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By Nic Robertson and Ken Shiffman
CNN
25 May 2012
**Videos onsite
Brendan Hughes
Editor’s note: Watch how Northern Ireland’s dark past could threaten the peace process as victims look for closure from tapes made by former combatants on both sides of the sectarian divide. “World’s Untold Story” on CNN International at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. ET on Saturday May 26, or Sunday at 6 a.m. ET.
Belfast, Northern Ireland (CNN) — Audio recordings locked inside a college library in the United States might help solve a decades-old murder mystery, but the release of those tapes could damage the fragile peace in Northern Ireland.
In December 1972, the widow Jean McConville was taken from her home in Belfast and her 10 children.
“They came about tea time and they dragged her out of the bathroom and dragged her out,” remembers McConville’s daughter, Helen McKendry, who was then a teenager.
Ever since, McKendry has been on a 40-year quest for answers.
“All I ever wanted was to know the reason why they killed my mother,” McKendry explained.
“I’ve lived all my life in fear,” McKendry added. “They destroyed my mother’s life, my family life.”
McKendry believes tapes locked away in Boston College’s library may hold the truth about her mother’s fate. But there are fears that the tapes may also cause embarrassment or worse for Gerry Adams, the prominent Catholic politician who helped broker peace in Northern Ireland.
The recordings were made as part of the Belfast Project, which is a collection of interviews conducted with former Northern Irish paramilitary fighters. They provide an oral history of the decades of sectarian fighting that became known as The Troubles.
Northern Ireland is part of Britain and Protestant fighters wanted to keep it that way. Catholics were fighting to force the British out and reunify the north with the rest of Ireland.
The former combatants believed that their recorded interviews would be kept secret until their death. But that may no longer be possible as Northern Irish police are asking the United States government to hand over some of the tapes.
The police say they were alerted to the secret archive by the book, “Voices from the Grave,” written by Belfast Project archive manager Ed Moloney, which is based on transcripts from two of the recorded interviews. One of those featured is Brendan Hughes, a now-deceased former commander of the Irish Republican Army or IRA, a Catholic paramilitary.
Hughes told his interviewer: “I have never, ever, ever admitted being a member of the IRA, ever. I’ve just done it here.”
And he talked about Jean McConville’s murder, stating: “I knew she was being executed. I knew that. I didn’t know she was going to be buried or disappeared as they call them now.”
Hughes went on to allege Gerry Adams was involved: “The special squad was brought into the operation then, called The Unknowns. You know when anyone needed to be taken away they normally done it. I had no control over this squad. Gerry had control over this particular squad.”
Hughes added he regretted what happened: “Looking back on it now, what happened to the woman was wrong.”
Hughes said in his taped interview, McConville was killed because the IRA believed she was working with the British army. The McKendrys do not believe she was a spy, saying she was too busy looking after her 10 children to be an informer.
Gerry Adams, leader of Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein party, refused to be interviewed by CNN for this story. But, he has said many times before that he was never in the IRA and never involved in the death of Jean McConville, and has labeled as libelous any allegation he was involved in the McConville murder. His spokesman goes further, labeling Adams’ critics as anti the peace process.
Adams’ denial of IRA membership angers his old comrades like Hughes. “It means that people like myself had to carry the responsibility of all those deaths,” Hughes said on the interview tape. “Gerry was a major, major player in the war and yet he’s standing there denying it.”
The Northern Irish police vow to “follow the material in the Boston Archives all way to court if that’s where it takes them … they say detectives have a legal responsibility to investigate murders … and follow all lines of inquiry.”
The British government’s most senior politician on Northern Ireland, Owen Paterson told CNN that no one person is above the law.
“There can be no concept on amnesty, so we have to support the police to have complete operational independence in pursuing every line of inquiry in bringing those who committed crimes to justice,” Paterson said.
Right now the Boston archive manager, Ed Moloney, is furious with Boston College for initially giving in too quickly to subpoena’s demanding they hand over some of the tapes to a U.S. judge. He says it puts lives in danger, damages the future of truth recovery, oral histories and academic research.
Moloney — who is appealing to try to stop the court from handing the tapes it has to police — wants the tapes handed back to the people who told their stories.
“Boston College is no longer a fit and proper place to keep these interviews,” Moloney insists. “The archives should be closed down, and the interviews should be returned to the people who gave them because they’re not safe.”
But there seems to be little chance of that, Boston College’s spokesman Jack Dunn blames Moloney.
“From the beginning, we said to the project organizer, who approached us with this idea, that there were limitations regarding the assurances of confidentiality under American law,” Dunn said.
But what worries Moloney is that if the police get tapes relating to Jean McConville’s murder, they could quickly find other crimes to investigate implicating more political leaders and the police could soon demand all the tapes in the archive.
Few believe the police will get Adams to court in part because he is inoculated from prosecution by his central role silencing IRA guns and delivering peace, and in part because the tapes alone cannot secure a conviction.
Former IRA man Richard O’Rawe recorded a statement for the Boston College archives and says lawyers told him under UK law the tapes cannot be used in court.
“I find it just imponderable, why the police are going down this road when they must know that there is no chance of obtaining any convictions at the end of this,” O’Rawe says.
Like many other Catholics, O’Rawe thinks the police are biased against them, trying to settle old scores and bring Adams and others down. But for Helen McKendry, herself a Catholic getting access to the tapes is about so much more.
For her, it’s not only about justice but a release from the pain of never knowing the truth.
“They tried to destroy what life I have now,” she says. “They are the people who committed the crimes in this. They should be worried.”
By Liam Clarke
Belfast Telegraph
25 May 2012
Reality TV: Gerry Adams’ speech to Sinn Fein’s ard fheis will be carefully stage-managed
Sinn Fein’s ard fheis opens in Killarney tomorrow. Like most conferences held by successful political parties, it is a well-managed set-piece. It is a PR event and it is aimed at the voters watching on TV.
The party faithful in the hall are a backdrop – there to radiate support and unanimity, not wrangle over policy like revolutionaries.
The most important episode and the focus of the whole conference will be Gerry Adams’ leader’s address, which goes out live on both RTE and BBC Northern Ireland at 5.25pm on Saturday.
It must be honed and crafted to suit the broadcasters.
Sinn Fein plays for high stakes and can’t afford to over-run, as Alasdair McDonnell did at the SDLP gathering.
Opinion polls say Sinn Fein is the second most popular party in the Republic after Fine Gael, and the Assembly elections made it second only to the DUP in Northern Ireland. That makes the goal of being simultaneously in government north and south potentially achievable.
If that happened, Sinn Fein could claim that Irish unity, or at least a significant staging-post, had been achieved, as Sinn Fein ministers operated all-Ireland bodies from both sides of the border.
Ideally, from Sinn Fein’s point-of-view, this would happen in 2016 – the anniversary of the Easter Rising.
Adams has a lot to juggle. The north-south equation isn’t easy to balance.
In government in the north, the party swallowed hard and voted to cut expenditure by £3bn over four years.
The imperative here is to maintain stable government in partnership with the DUP.
That – and the £10bn-a-year subsidy we receive from Britain – makes it difficult to do more than issue Press statements about austerities handed down from Westminster.
In the Republic, Sinn Fein advocates defaulting on EU loans and vocally opposes coalition cuts. There its main priority is to gain ground and undermine the coalition for cutting too hard.
The Irish Labour Party generally builds support in opposition and sees it seep away when it enters coalition with a more Right-wing party.
This time is no exception – the latest poll shows Labour has lost 25% of its support to Sinn Fein and independents compared to last year’s election and Sinn Fein has edged ahead of it in overall popularity.
Sinn Fein needs to continue to focus on Labour’s inability to deliver its pre-election promises in coalition, while it distracts attention from the fact it too is implementing cuts as part of a coalition in the north. The north is having a ‘feedback’ effect on southern strategy. Sinn Fein has seen how the DUP extended its appeal into middle-class voters by stressing its business credentials alongside more traditional rallying-calls.
Last week, Pearse Doherty, a Donegal TD and someone to watch when Gerry Adams steps down, gave a hint of things to come when he said: “We need entrepreneurs and business leaders to be adventurous and to be successful.”
In the battle for new and marginal votes, Sinn Fein must measure its policies by viewer sentiment, not dogma.
That democratic discipline will change it out of all recognition.
Independent.ie
May 14 2012
THIS is the house that Gerry built: his four-bedroom getaway deep in the Donegal Gaeltacht. [no photo]
Off the road, hidden away up a laneway, the stone-fronted home was a nerve centre for Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams during the Northern Ireland peace process.
But the fact that Mr Adams even had a holiday home on this side of the border was relatively unknown to the general public — until then Justice Minister Michael McDowell pithily highlighted his properties in a TV debate before the 2007 general election.
