is NOT okay anymore to remain silent or sit a fence once you have been presented with the facts.
We Never Had a Chance
Posted: 01 Apr 2014 01:00 AM PDT – The Pensive Quill
Guest writer Gerard Hodgins with his take on Sinn Fein’s failure to combat political policing in the North.
Having endorsed the British Constabulary in Ireland in 2007, two years later Sinn Fein went on record to denounce physical-force republicans as “traitors to Ireland”. In between those two dates Martin Mc Guinness went on record to offer his condolences on the death of former RUC Chief Constable Jack Hermon who oversaw shoot-to-kill policies against republicans, torture of republicans in interrogation centres and instigated the disgusting and disturbing attacks upon funerals of dead republicans in the early 1980s. Thank-you Mr. Eastwood!!
With the devolution of policing and justice powers to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2010 we were assured that the nationalist nightmare was over and that accountability mechanisms would ensure community control over policing with no more political policing focussed vindictively on any community.
It didn’t happen though. Sinn Fein’s trajectory from cutting-edge national liberation and social justice to acquiescing in the one-sided policing of our past was successfully sold to enough of the republican base for them to maintain the fiction for long enough that “everything is alright, the Big Lad knows what he’s doing”, until such a time when a critical mass would build up in votes rendering the republican base not only unnecessary but a bit of an embarrassment to the aspirations of career politicians in the neo-conservative world order.
Republican and Loyalist veterans will be hauled before the courts occasionally to maintain the false perception that British Law is the fairest, most equitable law in the world: due process, fair trial, the right to remain silent, consult with a solicitor, full disclosure of the evidence against you, evenly balanced and applied etc. etc. etc.
It is a one sided approach in that the working class foot-soldiers of Loyalism and Republicanism will forever live under a Sword of Damocles not knowing when a knock will come to the door from 30, 40, 50… years back. No knock-on-the-door will have anything to do with justice though; the knocks will come in accordance with the political expediency of the day and maintaining the fiction of the impartiality and fairness of British Law.
The state, along with their agents within Republicanism and Loyalism will not live under this mortal threat.
The killers of Pat Finucane will not come under the scrutiny of British law. Nor will the assassination squads who stalked our streets in the 1970s, the British Army unit The MRF; nor any of their descendents in the FRU who ran the UDA’s targeting of civilians – despite having full access to British Army and RUC intelligence files on IRA and INLA soldiers the UDA failed miserably to make any impact with their targeting preferring instead to phone an innocent taxi driver from a depot known to employ Catholics and then shoot the poor man dead and claim he was in the IRA.
Closed Material Procedures now in operation in the court system facilitates imprisonment and victimisation of people the state holds a grudge against, peopled perceived to be a threat to the state and the occasional scapegoat to appease political expediency – assessment of threat and grudge will rest with HM Security Services who have a record of not getting it right.
The days of a fair trial with full disclosure of allegations and evidence against you with the right to rebuttal are dead and gone. Secret allegations and secret “evidence” can be, and presently is being presented to closed courts by police/security officers from which the accused and his/her legal representatives are forbidden: Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” has come true. It is possible to be imprisoned and cast into a limbo-existence on undisclosed and legally forbidden to be disclosed “evidence”.
Being processed through the justice system today is more nightmarish than at any time over the past fifty years. All legal safeguards are gone at the stroke of a pen and the most worrying thing is that practically nobody knows; the erosion of civil liberties is a silent, creeping cancer kept from our vision by distractions of manufactured news and entertainment in a world driven by celebrity, spin and image.
Internal exile, an old favourite of the Soviet Union in Cold War days and much criticised by the British as a gross violation of human rights now operates as a facet of the British Justice system in Ireland. Martin Corey despite being freed from Maghaberry Prison is not allowed to return home to his family and friends, if he returns to live in, or even visit Lurgan he will be returned to prison. If he or his solicitor speaks with the media or anybody else about the terms of his release and internal exile he will be returned to prison.