After being elected as a TD for Louth last year, Mr Adams declared the property on his Register of Interests.
A handwritten ‘Private Road’ notice, in Irish, warns off anyone from going any further towards the secluded building, hidden away behind a 6ft-high wall and security gate.
Trees in spring bloom surround the small site, which overlooks the cottage of a neighbour in the townland of Cashel, Gortahork.
It wasn’t always like this though — for a decade Mr Adams was happy to make do with a caravan on the site.
But in the early 1990s, as republicans edged towards peace, Mr Adams began to make his holiday getaway more permanent as he slowly oversaw the building of his new home.
Builders from Gaoth Dobhair, 25km away along the coast road, were called in as he turned his caravan in the country into a tidy holiday home.
“It’s actually very modest,” says one republican who has been inside.
“The stone finish on the outside is very traditional in that area and Gerry likes tradition.
“It’s quite sparse, like a lot of holiday homes, I suspect.”
It was here in Co Donegal where Adams would often meet the republican leadership during the early days of the peace process — though one meeting which led to a split in the IRA took place in an old boarding school in the townland of Ballyconnell, in nearby Falcarragh, in October 1997.
IRA quartermaster Michael McKevitt and his partner Bernadette Sands, sister of hunger striker Bobby, walked out of that meeting and went on to found the Real IRA.
Throughout his time in Donegal, Adams’ movements were monitored by gardai, keen to gather intelligence on the direction of the peace process.
“All the republican leadership would go to Gortahork,” said one former special branch garda.
“It was like a ‘Who’s Who’ of the IRA at the time and our bosses in Dublin wanted to know everything.”
These days garda cars that pass close to his home do so to protect him.
This is a wild and remote and very beautiful part of north Donegal.
Offshore you can see ‘Elvis’ — the island of Tory, said jokingly to resemble Elvis Presley lying on his back, the rocks at one end forming the King’s quiff.
Mr Adams is said to love it here because he gets a chance to practise his cupla focal with native speakers.
You’re more likely to hear Irish spoken here than you are in the better-known Gaoth Dobhair Gaeltacht up the road.
Unsurprisingly, getting the locals to talk about their most famous holiday-homer isn’t that easy.
“He pops into the shop and chats away as Gaeilge,” said one. “He keeps himself to himself most of the time and I’ve never heard him talk about politics here except on the election campaign for Pearse Doherty.”
During the building boom, Mr Adams’s home in the hills was once valued at €250,000. It actually cost about IR£55,000 to complete.
“In the current climate, and with inflation taken in, he’d struggle to get his money back,” one estate agent said.
MARY MINIHAN
Irish Times
9 May 2012
SINN FÉIN leader Gerry Adams yesterday said the budget deficit had “almost doubled” since the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition came to power, a claim that was rejected by the Government.
Responding to Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore’s comment that Ireland would find itself “back in the eye of the storm” in the event of a No vote in the fiscal treaty referendum, Mr Adams blamed Government policy for sending young Irish people to Australia and Canada to find work.
“Any sensible person knows that the whole of the European Union is going to be in the eye of the storm for some considerable time. It’s how we come out of the storm,” he said.
“We think that the last four years of austerity have proved that austerity doesn’t work. It’s self-evident. Eamon Gilmore has been in Government for a year and the deficit has almost doubled.”
Minister for European Affairs Lucinda Creighton later rejected Mr Adams comments about the deficit, accusing Sinn Féin of “using fantasy figures cooked up on the back of an envelope” to frighten people into voting No in the referendum on May 31st. Ms Creighton said the underlying budget deficit for 2011 was 9.4 per cent of GDP, which was significantly ahead of the EU-IMF target of 10.6 per cent. The Government was committed to a general deficit of not more than 8.6 per cent of GDP for 2012, she added.
“Deputy Adams will be aware that the headline deficit figure for 2010 was over 30 per cent of GDP. Sinn Féin needs to invest in a calculator and stop plucking figures out of the sky. The stability treaty will provide us with sound economic policies well into the future. The Sinn Féin alternative is Gerrynomics,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Workers’ Party launched its referendum website outlining the reasons the party is campaigning for a No vote in the referendum. For the first time the party is also making extensive use of social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook.
Workers’ Party president Michael Finnegan insisted that people could not rely on the information being given out by what he described as “Government’s media”.
He claimed people were being bombarded by “barefaced lies and threats” and said the treaty had “deliberately been written in dense legalistic language”.
The Communist Party of Ireland called on the trade union movement to come forward “in a united opposition against this treaty and cut the anchor of the Labour Party which is dragging it down an endless spiral of cuts and job losses”.
Calling for a No vote on May 31st, the party said voters would have an opportunity to pass verdict “on the prioritisation of debt repayments, the bailing out of German and French banks and the imposed austerity by rejecting the permanent austerity treaty”.
HARRY McGEE
Irish Times
25 Apr 2012
SF CAMPAIGN LAUNCH: SINN FÉIN leader Gerry Adams has depicted supporters of the European fiscal compact treaty as Thatcherite and Reaganite right-wingers.
He said yesterday that the choice facing the Irish public in the referendum on May 31st was between austerity and growth.
Proponents of the treaty, he said, were coming from “a Thatcherite and Reaganite right-wing conservative ideological position”. The Louth deputy was speaking at the launch of the party’s campaign to urge a No vote on polling day. A pamphlet, Austerity isn’t working, was also launched by the party.
Speaking at the National Gallery, Mr Adams argued that if Ireland ratified the treaty, it would mean the handover of powers “to unelected officials and bureaucrats in the EU Commission”.
He said that providing a stimulus to create jobs was at the heart of Sinn Féin’s approach. “You cannot cut your way out of recession . . . There is no jobs stimulus in the Government’s strategy.”
He also dismissed as “rubbish” Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil arguments that Ireland will not be in a position to access emergency funding if the treaty is rejected.
He claimed that the emergency fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), needed to be given a legal basis in EU treaties.
In order to do that, all 27 member states had to ratify it. That is not due to be done until after the referendum. He suggested that Ireland could exercise its veto on the ESM. While a Sinn Féin strategist accepted it would be a difficult course of action to take, it was argued that there was “no way” the EU would deny emergency funding to a state.
Asked how the party proposed to find funding in the event of a No vote and a second bailout, he said it would come from “current sources”, a reference to the EU-ECB-IMF troika.
Sinn Féin
March 20, 2012
Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams TD is in Washington for the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. This afternoon he spoke with the Congressional Friends of Ireland Committee.
The Sinn Féin leader thanked the congressional leaders for their “diligence and commitment to the peace process over many years” He asked for their continuing support in forcing the British government “to honour the outstanding issues arising out of the Good Friday Agreement, including its breach of its commitment on holding an inquiry into the murder of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane.”
Speaking after the meeting Mr. Adams said:
“The Weston Park Agreement is an agreement between the Irish and British governments and is part of the process of negotiations following the Good Friday Agreement. The British government agreed to hold a series of inquiries arising out of that agreement, including into the murders of Rosemary Nelson, Robert Hamill and Billy Wright.
“The only outstanding inquiry is that of the killing of Pat Finucane. The British government has refused to hold an independent inquiry and has instead asked for a lawyer to examine the available papers.
“This is unacceptable to the Finucane family who have instituted court proceedings.
“The fact is that the British government has admitted that there was collusion in the killing of Pat Finucane. It should stop obstructing an inquiry and honour its obligations to hold a public inquiry.
“I have asked US congressional leaders to support the family in their endeavour.”
The Sinn Féin leader also raised a number of other outstanding issues arising from the Good Friday Agreement, including a Bill of Rights for the north of Ireland; an all-island Charter of Rights; the establishment of the North/South Inter-parliamentary Forum and North South Consultative Forum; the introduction of an Acht na Gaeilge (Irish language Act) and a resolution to the issue of OTRs. Mr. Adams also raised the cases of Martin Corey, Gerry McGeogh and Marion Price.
The Sinn Féin leader asked for support from the Congressional leaders for inquiries into the Ballymurphy and Springhill Massacres carried out by the British parachute regiment in 1971 and 72.
Deputy Adams also spoke to the Congressional leaders about the Irish government’s planned Constitutional Convention and the issue of the undocumented Irish in the USA and the immigration Bill currently with the Senate.
By EAMONN McCANN
Counterpunch.org
13 Feb 2012
Norman Baxter may find policing in Kabul these days more congenial than policing in Belfast. The former RUC and PSNI Detective Chief Superintendant is one of a number of senior Northern Ireland police officers who have decided that the new, reformed force is not for them, have taken redundancy and signed up with a private firm of “security consultants” with a contract from the Pentagon to help train the new Afghan police force.
Since leaving the Police Service of Northern Ireland in 2008, Baxter has spoken and written of his anger and frustration at changes which have seemed to him to belittle the sacrifices of Royal Ulster Constabulary in the long fight against the IRA and at policies brought in under the peace process which he believes now hamper the force in its continuing fight against terrorism. A year and a half ago, Baxter joined New Century, founded and led by Belfast-born Tim Collins, a commander in the Royal Irish Rangers who became a star of the British tabloid press in 2003 for a stirring speech he is said to have delivered to troops in Kuwait on the eve of their advance into Iraq. (The only record comes from an embedded Daily Mail reporter who claims that she took verbatim notes of the desert oration.)
The inclusion in New Century of a contingent of former NI police officers, as well as British soldiers with experience in covert operations in the North, indicates that Collins’ involvement in Iraq and now in Afghanistan hasn’t occluded his interest in affairs back home. Writing in the Daily Mail a few days after the Real IRA gun attack in Co. Antrim in 2009 which left two soldiers dead, he declared: “The emasculation of the old Royal Ulster Constabulary, once the world’s most effective anti-terrorist force, is largely to blame for this shambles…In its new guise as the PSNI, the force is so riddled with political correctness that many good old-fashioned coppers…have simply been sidelined. Nowadays, these old RUC professionals who haven’t been driven out work for MI5 as collators or clerks but take no part in operations. This is a disgrace.”
Collins’ rationale for throwing the doors of New Century open to those in the RUC/PSNI who hankered after the old days and the old ways is easily understandable. He will have anticipated that the techniques and experience which the RUC and British security services developed over 30 years combating the Provos and other paramilitary groups will have equipped them with the special skills needed to mentor Afghans training to fight the Taliban once Nato forces have left.
Baxter, a high-ranking officer who had become chief liaison officer between the police and MI5 in the North, will have been a natural. He has been joined in the upper echelons of New Century by a cluster of colleagues, including Mark Cochrane, former RUC officer in charge of covert training; David Sterritt, a 29-year RUC/PSNI veteran and specialist in recruitment and assessment of agents; Joe Napolitano, 25 years in the RUC/PSNI, retiring as a Detective Inspector running intelligence-led policing operations; Raymond Sheehan, 29 years a Special Branch agent handler; Leslie Woods, 27 years in the RUC/PSNI, with extensive Special Branch handling the selection, assessment and training of officers for covert intelligence-led operations. And many others.
Experience in the North is the single most common factor among recruits to senior positions with New Century.
New Century’s presence in Afghanistan and the involvement of veterans of the Irish conflict briefly surfaced in the mainstream British media last June when a former RUC man working for the company was killed in action in Helmand. Ex-RUC officer Ken McGonigle, 51, a father of four from Derry, died in an exchange of fire with two escaped Taliban prisoners.
Baxter had been a relatively well-known policing figure in the North for some years, regularly interviewed to provide a police view on security matters. His most prominent role had been to head the investigation of the Omagh bombing in August 1998, the most bloody attack of the Troubles. It is widely accepted now that the Omagh investigation was botched to an embarrassing degree – although there is no agreement on where blame lies. Baxter is not alone in believing that political considerations and the protection of security service “assets” North and South were major factors in the failure to bring the case to a conclusion
After leaving the PSNI in 2008, he was able to speak out with less restraint. He took a particular interest in the alleged involvement of senior Sinn Fein figures in IRA activities in the past.
The fact that the policing changes had been specifically designed to coax Sinn Fein into acceptance of the Northern State and thereby into a share of Executive power did nothing to sooth the disgruntlement of police officers resentful of reform. Baxter’s particular animus against Gerry Adams came through in a column in the Belfast Newsletter on March 30 2010, in which he urged the PSNI to launch a new investigation into the Sinn Fein leader’s alleged role in the 1972 abduction and killing of Jean McConville, the mother of 10 whose “disappeared” body was finally located on a beach in Co. Louth in 2003. He appears to have been the first figure of any note – certainly the first with a media presence and extensive police connections – to call publicly for action to subpoena video tapes held by Boston College, Massachusetts, in which two ex-IRA members claim that Adams, as a senior IRA commander in Belfast, had ordered the killing of Mrs. McConville and others of the “disappeared”.
Baxter’s intervention came within 24 hours of the publication on March 29 of “Voices From The Grave ”, the book by Ed Maloney based on interviews with senior IRA figure Brendan Hughes and UVF leader and Progressive Unionist Party politician David Ervine. Both men had recently died, allowing Maloney to publish the material: he had given assurances that none of it would be used while they were alive. The same assurance had been given to more than 20 other former paramilitaries, most of them ex-IRA, who had been interviewed by Maloney and his researcher Anthony McIntyre – himself a former IRA prisoner – and the tapes lodged with Boston College.
In the book, Hughes, once a close personal friend and paramilitary comrade of Adams, told that the man who was now an internationally respected figure had orchestrated the abduction and killing of Mrs. McConville.
“Although Brendan Hughes is now dead,” wrote Baxter in the Newsletter, “his evidence, which was recorded, may provide evidence which could lead the police to build a case for criminal proceedings.” His intense personal feelings were evident in his description of a recent appearance by Adams in a Channel 4 religious programme as “sickening” and in a suggestion that Mrs. McConville may have heard herself condemned “from the lips of a demon of death”.
The level of hatred – it is not too strong a word – of Baxter and many of his colleagues at the new status of individuals they had striven to extirpate from Northern Ireland society was unconcealed. “Sinn Fein and the IRA have a record of human rights abuse that would equal some Nazi units in the Second World War, and yet they currently wear the duplicitous clothes of human rights defenders with such ease.”
The pursuit of Adams and others will be seen by Baxter and his colleagues as unfinished business.
Baxter will have been well aware that a taped record of a conversation with a man who had since died is no basis for charging a senior political figure – or anyone – with murder. In the Newsletter, he urged Mrs. McConville’s family to try instead, or as well, to bring civil proceedings – where the standard of proof is less daunting than in a criminal case. Referring to Mrs. McConville’s daughter, he made a public appeal: “Helen McKendry should not be left in isolation to seek justice for her mother through civil proceedings. Civic society and democratic politicians should come together in a campaign to financially and morally support the McConville family.”
His bitter experience heading the Omagh investigation might have put the option of civil proceedings in Baxter’s mind. He had come to believe that shadowy forces had contrived to thwart his efforts.
At Omagh library in February 2006, Sam Kinkaid, the most senior detective in the North, told a meeting of relatives of the victims that MI5 had known months in advance that a bomb attack was planned for either Omagh or Derry, that one of those involved was an Omagh man whose name was known and that the bombers would use a Vauxhall Cavalier. MI5 passed this information to the gardai in the South, he went on – but not to the PSNI in the North. Baxter was seated alongside Kinkaid as he spoke, nodding vigorously. Kinkaid resigned from the PSNI the following morning.
Meanwhile, the Garda Special Branch had been running an informer who supplied information about a series of planned cross-border bomb raids by the Real IRA. Gardai decided to let a number of bombs through so as not to compromise the identity of the informer. Police in the North were not told about this. So there were no special security measures in place in or around Omagh when the bomb in a Vauxhall Cavalier was parked in Market Street on August 15, 1998.
Even after the explosion, with 29 people dead, none of this information was passed to Baxter’s investigation either.
The only person eventually charged with the Omagh atrocity was Sean Hoey, an electrician from south Armagh. He was acquitted in November 2009. The trial judge, Mr. Justice Weir, then launched a scathing attack on the investigation, accusing the police of “a slapdash approach” and condemning two named officers for “reprehensible” behaviour.
Remarkably, however, none of the relatives of the victims interviewed afterwards blamed Baxter or the men under him. Victor Barker, whose 12-year-old son James had perished in the blast, placed the blame much higher: “It is the appalling inefficiency of (Chief Constable) Sir Ronnie Flanagan that has meant that Chief Superintendant Baxter has not been able to secure a conviction”.
Many of the families were at one with Baxter in believing that the investigation had systematically been stymied by senior figures in policing and politics who had reason to be nervous about the full facts emerging and whose political agenda may have taken precedence over the safety of citizens and the pursuit of the perpetrators.
A number of families took Baxter’s advice and initiated a civil case for compensation against four men they believed had been involved in the bombing. In 2009, the four were found to have been responsible. Two were cleared on appeal. But the families were able to express some frugal satisfaction that at least they’d seen somebody held publicly accountable for the devastation which had befallen them.
It is hardly fanciful to trace Baxter’s loud advocacy of civil proceedings against Adams back to the Omagh experience which had confirmed his belief that “the world’s most effective anti-terrorist force” had been prevented from winning its war against the IRA by the machinations of people with no stomach for the fight. Getting Adams now, whether by civil or criminal proceedings, was a part of getting even.