Similar stringent bail conditions exist and are in operation now which exile people from their own home towns, from returning to their families while they await trial, prohibit them from travelling in cars except for taxis along with a plethora of other repressive measures designed to socially isolate and demoralise the individual and prohibit all contact with friends, family and comrades.
The arrest and malicious charging of Ivor Bell is but the latest travesty of justice. Ivor Bell is a sacrificial offering on the altar of political expediency and peace process politics; the British know Ivor Bell well and know he had no part to play in the abduction and disappearance of Jean McConville. They also know he was court-martialed by a man who was never in the IRA and sentenced to death in 1985, sentence suspended so long as he doesn’t speak about it and the reasons for it to anybody.
Peace process politics are the politics of illusion; nothing changes in real terms, only the faces of the architects of our oppression. Poverty levels and social injustices increase while opportunities for progress decrease. Health, housing and education conditions are being savaged. Wages and salaries are frozen for the men and women of little or no property while wages/salaries for politicians and councillors rise extraordinarily!
The Holy-Grail of Policing and Justice was achieved by Sinn Fein but all it has done is tighten the control of the police-state over all our lives, histories and futures. The Policing Board – that great accountability mechanism for us the people – is a white elephant! The Policing Board can talk till the cows come home about burglaries, robberies, car crime, and any other issue relevant but it is absolutely forbidden by law from engaging in any talk about political policing. Discussion of any sort relating to counterinsurgency and the threat or otherwise from dissident republican groupings is prohibited. Given that the main area of contention in policing tends to be its approach to Irish separatists then the Policing Board is as useful a tit to a bull. The devolution of Policing and Justice to the Northern Ireland Assembly has not been a liberating experience it has been a tightening of the British noose around our Irish necks.
The hypocrisy of the British in this entire charade is exposed in their one-sided, vengeful pursuance of geriatric republican and loyalist foot-soldiers while psychopathic paratroopers and their ilk still go unquestioned, uncharged and their daily lives totally uninterrupted with visits to interrogation centres and prisons. The political elite of British society who oversaw the Dirty War and gave the orders for executions will never have the inconvenience of having to answer any questions about their roles in the deaths of Irish citizens. Such is the peace our world-class negotiators negotiated us into. We never had a chance.
mcclafferty
Posted by Jim on April 1, 2014
TRANSCRIPT: Belfast Media’s Abysmal Reporting
Radio Free Éireann
WBAI 99.5FM Pacifica Radio
New York City
29 March 2014
John McDonagh (JM) and Sandy Boyer (SB) interview author, journalist and former director of The Belfast Project Ed Moloney (EM) about the Boston College tapes.
(begins time stamp 31:58)
SB: We’re talking to Ed Moloney, the author of Voices From the Grave (and) A Secret History of the IRA. And Ed was the director of what was called The Belfast Project. It was a unique oral history of The Troubles speaking to people from the Provisional IRA and the Ulster Volunteer Force who actually did the fighting.
And now, if you are a regular listener to the show you know, those tapes were handed over the the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and now they’ve been used to charge Ivor Bell, former Chief-of-Staff of the Irish Republican Army, with aiding and abetting the murder of Jean McConville. Ed, thanks for being with us and what can you tell us about that?
EM: Which bit, Sandy? There’s a lot there.
SB: About the use of the tapes from the project you directed to charge Ivor Bell.
EM: First of all there is no evidence that this is Ivor Bell that was interviewed.
As I understand it one of the reasons why the police have let it be known that they want to question Anthony McIntyre, the interviewer, is to provide evidence about the identity of someone who’s only known in court as “Z”, “Interviewee Z”.
And they’ve also let it be known that if they do proceed to trial on this they will identify the person “Z” by what they call “the jigsaw method”. I’m not exactly sure what that means.
But there is no confirmation, believe it or not, despite all the media reports that this is actually Ivor Bell that is featured in this interview at the center of this court case. So that’s point number one. And that should be borne in mind.
There’s a great deal sloppy journalism and reporting about this case and that has to be up there at the top of the list I think.
SB: And what tapes were actually handed over the the Police Service of Northern Ireland? Was it all the tapes from The Belfast Project?