It was against this background that the British authorities launched legal action to recover the Boston tapes. The suggestion came from the Historical Enquiries Team, established in 2006 to re-examine more than 3,000 unsolved cases of Troubles-related murder. The 100-strong team included Mike Wilkins, head of the Special Branch in Warwickshire in England until seconded to the HET in 2006. He had become HET chief investigations officer by the time he left in September 2010 – to join Baxter as training coordinator for the Afghan project. This was six months after Baxter’s call in the Newsletter for a new police investigation into the McConville case. The interconnections between these events have, inevitably, provided fodder for fevered speculation in Republican circles and on blogs and websites over recent months.
To the dismay of Maloney and McIntyre, Boston College decided not to contest a lower-court order to hand the tapes over. The archive is now in the custody of the court while Maloney and McIntyre continue legal action to try to prevent the material being passed on to the PSNI. It is a matter of speculation what the implication will be for Adams and others who have left paramilitarism behind if the tapes are handed over.
As he looks back on more than 30 frustrating years policing in the North, even as he assumes his new and more wide-ranging – and enormously more lucrative, one imagines – role in the global war on terror, Baxter may take grim satisfaction from the fact that he has some of his old enemies still in his sights. He may be cheered, too, by the thought that he won’t be confronted by the same defeatist attitudes and dark maneuvers in the freewheeling fight in Afghanistan as he faced in the constrained circumstances of Northern Ireland, that this time the good guys will get to win. Of course, he could be wrong about that.
The Boston archives’ row centres on Gerry Adams’ alleged role in murder. What else does it hold, asks Alan Simpson
Alan Simpson
Belfast Telegraph
25 January 2012
I must confess to having a healthy appreciation of the rich irony of the Boston College Oral History Project handing over to the US authorities, on foot of an order from one of their courts, the taped confessions of some former Northern Ireland terrorists.
Two of the loyalist confessors in the project – William ‘Plum’ Smith and Winston Churchill ‘Winkie’ Rea, both formerly of the Red Hand Commando – urgently want their taped disclosures returned “not due to their content, but on a point of principle”.
As a retired detective superintendent who worked for many years in west and north Belfast, I would be keen, should the tapes be handed over to the PSNI, that they be placed in the public domain – particularly in respect of Rea.
I first encountered Rea one day in February 1973, when, as a very junior detective, I found myself alone in the CID offices at Springfield Road RUC station.
Around lunchtime, a call came through that two Catholic post office workers, Michael Coleman (30) and 38-year-old Joseph McAleese, who had just finished a shift at the nearby Divis Street sorting office, had been making their way home on foot to the Clonard area when a car pulled up and a gunman armed with a sub-machine-gun stepped out and fired several bursts, killing them instantly.
Accompanied by a uniformed colleague and an Army patrol, I dealt with the scene. A large crowd had gathered. Also present was the late Paddy Devlin, who had recently lost his parliamentary seat for West Belfast.
The scene was quite chaotic and I noticed some children kicking around several of the spent cartridge cases and was relieved when Paddy Devlin took this vital evidence from them and handed it to me. I collected the remainder and Devlin then successfully encouraged the crowd to disperse.
The car used in the double-murder was recovered a short time later in the Shankill area and, when forensically examined, a distinct palm print was found on it which was identified as having being made by Rea.
He was duly arrested and, as we could not prove he had actually been in the car at the time of the killings, he was convicted of assisting offenders and received a prison sentence of eight years.
I strongly suspect that the late Frankie Curry, a member of the Red Hand Commando and a close associate of Rea, was the actual gunman. Curry was himself shot dead in 1999 by fellow loyalists.
I had had many encounters with him and managed to put him in prison a few times. Just prior to his murder, Curry confided in a reputable journalist that he had been involved in a total of 13 killings – most of them sectarian murders.
He claimed to have been ‘blooded’ at the tender age of 13 years by his uncle, Gusty Spence, when he took away the weapons from the scene of the Malvern Street shooting.
I wonder did Spence – before his death last September – ever take responsibility for setting his nephew on a road which led to so many killings.
My interest in the Boston tapes is to discover – should they ever be made public – if Rea actually mentions the murder of the two postal workers in 1973.
If he does, has he considered any sort of apology or explanation to their relatives?
My cynical nature believes it is the actual contents of the Boston tapes that is the real reason Rea wants them returned.
And now to the late Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes, former officer commanding of the Belfast brigade of the IRA, who also recorded his memoirs for the benefit of the Boston project.
I only encountered him once, just after his arrest in an IRA safe-house in Myrtlefield Park, off the Malone Road in 1974.
I could see instantly how he earned his nickname as he was very swarthy with thick, black hair and a large moustache. Had I not known his history, I would have guessed he was of Turkish extraction.
During the recording of his experiences in the IRA, he strongly implicated Gerry Adams as the man who ordered the kidnapping, interrogation and subsequent execution by a single bullet to the back of the head of Jean McConville – a mother of 10 – for her perceived sins against the IRA.
Hughes’ allegations against Adams have been corroborated by Dolours Price, who was a notorious and very active member of the IRA and who admits driving the unfortunate Jean McConville to her appointment with death.
It is often said by commentators on the Troubles that there should be no hierarchy of victims, but who for example, would not show greater compassion for a murdered child?
Similarly, the killing of a woman has always had a certain abhorrence throughout the civilised world – never mind a woman who was the mother of 10 children.
Adams, as one would expect, denies any involvement in the killing but in mitigation, if he was involved as alleged, he too must have felt a degree of shame at what could be regarded as a war-crime, as the perpetrators had her body secretly buried to conceal their foul deed and it was not recovered until 30 years had passed.
Sinn Féin
January 23, 2012
Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams has said the government has no mandate to ratify the new Eurozone austerity treaty without consulting the people in a referendum.
Deputy Adams was speaking today after comments from Finance Minister Michael Noonan on the requirement for a referendum.
He said: “This treaty will inflict a decade of austerity on the Irish people yet the government is attempting to deny them a vote on it.
“Fine Gael and Labour have no mandate to ratify the new Eurozone austerity treaty without consulting the people in a referendum.
“If the government manages to negotiate its way out of a constitutional requirement for a referendum there is still a democratic imperative to put it to the people.
“The people must be afforded the right to judge this treaty for themselves.” ENDS
News Letter
Monday 23 January 2012
PETER Hain privately agreed with Gerry Adams that the Shankill bomber Sean Kelly should not have been re-imprisoned in June 2005 — despite police and prison service advice that he should be jailed, he has admitted.
Kelly, who had bombed a chip shop on the Shankill Road in 1993 killing nine innocent civilians, had been released on licence under the terms of the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
“Late one night in mid-June 2005 at Hillsborough I was working on a red box when, without any prior notice, a submission marked ‘secret’ came to the top of the files left for my attention,” Mr Hain says.
“It recommended revocation of Sean Kelly’s licence and presented evidence of him apparently orchestrating young republicans clashing with loyalists as trouble erupted outside a pub after a televised match between the Catholic-supported Glasgow Celtic and the Protestant-supported Glasgow Rangers football teams.
“I immediately knew this was a hot potato. Damned if I agreed the submission because it would destabilise an imminent peace move by Gerry Adams to disarm by the IRA.
“Damned if I did not because the submission came with evidence and a recommendation from both the police and prison services.
“If I ignored or countermanded it where would that leave my credibility?
“Maybe I was being set up with a deliberate test as to whether I could be trusted with the security of Northern ireland and the security agencies of which I was now in charge?”
He adds: “So I accepted the recommendation with considerable foreboding.”
Mr Hain says that he was then approached by two senior DUP figures who had been aware of the Kelly recommendation.
“Lo and behold, a few days later the DUP’s Peter Robinson and Jeffrey Donaldson let slip that they had been aware that the process for Kelly’s licence suspension had been activated weeks before and that the recommendation would come from me.
“So DUP leaders, often uncannily well informed from within the police, knew all about it well before I did.”
Mr Hain says that the next morning he summoned his permanent secretary, Joe Pilling, and political director, Jonathan Phillips, to warn that he “would not tolerate anything so serious again just turning up in my red box without proper discussion of the implications, and I made clear my suspicions”.
However, Mr Hain does not make clear what those suspicions were in the book although he says that he told Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde that “officials well down the line, perhaps merely seeing the issue as one of due process, would have to refer matters higher up to their superiors before setting in train proceedings that could only have one outcome under the legislation: the decision I confirmed”.
The following Saturday, when news of Kelly’s re-arrest broke, Mr Hain says that an angry Gerry Adams phoned him to complain that “every republican will see Sean’s arrest as proof the security forces are trying to destabilise the republican movement. How can I do what I have promised to do — deliver the end of the IRA’s war — when you do this to me?”
Mr Adams claimed in the call that he had been told that Kelly was “trying to restrain the disorder, not to organise it” and added: “You are going to have to let him back out.”
Mr Hain says: “Although I replied that the evidence provided to me was clear, and that others contravening their licences had also been reimprisoned, I privately agreed with Adams.
“I had been equally unhappy about the fait accompli, though I could not say so….inevitable strong [republican] complaints to No 10 and Dublin led Tony Blair and the Irish foreign minister to ask me how on earth this had happened. Although they accepted my explanation and my officials swung into action strongly to back me up, I was momentarily concerned about damage to my credibility.”
He add: “Subsequent meetings with Adams and McGuinness made it crystal clear they needed Sean Kelly out to deliver the historic IRA statement.”
Eventually a “carefully choreographed sequence of procedures” saw Kelly released the night before the IRA’s statement that its war was over.
News Letter
Monday 23 January 2012
PETER Hain said that on July 27, 2005, the day before the IRA declared that it was ending violence for good and agreeing to decommission, Gerry Adams had phoned him to request a private meeting.
The Sinn Fein president was unhappy with the Irish Republic’s government for being tougher than the British by demanding pictures of decommissioning (which in the past Dr Paisley had similarly demanded).
According to Mr Hain, the Sinn Fein leader told him: “My instructions are to show only Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell a copy of the IRA statement.
“I am passing it to you exclusively and I don’t want it shown to the Irish government. They can stew in it. I have to have Sean Kelly out [of prison] and both governments have to agree to welcome the statement. You must know we are acting in good faith and respect your good faith.”
Mr Hain added: “Adams was, however, practiced at squeezing every last item out of a key moment like this, and was well versed in the art of brinkmanship. ‘The problem is the statement will not issue from the IRA until Dublin agrees over this outstanding issue between us’.
“Almost as he said this he broke off as a call from the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, came through on his mobile, and Adams told him: ‘I can’t deliver photos of the decommissioning of IRA weapons … photos are impossible’.”
Mr Hain said that the Irish government’s insistence on photographs appeared to be at the insistence of the Tainaiste, Michael McDowell, a staunch opponent of Sinn Fein and the Taoiseach was worried that his coalition government could even fall over the issue.
Mr Adams then demanded that no photographs be taken of the 1,000-word handwritten statement which Jonathan Phillips was forced to copy before sending to London, at Mr Adams’ insistence, by secure fax rather than email (something Mr Hain was baffled at as the government email system was more secure than a fax which had to be sent on an open line).
While the impasse with Dublin remained the Sinn Fein leader sat outside Hillsborough Castle in the sunshine with Gerry Kelly “munching fruit and cake”.
The deal was finalised with Dublin late that night, Mr Hain said, and the following morning he briefed Dr Paisley in person who was “pleased to be pre-informed, he was relaxed, chatty and in witty mode”.
However, several days later he said that “Paisley was in decidedly different mode”.
“On August 3 a furious delegation which he led came to see me, the two women Assembly members refusing to shake my welcoming hand.
“Peter Robinson was at his bombastic best. They had simply banked the IRA statement, typically finding fault with some of its wording, and were on the warpath. The issues were toxic: the release of Sean Kelly, the disbandment of the Royal Irish Regiment and the dismantling of the south Armagh watch towers.”
Mr Hain said that his past involvement with groups calling for the UK to leave Northern Ireland had created some initial suspicion among unionists.
“Although I had never had any truck with the IRA, my anti-colonial upbringing made me sympathetic to the political aims of Irish republicanism, though certainly not the violent methods,” the South African-born anti-Apartheid campaigner said.
Mr Hain said that he had been involved in the Time To Go Labour campaign organised by Clare Short in the 1980s and had at that point met Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness who had “told me they wanted a political settlement, even if the IRA was still active”.
He said that Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness were “the most professional and tough negotiators I had encountered in politics. Well read and meticulously prepared, they were courteous and straightforward. I was briefed that they remained members of the IRA Army Council, effectively the organisation’s Politburo. I got on with them well”.
He said that Mr Adams was “haunted by the memory of Michael Collins, the IRA leader assassinated from within his own ranks in 1922. This followed Collins’ agreement to the Anglo-Irish Treaty the year before”.
He said that in meetings Adams and McGuinness would occasionally play “hard cop, soft cop”.
“Bespectacled and tall, with greying black hair and a bad back, Adams often seemed tired.”
He said that despite “our friendly relations” Adams and McGuinness had gone behind his back to the Prime Minister and suggested that he should not have confidence in his secretary of state.
He said that on another occasion the pair had asked to see him on his own and after squeezing into a box-like room they had aggressively insisted that pressure on them risked “sabotaging the whole process” in terms which Mr Hain described as “physically threatening”.
Several days earlier Mr Adams had phoned Mr Hain to tell him that the statement would be coming. Mr Adams had told him: “It would be such a decisive, historic move that even for him to discuss it with me beforehand was potentially treasonable to the IRA.”
By Shawn Pogatchnik, Associated Press
Boston.com
17 Jan 2012
DUBLIN (AP) — A trans-Atlantic legal showdown could determine whether Gerry Adams, the Irish republican chieftain long at the center of Belfast war and peace, faces trial over his IRA past.
Police probing the Irish Republican Army’s 1972 killing of a Belfast mother of 10 want to seize taped interviews with IRA members that Boston College hoped to keep locked up for posterity. Researchers fighting the handover in court next week warn that disclosure could trigger attacks against IRA veterans involved in the secrecy-shrouded project and undermine Northern Ireland’s peace.
The case of Jean McConville, a 37-year-old widow, commands special attention among Northern Ireland’s nearly 3,300 unsolved killings because of allegations that Adams, the conflict’s leading guerrilla turned peacemaker, commanded the IRA unit responsible for ordering her execution and secret burial.
Adams denies this.
But the researchers who collected the interviews say they include multiple IRA colleagues of Adams from 1972 — testimony that, if made public, could fuel a victims’ civil lawsuit against the Sinn Fein party leader.
“Imagine if these interviews are delivered to the police and their contents come out in court. There’ll be a hue and cry for Gerry Adams’ political scalp,” said Ed Moloney, a former Belfast journalist who directed Boston College’s oral history project on Northern Ireland.
Moloney and the former IRA member who collected the interviews, Anthony McIntyre, go to court next Tuesday in Boston seeking to persuade Judge William Young to let Boston College keep the audiotapes out of the hands of Belfast police.
Moloney said the material was explosive enough to damage Northern Ireland’s unity government, in which Sinn Fein represents the Irish Catholic minority. Their surprisingly stable coalition with the British Protestant majority is the central achievement of the U.S.-brokered Good Friday peace accord.
McIntyre won the IRA veterans’ confidence by promising their confessions would remain confidential, beyond the reach of British law and order, as long as they lived. IRA members normally never talk openly about the underground group — partly because the IRA reserves the right to kill such people as traitors.
But posthumous testimony isn’t admissible as evidence.
Young last month ruled that the interviews of one living IRA veteran, convicted car bomber Dolours Price, should be surrendered because she discusses her role in the McConville killing. The judge also ruled he would personally review interviews involving 24 other Irish republicans, and more than 100 transcripts, to determine if others should be sent to Belfast police for the same reason.
To the fury of Moloney and McIntyre, Boston College accepted Young’s judgment. They say university officials should have appealed or risked a contempt order by destroying the whole archive.
“If they weren’t prepared to fight to the bitter end like us, then why did Boston College get involved in this kind of project at all?” Moloney said.
Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn insisted Young’s judgment was the best they could expect, given that some tapes include confessions of involvement in crimes.
“We would never want anyone to think that Boston College was obstructing a murder investigation,” he said.
A Boston appeals court has blocked any handover of IRA material to British authorities pending the resolution of two Moloney-McIntyre lawsuits.
McIntyre said his family home could be bombed, or he could be run over in the street, if his work ends up inspiring criminal prosecutions against those he interviewed or a civil lawsuit against Adams.
“I’m already being labeled a tout, an informer. That’s a death sentence in Irish republican circles,” said McIntyre, a Belfast native who spent 17 years in prison for killing a Protestant militant in a 1976 drive-by shooting. Today he lives in Ireland with his American wife, 10-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son.
“Of course I’m concerned what might happen to me,” said McIntyre, who is barred from traveling to the United States because of his murder conviction. “But I’m much more concerned about the safety of my wife, my children, and the people I interviewed.”
He, Moloney and Boston College officials all say they felt ambushed when the U.S. attorney’s office, acting on behalf of the British government and Northern Ireland police, last year filed subpoenas seeking all audiotapes in which IRA members discuss McConville’s disappearance.
Dunn said the researchers and key university staff a decade ago naively presumed that the risk of any British legal action was low, given that the Good Friday accord emphasized the need to draw a line under a conflict that had left 3,700 dead in the previous three decades.