EM: No, no, no, no indeed. As you said in your introduction that the Boston College tapes were handed over as if all them were handed over.
My estimate is that maybe two to three percent of the archive has actually been handed over to the PSNI. A very small fraction – much, much less than the PSNI were actually seeking in the first place and a very, very small number of interviews. I mean, if the police had been trying to get say all of a person’s interviews that they gave to the Boston College (archive) they were refused that.
They were only allowed interviews which actually made mention of the Jean McConville case or associated elements of it and that dramatically reduced the number of interviews that were actually handed over.
So again, I was watching news reports in Belfast during the week which were saying that the PSNI now have full access to Boston College archives. Nothing could be further from the truth. They’ve got as I said my estimate is about two to three percent – very small number – eleven in total – and that is very small.
JM: Ed, you were speaking about how it was covered over in Ireland. We’re going to go to two clips now: ne from Ulster Television and the other from RTÉ and this is how they covered it.
(Audio clip of two news broadcasts by UTV Reporter Sharon O’Neill and RTE Northern Editor Tommie Gorman)
JM: And that was two news clips about how it’s being reported over there.
Also Ed, what’s coming out now is how Sinn Féin is going on the attack, particularly of you and Anthony McIntyre, calling the Boston tapes a “touting programme” on one hand and then Gerry Adams issuing statements that if anyone has any information on the killing of Jean McConville to please come forward to the PSNI.
So, they want it both ways.
EM: So what’s your question, John? I don’t quite follow you.
JM: How did you perceive the two clips there? Were they accurate? And Gerry Adams’ hypocrisy on telling people to come forward and then criticising the tapes themselves.
EM: Both of those reports were just so full of inaccuracies that it highlights exactly what I’m talking about here.
In Belfast at the moment we do not have a fully functioning media.
First of all, Paul Bew’s involvement in this project, which is now being highlighted by Gerry Adams, was marginal. He was a message boy from Boston College to a number of people in Belfast back in 2000- 2001.
If anyone had any ideas for projects or things that Boston College could do commemorate the peace process – to record The Troubles – Paul Bew would pass on their ideas to Boson College and we were one of the ideas that was put forth.
So his role is marginal but is being played up by Gerry Adams because he was also at one stage advisor to David Trimball so he’s trying to make this appear to be a Unionist plot of some sort which it is absolutely not.
Secondly, I was never an interviewer. I coordinated the project. The interviews were conducted on the Republican side by Anthony McIntyre and on the Loyalist side by Wilson MacArthur. So again, another inaccuracy.
And Sharon O’ Neill, the UTV person, is the one I was referring to who said that The Belfast Project, the archives at Boston College, that the PSNI now have full access to them.
I rang her up and I said: Sharon, that is not true and I repeated to her what I just repeated to you, that they got a very tiny percentage of the reports.
And she said: Oh, terribly sorry, Ed, it was because it was a live report. In other words when you go on live reports for UTV and you’re the Justice Correspondent you’re apparently allowed to say the first thing that comes into your mind and accuracy is a second option as far as people like that are concerned
And this is part of the problem. You’re getting just absolute rubbish journalism covering this story.
If this was the United States of America and it was happening by this stage, for example, The New York Times and The Washington Post – I would certainly hope and I think they probably would – would have had a team working on the story:
Is it possible to get a conviction?
Would a case like this even go trial on the basis of the evidence that we have?
And the evidence? Let me just go through it:
We have this interview or portion of an interview, small portion of an interview from someone called “Z” who the police are claiming is Ivor Bell.
That was an interview that was not taken under caution such as most police statements have to be in order to be presented into court.
It was not a sworn statement. It was conducted by someone who was an academic researcher and not someone who was a forensic interrogator from the RUC. Or PSNI. (excuse the Freudian slip.)
There’s no supporting evidence. There’s no forensics evidence. There’s no ballistic evidence.
And most crucially of all: there is no admission by anyone, least of all “Z”, least of all whoever “Z” is, if it’s Ivor Bell or not I don’t know.