That did little to mute cries for justice for Northern Ireland’s victims. The police there in 2005 formed a special “cold cases” unit, called the Historical Enquiries Team, that promised to re-examine all unsolved political killings since 1969. The Boston College archive represents a potential gold mine for its work.
Boston College has already handed over the tapes and transcripts of IRA member Brendan Hughes, a one-time Adams confidante who died in 2008. Moloney made Hughes’ posthumous testimony the foundation for his 2010 book “Voices From the Grave.”
Hughes told McIntyre he oversaw McConville’s “arrest” for allegedly being a British Army spy. He said Adams commanded a unit called “The Unknowns” responsible for making McConville and several other West Belfast civilians disappear.
“There was only one man who gave the order for that woman to be executed,” Hughes said. “That man is now the head of Sinn Fein. I did not give the order to execute that woman. He did.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Boston so far has received 13 interviews involving Price, who reportedly drove McConville from Belfast to the Irish border for her execution, but has yet to hand them to the British.
Assistant U.S. Attorney John McNeil said American authorities must provide relevant IRA testimony to British authorities as part of Anglo-American treaty commitments to aid each other’s criminal investigations.
“The UK is investigating serious crimes: murder, kidnapping. The court has already found that it’s a bona fide investigation and that there’s no other source for this material,” McNeil said.
Adams’ spokesman, Richard McAuley, said Adams has nothing to hide.
“As to the specific allegations against Gerry, he’s consistently denied them,” McAuley said. “The truth is nobody knows what’s on the tapes. We only know the innuendo and insinuation.”
McConville’s eldest daughter Helen McKendry, who since 1994 has campaigned for the IRA to admit the truth of her mother’s execution, said she has no doubt Adams is responsible.
“Gerry Adams has come to my home and claimed he’s got nothing to do with my mother’s murder. But he couldn’t look me in the eye and he couldn’t say her name. He’s a liar,” she said.
McKendry was 15 in 1972 when several IRA members came to their Catholic west Belfast home to abduct her mother. The 10 children never saw her again, were told she’d abandoned them and were scattered into different foster homes.
The IRA didn’t admit it killed McConville until 1998. Five years later, a dog walker on a Republic of Ireland beach 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of Belfast spotted McConville’s skeletal remains protruding from a sandy bluff. Forensics officers found she’d been shot once in the back of the head, with the .22-caliber bullet still lodged in an eye socket.
“I really hope people in Boston back us up on this,” McKendry said. “Murder is murder. Release the tapes.”
• Associated Press writer Denise Lavoie in Boston contributed to this report.
On the Net:
Boston legal documents: http://bit.ly/yZwEaT
Northern Ireland’s ‘cold cases’ police team: http://bit.ly/zAQbyA
British-Irish commission for finding victims’ remains: http://www.iclvr.ie/
Boston College Library: http://bit.ly/zT0lSH
By Liam Clarke
Belfast Telegraph
4 January 2012
**Poster’s note: I have a simple question: Why should the truth of the Troubles be covered up? Who gives anyone the right to keep silent when they know such things? The whole premise of this project is faulty as far as I am concerned. First we have the originators going on about how sacrosanct these oral histories are. Now they want them destroyed so the information contained in them will not get out. What and who does this remind you of?
A controversial US project which contains the testimonies of Troubles era terrorists should now be wound up, according to the men who founded it.
The three men involved in the oral history project have said Boston College’s decision to hand over material to the US authorities after requests from the PSNI has betrayed the trust of those involved.
Investigative journalist Ed Moloney is the former director of the project that aimed to document the conflict through the eyes of those involved.
Dr Anthony McIntyre interviewed former IRA members, while Wilson McArthur spoke to former loyalist paramilitaries for the archive under promise of confidentiality until death.
They said: “We are, all three of us, now strongly of the view that the archive must now be closed down and the interviews be either returned or shredded since Boston College is no longer a safe nor fit and proper place for them to be kept.
“We made a pledge to our interviewees to protect them to the utmost of our ability and we will stand by that pledge firmly and unalterably.”
All three are bitterly resentful of Boston College for releasing incriminating tapes, transcripts and DVDs without exhausting all possible legal channels.
The material was requested by the British Government on behalf of the PSNI after a Historical Enquiries Team review of the murder and secret burial of Jean McConville by the IRA in 1972.
Mr Moloney and Mr McIntyre have now won a stay of execution while the American courts consider whether to hand the tapes over to US attorneys, who will give it to the British.
They are arguing that doing so would endanger the researchers’ lives and impact on the peace process.
They also believe it could breach laws which prohibit the extradition of people accused of Troubles era offences from the US.
William ‘Plum’ Smith and Winston Rea, two former loyalist prisoners, have already said that they want their testimonies back.
However, the Belfast Telegraph has learned that Boston College has already handed the entire archive over to the US courts to decide what is relevant to the McConville investigation.
“I was appalled,” Mr Moloney said.
“The college was asked for relevant material and said that the librarian had not read it. So the court got everything.”
He hit out at Boston College for not going far enough to protect the material in his view.
“Implicit in the pledge of confidentiality was that it was non-negotiable,” he said.
“Boston College therefore had a duty to fight to preserve it to the utmost, in effect to challenge any adverse legal decisions all the way up the legal chain, as far as the Supreme Court if necessary.
“BC’s failure to appeal in my mind robs the college of any moral right to hold on to the archive.”
Boston College Belfast Project controversy …
Your questions answered.
Q What is Boston College’s ‘Belfast Project’?
A The archive contains the testimonies of around 30 former Northern Ireland terrorists in which they recounted their careers in the belief that it would not be made public until after their deaths.
The project was an initiative of journalist Ed Moloney and Lord Bew, a Queen’s University professor of history.
It was funded by Boston College and is housed in the college’s Thomas Burns Library.
The republican interviews were carried out by Dr Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA prisoner, while Wilson McArthur carried out the loyalist interviews.
Mr Moloney also carried out some video interviews, for instance with the former IRA bomber Dolours Price, which were not formally part of the archive.
Q Why is it in the news at all?
A Boston College has handed over parts of the archive relating to the murder of Jean Mc Conville to US attorneys acting, ultimately, on a warrant issued by the PSNI.
Mrs McConville was a west Belfast mother-of-10 abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1972 on suspicion of being an informer.
The material handed over included the testimony of Brendan ‘the Dark’ Hughes, a local IRA commander now dead, and Dolours Price, an IRA activist at the time.
Both accuse Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, of involvement in the planning of the murder and the decision to secretly bury her, though Mr Adams has consistently denied this, just as he denies ever being in the IRA. He says Mr Hughes was a friend and fellow republican, nothing more.
Q Wasn’t it meant to be confidential?
A Dr Mc Intyre said: “People spoke frankly to me on the strict understanding that nothing they said would be revealed in their lifetimes without their written authorisation. I wouldn’t have been involved without legal assurances.”
Interviewers and interviewees signed an undertaking not to “disclose to third parties the existence of the project without the permission of the sponsor”.
Q How did the news leak out?
A There were rumours about the project when the interviews were being carried out.
After Brendan Hughes, the IRA leader, and David Ervine, a loyalist politician and former UVF bomber, died Mr Moloney wrote a book entitled Voices From The Grave based on their testimonies.
Later, Dolours Price gave an interview in which she revealed that she had made a tape which was in the archive.
Q Who could be affected by this?
A If reports of the contents of the archive are correct, then Gerry Adams and others could face police questioning.
News Letter
4 January 2012
POLICE are confident of putting at least some of those responsible for the murder of Jean McConville before a court, her family said last night.
The potential breakthrough — which comes after police won a US court battle to access secret recordings by senior IRA figures — comes almost four decades since republicans abducted, murdered and secretly buried Mrs McConville.
The recordings of interviews with scores of senior loyalist and republican terrorists are believed to be explosive and were only to be released from a vault in Boston College when each terrorist died.
However, a PSNI court case to access all material in the archive which may help put Mrs McConville’s killers behind bars could see those candid private testimonies released.
The journalist Ed Moloney and former IRA man and writer Anthony McIntyre, who conducted the interviews, have now accused Boston College of not doing enough to stop the tapes’ release and lodged their own appeal after the college declined to appeal a court judgment which ordered the tapes be released. They have warned of reprisals and a threat to the “peace process” if the recordings are made public.
But last night Mrs McConville’s son-in-law, Seamus McKendry, disagreed. The McKendrys, who formed the group Families of the Disappeared back in 1995, have been helping police with their investigation.
In 2010, former IRA bomber Dolours Price told The Irish News that she drove Mrs McConville to her death, under orders from Gerry Adams. The Sinn Fein president has always denied any part in the murder.
Mr McKendry told the News Letter: “The police are confident that they can bring a prosecution and we would dearly love to see the prosecution being bigger than Dolours Price, of course.”
Asked if the police had given indication about examining the actions of those beyond Dolours Price, Mr McKendry said: “Obviously they aren’t going to say too much. Privately they have told me stuff but I wouldn’t be at liberty to divulge it.”
In 2006 the then Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde said that a successful prosecution “in any case of that age” would be “highly unlikely”.
Mr McKendry, who has worked as a freelance journalist, said that the case to release the tapes went against his instincts to protect sources but added: “From that point of view I was a bit concerned but having said that we’re not talking here about someone stealing a handbag; we’re talking about murder and they still should face the full wrath of the law.”
Mr McKendry said that his wife, who was just 15 when her mother was abducted, has been “really upset” in recent days as debate over the tapes raged.
Two years ago the man in charge of the vault which holds the recordings, Professor Thomas Hachey, told the News Letter that it contained scores of interviews with loyalist and republican paramilitaries which had been conducted over a nine-year period.
Professor Hachey, who is director of the Jesuit-founded college’s Irish Institute, said that no one other than those involved in the interviews knew the identities of paramilitaries who spoke to the college.
“The people that we went out and interviewed were not gophers – people who were simply sent out on missions and had no idea who was sending them or why – nor was it the upper echelon, which is to say whomever the leadership may have been on the loyalist side or nationalist side.
“That sort of thing has been done by the BBC, NBC…this was really about the operational level.”
No one other than those involved in the interviews knows who spoke to the academics, with the exception of three people — Ms Price and both senior IRA member Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes and UVF commander David Ervine, whose accounts were published in 2010 in Mr Moloney’s book Voices From The Grave.
BBC
3 Jan 2012
New government information has raised more questions over whether the 1981 hunger strikes could have been stopped sooner.
Veteran republicans have continued to disagree over the release of classified government documents concerning the 1981 hunger strikes.
The papers suggest the government made an offer that could have saved the fifth man to die, Joe McDonnell.
Richard O’Rawe, the IRA’s second-in-command in the Maze Prison at the time, has backed the scenario played out in the government documents.
But Sinn Fein’s then publicity director Danny Morrison rejected that account.
The government papers were released under the 30 years rule and also appear to show that Margaret Thatcher was involved in negotiations with the IRA during the hunger strikes.
Speaking on Radio Ulster, Mr O’Rawe repeated allegations he originally made in his book Blanketmen in 2005, that the IRA leadership allowed men to die despite there being a considerable offer on the table from the British government.
Mr Morrison has consistently rejected this and said that at the time it was “unclear what they were proposing to do”.
The debate centres on and around 5 July 1981 and the supposed offer that was made. Mr O’Rawe said it was virtually identical to that which the republican prisoners ultimately accepted much later after 10 men had died.
Mr O’Rawe said it was “absolute rubbish” that the prisoners were made aware of everything that was happening.
“The prisoners were consulted about nothing, absolutely nothing,” he said.
Government papers Government papers reveal Margaret Thatcher made an offer to republican prisoners in 1981
“I was number two in the prison, effectively, as PRO (press officer) of the prisoners. Bik McFarlane was number one.
Adams rejection
“I knew nothing about any of this. I knew there was telephone conversations but the first I have seen them in context was the release of government papers last week like everyone else.
Government papers reveal Margaret Thatcher made an offer to republican prisoners in 1981
“The prisoners knew nothing, the prisoners were told absolutely nothing and to suggest otherwise is nonsense.”
Mr Morrison was granted access to the Maze Prison in 1981 and Mr O’Rawe said he was involved in passing on the offer to the prisoners.
“The fact of the matter is that the prison leadership, Bik McFarlane and myself, accepted the offer,” he said.
“The offer which Danny Morrison brought in, which Brendan Duddy said he brought in, which I say he brought in on 5 July when he visited the prison hospital.
“Bik McFarlane came back to our wing and he and I accepted the offer. That’s the bottom line.
“After that, a communication came in from Gerry Adams rejecting our acceptance of the offer. If the prisoners were sovereign then the hunger strike should have ended.”
Mr Morrison, who helped lead the negotiations, said Mrs Thatcher was not prepared to do a deal with the IRA during the hunger strikes.
He said she had ultimately listened to her advisers who were opposed to any compromise.
“Humphrey Atkins, who was secretary of state, and Michael Ellison, who was the prisons minister, their advice to her throughout was ‘do nothing, don’t move’,” he said.
“If we go back to a document that was released, on the 18 July this is what the document says :’She (Mrs Thatcher) was more concerned about doing the right thing by Northern Ireland than to try and satisfy international critics’.
Roy Greenslade
Guardian
2 Jan 2012
Today’s Belfast Telegraph splash headline, “Fury as IRA tapes turned over” (not online) follows a piece in yesterday’s Irish edition of the Sunday Times, “Tale of the tapes” (behind a paywall).
Yet the story deserves wide readership by journalists and journalism academics because of its ethical ramifications.
As so often with matters related to the Northern Ireland conflict it is complicated to unravel, not least because of the underlying politics.
Let’s begin at the end, so to speak. A federal judge in the United States has ordered Boston College to surrender taped interviews with an ex-IRA member, Dolours Price.
She was one of 26 former IRA volunteers to give a series of interviews – between 2001 and 2006 – as part of a research study, called the Belfast Project.
The interviewees, who signed confidentiality agreements, were given an assurance that the tapes would not be released until after their deaths.
What they were not told is that there was no guarantee that the interviews could be protected from court orders. Boston College would have to comply with the law.
It is thought that many of the interviewees who, naturally, have many secrets to tell, were unusually candid about their activities on behalf of the republican movement.
Even so, as one would expect, there was no assurance that they were telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They did not speak under oath.
It means that some may have made allegations about named, living people being guilty of criminal offences. None of these accusations were able to be independently verified by the researchers.
The interviewees could, in effect, say what they liked about anyone. That is not to devalue oral histories as such, but given the nature of a conflict in which so many people were killed in secret operations in what everyone regards as having been a “dirty war”, the project was bound to be of questionable merit.
The 26 probably had different reasons for giving interviews. Some may simply have wanted to get things off their chests. Some may have regarded it as a valuable historical academic exercise. Some, motivated by malice, may have wished to settle accounts with the former IRA leadership they now despise.
Price, for example, was a noted critic of the peace process and, particularly, of one of its main architects, the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.
Similarly, so were two of the project’s key participants and interviewers – the journalist Ed Moloney and a former republican prisoner, Anthony McIntyre.
That very salient fact has not gone unnoticed. See, for instance, Danny Morrison’s pieces – ‘Baloney College Archive’ and ‘Why the Boston College Irish oral history project should be discontinued’ – in which he points to the political bias of Moloney and McIntyre.
He finds it blackly ironic that the two men, having created the project, are now screaming about the US court’s decision.
They have been critical of Boston College for its willingness to comply with the court order. However, some US academics have been just as critical of the researchers, arguing that it was, at best, naive and, at worst, manipulative, to give interviewees a guarantee of confidentiality.
One quoted by the Sunday Times – John Neuenschwander, professor of history at Carthage College in Wisconsin – said: “You need to alert the people who you seal the interview for that you may not be able to prevent it from being picked up by a subpoena and going to court.”
The drama began when Price told a Belfast newspaper that she had been involved in the “disappearance” of several IRA victims, including Jean McConville, and – in so doing – incriminated Adams.
The Northern Ireland police (PSNI) decided to act, and the British government agreed. It began a legal action in the States to order Boston College to surrender the Price interview tapes and any others relevant to the murder of McConville.
Leaving aside the obvious dispute about the motives of Moloney and McIntyre in obtaining the interviews and whether they acted properly, the case raises a hugely important question about the validity of academics giving people guarantees of confidentiality in order to persuade them to speak.
It touches directly on the problem all journalists face in protecting confidential sources and, in my opinion, we journalists ought to condemn both the British government for pursuing the action and the US judge for acceding to its request.
**Posted by Rusty Nail on slugger o’toole here:
While Danny Morrison is now claiming that the British had not formulated a position nor proposed a deal at the time of his specially arranged July 5 visit to the hunger strikers and Bik McFarlane, both Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, in the Irish News in 2009, wrote of Morrison going into the prison to deliver the British offer to the prisoners.