There’s not a lawyer that I have talked to in the week or so since Ivor Bell was arraigned on these charges who believes: a) that this could secure a conviction and many of them believe this won’t even go to trial.
Yet none of this is reflected in the media coverage. Not one journalist as far as I can make out has made an issue of trying to examine what are the real legal possibilities of even going to trial on something like this never mind securing a conviction.
And on the basis of that the PSNI have been allowed to present a fantastic triumph – breaking, cracking the case of Jean McConville’s disappearance – when in fact as I think events will ultimately prove – you couldn’t be further from the truth.
Now in relation to what Gerry Adams is calling for well, we’ve gone through this before. And we’ve gone through all the attacks that he has launched against Boston College and against this particular project.
I’m asking, or I’m saying this very simply:
if anyone was to conduct a serious history of the Provisional IRA during The Troubles and decided to leave out, because they have fallen out of favor, people like Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price…
…incidentally it would help if Tommie Gorman could actually pronounce her name – it’s not Dolers or Dolores – it’s Dolours. It means sadness. He couldn’t even get that basic fact right.
But if he were to try to construct a history of the Provisional IRA during The Troubles and you left those people out – Dolours Price was in charge of the first bombing team that attacked London back in 1973.
Brendan Hughes was at the side of all the Belfast Commanders from the early 70′s onward including Gerry Adams. He was the closest friend of Gerry Adams. He shared a cubicle with Gerry Adams in a hut in Long Kesh during internment.
He led the 1981 hunger strikes.
He led the debate inside Long Kesh which led to the reorganisation of the IRA in the mid and late 1970′s.
He was involved in all the major phases of the Republican struggle.
And one’s supposed to leave someone like that out because Gerry Adams doesn’t like or didn’t like Brendan Hughes’ attitude towards him and towards the peace process?
I don’t think so.
I think if you were an historian and you left those sort of people out of any attempt to chronicle the real story of the IRA you would be accused by historians of utmost bias.
We went and we sought people like Brendan Hughes because of their value and the totality of what they could contribute in terms of their knowledge of the IRA and their knowledge of the Provisional’s and their history.
And the sections in which he criticises Gerry Adams actually, when you look at the totality of these interviews, were very small indeed. The rest of it, in relation to the Gerry Adams was either neutral or in fact very pro, because he was very close to Gerry Adams and very fond of him and said many, many nice things about him as well as being critical of him.
SB: Ed, getting back to Gerry Adams: I find it very interesting that Ivor Bell is charged with aiding and abetting the murder of Jean McConville.
As far as we know Gerry Adams has not even been questioned about that. But both Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price said he gave the orders for that.
Why is it do you think he doesn’t even get questioned?
EM: I don’t know what’s happening on that particular issue, Sandy, because Gerry Adams issued that offer, if you want to call it that, to the PSNI a couple of days ago and the PSNI have been conspicuous in their silence since.
Some people have said this is a very clever move by Gerry Adams because it will force the PSNI to say “no” we don’t want to interrogate or question Gerry Adams.
But on the other hand the PSNI might consider it wiser to leave the option open and not to give him an answer at this stage. What all that is about I am not entirely sure.
But from what we know – and incidentally – the only person who has actually linked Gerry Adams to the Jean McConville disappearance in our interviews that I know of is Brendan Hughes. Everyone seems to forget this.
Dolours Price DID NOT MENTION the Jean McConville business in her interview with Anthony McIntyre.
Not once did the words “Jean” and “McConville” leave her lips!
She did not talk about her disappearance. She did not talk about the woman. She did not talk about how she was killed or anything like that.
That’s forgotten. It’s just assumed – as was assumed in those reports – none of which are based upon any research. None of those journalists bothered to ring me up, the director of this project, to ask basic, factual questions before they went on air.
I mean it’s astounding! The abysmal standard of journalism that we have in Northern Ireland these days. And that’s a perfect example.
There is only one person who has actually linked Gerry Adams to Jean McConville and that is Brendan Hughes.
Yes, Gerry Adams is coming on and painting with this hugely broad brush about what was said about him and Jean McConville in the Boston archive in fact it comes down to one person out of all of the ones that have been talked about.
Where do you hear that mentioned in the media reports? Not at all. It’s disgraceful!
JM: Ed, you’re talking about the small percentage of the tapes that were handed over. And it seems to be there might be six other people involved.
Do you know what the process that Boston College went through of the editing of these tapes? And who sat down and picked out which parts were going to be handed over?
EM: This is the interesting story, isn’t it?
As you know myself and Anthony McIntyre tried to get included in the case and we were consistently rebuffed. First of all at the district court level, then at the First Circuit level and then we tried to get into the Supreme Court and apparently we quite narrowly failed on that as well.
We were trying to argue that we had certain rights and what have you – those were not recognised by the courts. So the entire case in relation to dealing with the tapes was left to Boston College.
They claimed at district court level that the librarian at Boston College when asked by the judge to go through the interviews and to hand over to him those interviews which were respondent to the subpoena he claims, can you believe, that he had not read one of them and didn’t know what was in them.
Now you can take that with as large a pinch of salt as you can possibly manage to get between your forefinger and your thumb.
But anyway that’s what he said so the judge said well in that case I’ll go through them all. Hand over the entire archive to me. So Boston College handed over the entire archive to the judge, Judge Young, in the district court.
When the case was then lost and Boston College announced that it was not going to appeal and the process of resisting the subpoena as far as they were concerned was over there was an outraged reaction from all sorts of people, not least ourselves, leading the criticism of Boston College for abject cowardice.
That forced them into a re-think.
And the re-think was that they then appealed to the First Circuit that only those interviews which actually dealt with and were respondent to subpoena – i.e. dealt with the Jean McConville case – should be handed over.
So originally something like forty-six or forty-seven interviews were to be handed over (if not more) but as a result of that action and the judgment of the First Circuit that was reduced down to eleven out of forty-six.
So as result of that a very, very much smaller number of interviews were put at risk as a result.
But no thanks to Boston College. None of this need have happened. If they had been honest at the outset and told the judge: Yeah – we’ll go away and look at them and we’ll give you over – they could have handed over even less if they really wanted to.
I know, for example, that one of these interviews – it was handed over on the basis of a question and answer which amounted to: did you know anything about the “unknown cells”. (This was unknown cell that “disappeared” people.) Answer: I heard of them but didn’t know anything about them.
And on the basis of that or a question very similar to that an interview was handed over and therefore, in the words of Tommie Gorman and Sharon O’Neill, that is then translated into really crucial, exciting evidence about Jean McConville’s disappearance.
A lot of nonsense being is talked. Very little research, very few questions being asked by the media and the result is what we have.
SB: Ed, thank you very much for setting the record straight. This is an incredibly important case and we’re going to continue to keep on top of it. I think we’ll be back next week with more on this subject. So thank you very much, Ed.
EM: No problem.
(ends time stamp 53:20)
mcclafferty
Posted by Jim on
by the Pensive Quill
Monday, March 31, 2014 AM
Ed Moloney with a piece on the Boston College project. It initally featured on The Broken Elbow on 29 March 2014.
“This was a bona fide academic exercise of considerable intellectual merit.”- Judge William G. Young
Aside from myself and Anthony McIntyre there is only one other person who has read all of the interviews lodged in the Belfast Project oral history archive at Boston College and that is Judge William Young of the Federal District Court in Boston, Massachusetts.
Judge Young got to read them because at the end of his hearing rejecting an application to quosh the subpoenas in December 2011 he asked Boston College librarian Bob O’Neill to select interviews that were respondent to the PSNI/DoJ request. O’Neill replied, in a sealed affidavit which was leaked in court, that he could not help as he had not read the interviews.
So we know from that exchange that the person at Boston College who was supposed to read the interviews hadn’t, or at least said he hadn’t and we know from what followed that Judge Young did. In response to O’Neill’s startling admission, Young said he would himself read the entire archive over the Christmas holidays and that is how we know that he is the only other person to have read the interviews.