“This was the prisoners’ mindset on 5 July, 1981, after four of their comrades had already died and when Danny Morrison visited the IRA and INLA Hunger Strikers to tell them that contact had been re-established and that the British were making an offer.” – Gerry Adams
“According to our critics, the hunger strikers, on whose behalf we were acting, should have accepted an ‘offer’ which came to the prisoners and us, via a phone-call from a British official in London, through the intermediary (since identified as Brendan Duddy – an honourable man), to myself, to a phone-call to Gerry Adams, and in a verbal message to Danny Morrison to the prisoners.” – Martin McGuinness
Both men place Danny Morrison in the prison on the 5th of July specifically to deliver the British offer. Obviously, a position had been formulated and a deal proposed. In regards to the document detailing the phone conversations between the Mountain Climber/SOON and the British, the paragraph being referred to, paragraph 22 (page 19), describes McGuinness arriving around 2:30 pm to see Brendan Duddy. He asked what the current British position was. The British explained that it was ‘important before drafting any documents for consideration by Ministers’ that the British should ‘possess the Provisionals view’. Their view, of course, could not be known until after Morrison returned from delivering the offer to the prisoners and was debriefed. McGuinness told Duddy their views would be relayed to the British ‘after discussion in light of Morrison’s visit’.
It wasn’t until 1am on the 6th of July that the Provisionals’ view was relayed. No ‘final position’ could be obtained from the British because the Adams committee had attached the condition that they see the draft proposal before it went public. In the event, Adams was on the phone with the British making changes to the language of the draft when Joe McDonnell died. (see John Blelloch, and Gerry Adams, Before the Dawn, page 299) A final position would never be forthcoming.
News Letter
January 2012
President of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams.
BRITAIN’S most senior army officer thought that Gerry Adams should be arrested in 1981, a confidential document just released has revealed.
The revelation will raise fresh questions about the role which the British Government played in keeping the Adams-McGuinness IRA leadership in place.
The military man’s clear belief that there were charges which could be brought against Mr Adams suggests that up to that point the Sinn Fein leader had in some way been more useful to the government outside, rather than inside, prison.
In a meeting during the final weeks of the hunger strike, the chief of the general staff told the then secretary of state, Jim Prior, that he believed the time had come to arrest Mr Adams.
General (later Field Marshall) Sir Edwin Bramall’s request was recorded in a minute taken by Mr Prior’s private secretary on September 22, 1981.
The meeting, which was also attended by Lord Gowrie, the prisons minister, discussed several security issues and the suggestion that Mr Adams should be arrested comes at the end of the three pages of minutes.
It records: “He believed the time had probably come to arrest Gerry Adams. He imagined it would be possible to prosecute him successfully for some offence and thought that more was now likely to be lost by allowing him to continue his activities than by forcing his colleagues to choose a successor, who would probably be less able.”
There is no record of how the secretary of state or others in the room reacted to the suggestion.
It is not entirely clear whether the Sinn Fein chief, who had been interned in the early 1970s, was arrested after the meeting but he was not imprisoned and went on to become MP for West Belfast before entering the Dail this year as a Louth TD.
Earlier in the meeting, the general said that he believed cooperation between the army, police and NIO was “very good”. He said that the army had the right number of troops in Northern Ireland “to hold things steady for the foreseeable future”.
The general is also quoted as having said that although he believed ending the hunger strike would be “beneficial”, “the security forces were quite able to contain any disorders arising from the dispute but the hunger strike had undermined the efforts of the RUC to work in harmony with the minority community, and he believed this was in the long-run very unfortunate”.
It added: “He wondered if the government could now, as an administrative act, make the changes to the prison regime which it had agreed in principle to make but pending the end of the hunger strike had not yet implemented.” However, the secretary of state countered that a precipitative move by the government to meet some of the prisoners’ demands could “lead to another matter on which to take issue with the government”.
He wanted any government move to be “from a position of strength”. He told the general that “there were signs that [hunger striker Liam McCloskey] would be taken off before he died; if he was the government might be in a stronger position than it was at the moment”.
By Anne Madden
Belfast Telegraph
Friday, 30 December 2011
Jean McConville (left) with three of her children before she was abducted and killed by the IRA in 1972. Her body was found in 2003. (Photograph: PA)
An American university has until today to hand over recorded interviews with a former IRA member to assist the investigation into the murder of Belfast mother-of-10 Jean McConville.
Boston College was ordered by a federal judge to turn over recordings, transcripts and other items related to Dolours Price to federal prosecutors in Boston.
The material which was collected for the Belfast Project, an oral history project about the Troubles, was subpoenaed on behalf of the British Government.
Judge William Young of the federal court in Boston noted in his ruling earlier this week that a treaty between the USA and the UK requires the two nations to share information relevant to ongoing criminal investigations.
Boston College said it is disappointed by Judge Young’s ruling, arguing it “could have a chilling effect because people could be reluctant to participate in oral history projects moving forward”.
The Belfast Project’s organisers, which included author Ed Moloney and former IRA prisoner Anthony McIntyre, had promised their subjects they would keep identities and material confidential until the person had died.
The college is not appealing the decision. Prosecutors had asserted in court filings that the material sought is relevant to a probe into Mrs McConville’s death. She disappeared in 1972. Her body was found in 2003.
The IRA said it killed McConville because she was suspected of being an informer.
Price and another former IRA member, Brendan Hughes, have said that her abduction, execution and burial was ordered by Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.
According to court documents, Price admitted in news reports in Northern Ireland that she had driven the abducted McConville to the place of her murder.
Mr Adams, who was elected TD for Louth earlier this year, has repeatedly denied the allegations that he ordered the killing.
A Sinn Fein spokesman said it had no comment to make.
“It doesn’t concern Sinn Fein at all,” he said. “It is a matter between Anthony McIntyre, Ed Moloney, the PSNI and Boston College.”
However, DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson said he welcomed the finding of the court, adding it is up to police alone to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to bring a public prosecution.
Story so far
Police believe the material held by Boston College will assist an ongoing investigation into the 1972 abduction and murder of Belfast woman Jean McConville. The US federal judge who made the decision, William G Young, ruled he will make further orders for the release of information from the oral history project of the Troubles.
Claims that the Sinn Fein president could have stopped the 1981 fast in July are vindicated by newly-released papers, says Carrie Twomey
Carrie Twomey
Belfast Telegraph
20 December 2011
The controversial claim that Gerry Adams and his committee controlling the 1981 hunger strike from outside the Maze prison refused a substantial offer from then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – an offer accepted by the prisoners – has been proven true.
The allegation is substantiated in the notes of Derry businessman Brendan Duddy. Duddy, the ‘Mountain Climber’, was the messenger between the British Government and IRA during the hunger strike.
Duddy previously confirmed he delivered an offer from Thatcher’s Government to Martin McGuinness. Along with Danny Morrison and Jim Gibney, McGuinness was a member of Adams’s clandestine hunger strike committee.
The content of that offer was the same as was revealed in FOI documents obtained by the Belfast Telegraph’s political editor, Liam Clarke. These documents show most of the five demands prisoners were hunger striking for would be met.
In his books Blanketmen and Afterlives, Richard O’Rawe, PRO of the IRA prisoners during the hunger strikes, wrote of the acceptance of that offer by himself and Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane (in charge of the hunger strike inside the prison).
This claim was vehemently denied by Morrison and Sinn Fein. O’Rawe faced vilification, threats and intimidation for revealing this information, as it meant six of the 10 hunger strikers need not have died had the offer been accepted.
Duddy’s notes of talks between Thatcher and Adams over the weekend of July 4-5, 1981 conclusively prove O’Rawe’s account was true.
After a conciliatory statement from the prisoners, Thatcher sent Duddy details of an offer with the potential to end the hunger strike.
Danny Morrison went into the prison to convey this offer to McFarlane, who discussed it with O’Rawe. McFarlane then sent word out that they would accept it.
Written in code on the morning of July 6, Duddy’s notes reflect this significant movement.
Adams and his committee were the ‘Shop Stewards’, the prisoners were the ‘Union Membership’ and the Government was ‘Management’.
The message Adams wanted conveyed to Thatcher was: “The S.S. fully accept the posal [sic] – as stated by the Union MemBship [sic]“. In other words, the prisoners had endorsed the proposal.
The rest of the message added conditions to the acceptance that gave the Adams committee, not the prisoners, a veto over the deal.
Crucially, the message added, if the British published the offer without Adams having prior sight, and agreeing to it, he would publicly ‘disapprove’ it.
In spite of the prisoners’ acceptance of the offer negotiations continued over the next two days, with Joe McDonnell close death.
The demands the prisoners were seeking via hunger strike had effectively been granted. Before implementing the agreed proposal, the British were waiting for word from Adams that the prisoners would end their hunger strike. Once that word was given, the proposal would be read to the prisoners by the NIO and released to the Press.
It was not to be. On July 7, the Adams’ committee sought to alter the ‘tone’ of the agreement, not the content. The substance had already been met. Adams and his team were concerned with presentation.
Negotiations continued throughout the night. At 4.50am on July 8, while Adams was in mid-discussion with the British, Joe McDonnell became the fifth hunger striker to die. Five more were to die before the hunger strike’s end in October 1981.
All the proposals made by Margaret Thatcher in early July were implemented immediately after the hunger strike ended.
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