A lot of other people, Gerry Adams and Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Fein among them, act as if they have and pronounce judgement on them as if they have. But they haven’t. In fact they haven’t read a single interview from beginning to end. Not a single one.
 |
| Judge William Young – the only person aside from Anthony McIntyre & Ed Moloney to have read the entire archive |
 |
| Unlike this guy……. who hasn’t read a single one |
 |
| …..or this one |
This is what Mr Adams had to say in his blog Leargas on Friday last:
This project was flawed and biased from the outset. It was an entirely bogus, shoddy and self-serving effort. It was not a genuine or serious or ethically based history project.
Mary Lou said something very similar on RTE’s Late Late Show a week ago on the same day that Ivor Bell was refused bail in the Belfast Magistrates Court (an event that brought banner headlines in contrast to the virtual non-coverage, e.g. Irish Times, when four days later High Court judge, Reg Weir did grant him bail).
The comments of Adams and McDonald have been widely reported but I am still waiting for a reporter to call me for my take on the matter of political bias or lack of integrity vis a vis the archive.
Almost since this subpoena affair began we have run a blog which was set up and is regularly updated by Carrie McIntyre. Here is the address for the benefit of any in the media who don’t know about it:
I strongly recommend that reporters consult it at times like this because there is no other source to rival it in terms of a comprehensive record of events and archive of documents dealing with all aspects of the case.
On the opening page of the blog can be found the words of Judge William Young that have great relevance in light of the Adams/McDonald critique of the archive and here is what he says about it (And I think one can presume that Judge Young is not a critic of the peace process or a sneaking regarder of dissident republicanism!):
[These materials] are of interest – valid academic interests. They’re of interest to the historian, sociologist, the student of religion, the student of youth movements, academics who are interested in insurgency and counterinsurgency, in terrorism and counterterrorism. They’re of interest to those who study the history of religions.– Judge William G. Young
So that’s the judgement of the guy who read the entire archive, unlike Gerry Adams or Mary Lou McDonald. Do you get that? Unlike Gerry Adams & Mary Lou McDonald. Do I need to repeat that? UNLIKE GERRY ADAMS or MARY LOU McDONALD.
Is it too much to expect, to ask the media when next they report on the criticism of people like Adams & McDonald that they at least nod in the direction of someone who actually read the archive?
Posted by Jim on March 29, 2014
MARTIN GALVIN
ATTORNEY-AT-LAW
BRONX, NEW YORK, 10451
March 24, 2014
EDITOR
IRISH NEWS
113-117 Donegal Street
Belfast, Northern Ireland
BTI 2GE
PANDORA’S BOX OF IVOR BELL ARREST
A chara
The British may think it time for self-congratulations after arresting respected Republican icon Ivor Bell. With one stroke the crown muted the Westminster outcry over its bartered OTR immunity certificates, placated Unionist adherents, and sent a sinister warning to potential Independent Republican candidates or campaigners. All the while the British continued long-fingering arrests for Bloody Sunday or collusion murders towards oblivion.
On St. Patrick’s Day a constabulary delegation originally put out of the New York parade due to Irish-American opposition, was reinserted, amidst the ‘ENGLAND OUT of IRELAND’ banners, after public pleas by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness for the new constabulary. Within days this new constabulary repaid them in old RUC form, by selectively targeting a 77 year old veteran Republican who was with one or both in negotiations with William Whitelaw.
The arrest of Ivor Bell on 1972 charges, contrasted with the failure to arrest any Bloody Sunday 1972 troopers, despite overwhelming evidence in hand, should end any questions about the one-sided immunity or impunity granted those who murdered while wearing British Army or Constabulary uniforms.
Independent Republicans are told they have a democratic right to contest elections and put their political analysis before the voters. Some point to Jim Allister as the proverbial tail wagging the DUP unionist dog on issues like the Long Kesh u-turn. They ask whether Independent Republicans at Councils or Stormont could lead other nationalist representatives on prisoner and justice issues. It has been suggested that Gerry McGeough’s arrest at the vote count and imprisonment at Maghaberry had more to do with his election campaign than with events thirty years earlier. It must now be asked whether Ivor Bell’s real crime is daring to lend his name to Ciaran Mulholland’s campaign.
This case opens a legal Pandora’s Box which will effect more than Ivor Bell. If the Boston tapes are deemed credible evidence, sufficient to imprison Ivor Bell, should we not expect the same evidence to be used against others? Who else is named on these tapes?
Once we had the ability to turn every British injustice into a campaign which made the crown end, or at least pay a costly political price for its injustices. The Blanketmen were locked away in Long Kesh but they broke Thatcher and her attempt to brand them criminals. Internment, Castlereagh Confessions, Supergrass trials and more were broken by such campaigns. We highlighted the wrong, enlisted support from human rights activists, and gradually forced nationalist representatives to stand with us or be proven complicit in British injustice.
Can we unite to fight and defeat this injustice now? Must others stand in the dock because we lost our ability to do so?
Slan, Martin Galvin
Posted by Jim on March 28, 2014
As the impact of the arrest of the veteran activist Ivor Bell continues to reverberate within Republican circles there is a lot to agree with in this analysis by Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe:
“Ivor Bell is awaiting trial in Belfast on charges he aided and abetted the murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10 who in 1972 was abducted, shot, and secretly buried by the IRA after she was accused of being an informer.
Bell’s lawyer said Bell was innocent, but acknowledged that Bell was the man referred to as Mr. Z in a series of tape-recorded interviews made by a researcher hired by BC to compile recollections of republicans and loyalists who fought in Northern Ireland.
That researcher, former Irish Republican Army volunteer and prisoner Anthony McIntyre, told me from Ireland that he expects police to knock on his door any day. If they do, they’ll be wasting their time. “I wouldn’t even tell them hello,” he said.
Neither will Bell, 77, who was a senior IRA commander before his star dimmed…
Bell was among a group of IRA veterans who opposed the compromise accepted by Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams in 1998, effectively ending the Troubles.
Now, police would love Bell to implicate his former comrade turned foe, Adams, who has repeatedly denied involvement in McConville’s murder. Adams says BC naively allowed McIntyre, who openly opposed his leadership, to interview former IRA members who were inclined to implicate him for political reasons.
McConville’s children believe that Adams was behind their mother’s murder and insist he face justice. But this debacle has never been about justice. It’s about politics, specifically about sticking it to Adams and his party…
…the prosecution is so biased and politically motivated as to undermine all credibility.
The police in Northern Ireland have shown no interest in the other half of the oral history project: interviews with loyalists, who presumably could shed light on state-sanctioned murders they carried out with the covert assistance of the police and British military.
Ed Moloney, the journalist who oversaw the Belfast Project paid for and archived by Boston College, called Bell’s arrest “a cheap publicity stunt” by police and prosecutors who know that the oral histories, given to an academic by people who were neither under oath nor given legal warnings about self-incrimination, will not stand up as evidence in court.
As critical as he is of the authorities in Northern Ireland, Moloney said it wouldn’t have gotten this far if the US Department of Justice had rebuffed British authorities who asked their American counterparts to gain custody of the BC tapes, or if BC officials were willing to risk fines and even imprisonment to defy the government.
What a mess. An American university has been unwittingly and unwillingly used by a foreign government, with the acquiescence of the US government, to build a criminal case.
Oral history and academic freedom are dead and gone.”
The author Ed Moloney has suggested on several occasions that the pursuit of the forty-year old McConville case by Britain, and particularly by the PSNI or the British paramilitary police force in the north-east of Ireland, has more to do with the settling of old scores than any concerns over justice delayed. During the Irish-British conflict from the late 1960s to the early 2000s the RUC, the much-feared predecessor to the PSNI, incurred thousands of casualties amongst its officers while combating the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army and others. Though that came to an end
with the Peace Process of the late-to-mid 1990s the negotiated settlement also brought an end to the RUC. However despite promised reforms many hardcore RUC men were kept within the ranks of the new PSNI or subsequently rejoined it when the political spotlight moved on to elsewhere. Under their influence, and that of some senior British government officials, retribution upon former opponents has become a primary impulse of law and order in the north-eastern region of Ireland. This post-conflict vendetta is one that anti-Sinn Féin elements of the Irish and British media have proven eager to pursue with little thought for the consequences (which in this case is a not inconceivable eruption of renewed armed conflict). Nor is SF itself blameless. Elected members of the party, notably Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, have been less than honest with their electorates and the Irish people as whole. While there were good reasons for their obfuscation during and in the immediate aftermath of the war those reasons are looking increasingly threadbare now that we have had over a decade of (near) peace. Furthermore Sinn Féin’s willingness to see former, now rival, Republican comrades and colleagues thrown to the PSNI wolves is less than edifying.
All this is not to excuse the Republican movement of any wrongdoing when it comes to the central issue of Jean McConville’s death. It is clear that after a considerable debate McConville was executed/killed/murdered by the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army on the orders of senior officers within the organisation, her body hidden and her relatives left with no (honest) account of what had happened. Repeated claims by the news media in Ireland and elsewhere that McConville was killed because she had lent aid to a British soldier wounded outside her home by a sniper are completely unfounded. It simply never happened, as a 2006 investigation by the Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan made clear. Indeed the belief that such a gesture of simple human decency would elicit the ultimate penalty says much about the wilful ignorance of the conflict by observers both in Dublin and London.
While the O’Loan examination went on to find no evidence of McConville communicating with the British Forces, and specifically denied that she was a known informer, it did reveal that the British Army had initially insisted that her disappearance was a hoax or later that she had willingly deserted her children and was living elsewhere in Ireland. Whether that reflected poor intelligence or something more sinister has never been established (certainly such rumours may have originated with the IRA in an effort to confuse any potential investigation though local people were aware of her execution and the reasons behind it within weeks). Unfortunately Britain has refused access by journalists and members of the McConville family to the regimental records of British Army units deployed in Belfast during this period which is why so much of the case remains in the realms of speculation. However we do know that no serious investigation was carried out by the RUC into her disappearance until some considerable time after her death (and that the subsequent investigation was thrown off track by the misinformation supplied by the British military despite the RUC’s more informed sources). The evident reluctance of the British to address the disappearance of Jean McConville in 1972/3 remains the subject of much discussion, both fair and unfair.
The Irish Republican Army is adamant in its counter-claim that Jean McConville was a known informer who had been warned about her activities until finally discovered in the possession of a concealed military radio transmitter supplied to her by the British Army. Though we cannot be sure it seems likely that she was seized by the IRA’s Belfast Brigade the day before her known disappearance, interrogated (perhaps beaten) and then released. That would match British military reports and statements from some of her family relating to the discovery of a woman likely to be McConville in streets near her home in a state of some distress and confusion the day before she was abducted. With the radio transmitter in its hands the IRA must have discussed what actions to take based upon the evidence gained, no doubt in part spurred on by fears that Jean McConville would be spirited away to safety by the British now that her cover was truly blown or that she had further knowledge to impart to the enemy (her son, Robert McConville, was a member of the Official IRA and detained in the infamous Long Kesh concentration camp at the time of her death. During this period the OIRA and PIRA were bitter rivals, especially in Belfast and McConville remained a committed Republican activist going on to serve with the insurgent INLA). This resulted in her arrest the next day by the Irish Republican Army and transport across the border to the spot where she was shot dead. Or at least we can suppose that is the sequence of events. The truth is, of course, that everything to do with the killing of Jean McConville is supposition. We simply don’t know what happened during that dreadful period some forty years ago. However, as yet, no one has produced a plausible reason for the controversial killing of a mother of ten from an intensely closeknit community beyond that offered by the killers themselves.
The only legitimate way to end yet more years of speculation and anguish for the McConville family is for the governments of Ireland and Britain to agree a general amnesty that will allow all participants to the conflict, willing or otherwise, to give truthful testimonies free of fear or repercussion. Only then will we learn the truth about Jean McConville. Or about Gerry Adams.
