JIM CUSACK
Sunday Independent
04 May 2014
Gerry Adams, Madge McConville and former PIRA chief of staff Joe Cahill
Pat McGeown photographed beside Gerry Adams.
THIS is Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams with two members of the gang that dragged Jean McConville from her screaming children to be brutally beaten, murdered and disappeared.
Madge McConville (no relation to Jean) was the head of the women’s wing of the IRA in the lower Falls Road area at the time the widowed mother of 10 was murdered. She died in May 2009 and was eulogised by Sinn Fein as representing “what republicanism was about and … the embodiment of our history”.
The photograph was taken in January 2000 at a ceremony to mark the re-burial of Belfast IRA man Tom Williams, who was hanged in 1942 for the murder of RUC constable Patrick Murphy. Williams had been buried in the grounds of Crumlin Road Prison in Belfast after his execution. He was disinterred and re-buried in west Belfast, with Adams and Madge McConville as lead mourners.
In the other photo, Adams is alongside Pat McGeown who was also part of the gang that abducted Mrs McConville.
McGeown, who died in October 1996, was a 17-year-old member of the junior wing of the IRA at the time. He subsequently became a Sinn Fein councillor in Belfast.
McGeown and Adams are together with a group of Sinn Fein leaders after the count in the May 1996 elections to the Northern Ireland Peace Forum. Adams and McGeown were close associates and shared the same prison hut in the Long Kesh internment camp outside Belfast in the early Seventies.
Republican sources in west Belfast say it was the 17-year-old McGeown who shot Mrs McConville through the back of the head as she knelt in front of her burial site on Sheeling Beach in Co Louth.
On his death the Sinn Fein newspaper An Phoblacht reported McGeown “was a political prisoner in the infamous Cage 11 along with such notables as Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes”.
Brendan Hughes was the first IRA man to publicly name Gerry Adams as his “officer commanding”, alleging that he was the one who gave the order for Mrs McConville’s murder and disappearance. Adams continues to deny this.
McGeown was one of the republican hunger strikers in the Maze Prison in 1981 and spent 47 days without food before it was called off. His period of starvation led to ill-health and his early death at the age of 44 from a heart attack. After his death, Sinn Fein launched a community endeavour award in his name and Adams described him as “a modest man with a quiet, but total dedication to equality and raising the standard of life for all the people of the city”.
Madge McConville was given the job of stopping young women fraternising with the British soldiers who were initially welcomed by Catholics after they stopped the invasions by loyalists mobs in the area.
The soldiers held discos in a factory they had commandeered as a barracks. Young Catholic women who were identified as attending the discos were abducted and beaten up. Several were also tied to lamp posts, their heads shaven, and covered in black paint and feathers in the same way French women deemed collaborators with the Nazis were tarred and feathered after the Allied invasion.
A decision was made not to kill any of the young Catholic women, many of whom were driven out of the area, because of their local family connections. But according to local sources, Mrs McConville was sentenced to death because she was a Protestant who had married a Catholic, Arthur, who had died in 1971 leaving her alone to bring up their 10 children. She had no family connections in the Falls area.
Mrs McConville was allegedly targeted because she gave a cup of water to a soldier who had been injured outside her maisonette in the Divis complex in the lower Falls. A gang of up to 20 male and female IRA members abducted and murdered her.
The intention of the IRA leadership was to ensure that there was no relationship between the local community and the soldiers or police. The tarring and featherings and finally the murder of Mrs McConville ensured this.
SAOIRSE32 
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5 May 2014 at 4:33 pm
Erin Go Bragh
Thank you for reproducing these kinds of articles. Gerry Adams and his supporters could quite credibly claim that the relatively small circles of the Catholic community/ Republican community meant that anybody involved in the civil rights or Republican movements such as Adams would come into contact with active IRA supporters who committed murders and other acts broadly defined as terrorism.
I think the investigation needs to focus on the role of the IRA Women’s Committee just as much as on Gerry Adams’ alleged role. Jean McConville was at first brutalised by some of these women before she was captured by them and held in houses connected to them before her torture and murder, and those women need to be investigated more intensely.
I note that IRA members such as the Gilroy woman (Evelyn Gilroy I think is the name) have been instrumental in dry snitching on Gerry Adams through the media.
Gilroy claims that Jean McConville never assisted any wounded or fatally wounded British soldier, and says that it was in fact a relative of hers (Gilroy’s relative that is), a woman called Mary or Margaret Kennedy, who helped a British soldier that had been hit by a brick. For what was considered an offence by the IRA, Kennedy simply had graffiti written on her door.
Something doesn’t sound right there. Jean McConville actually had a son in prison because of alleged IRA activities yet she was not given any benefit of any doubt. However, supposedly an IRA woman’s relative helps a British soldier and simply gets some warning painted on her door
Gilroy further claims that she and other IRA members didn’t know that Jean McConville had 10 children. Are we really expected to believe yet another blatant lie out of the mouth of an IRA member in order to justify torture and murder?
So the IRA women knew where Jean McConville lived, they knew where she played bingo because they beat her up when she went there as their first brutal assault on her before they abducted her, they knew her history of being a Catholic convert who had married a Catholic ex-British soldier, and the IRA’s intelligence gathering would have been very simple in Jean McConville’s case. Yet supposedly it wasn’t known she had 10 children.
May those investigating the Jean McConville case start putting as much pressure on those women as they are exerting on Gerry Adams.
10 May 2014 at 12:58 pm
micheailin
Sorry it took me so long to approve this. I missed the notification.
11 May 2014 at 6:13 am
Erin Go Bragh
No worries! Justice for Jean McConville must be done and it must be seen to be done.
The emphasis on Gerry Adams concerns some of us as there are indeed political implications and agendas. Clearly the rise of Sinn Fein as a big political force in the Irish Republic worries some of the biggest names in politics in Ireland the UK.
I note that politicians in the UK have not been as keen to bring to justice others closely connected with brutality and murder on the other sides of the fence.
There is no doubt that extensive damage was done to the emotional and physical development of young Catholic Irish around the Falls Road and other hotspots of The Troubles. I am not surprised that this would be instrumental in such horrors as that committed against Jean McConville. Evelyn Gilroy was one of those young people who was subjected to brutalisation.
However, many of us are sick of the lies about victims such as Jean McConville. Evelyn Gilroy would be best ceasing her lies, express true remorse for what was done in the name of Irish freedom and which would never have been done by those women who took part in the Easter Rising including ordinary women who had none of the privileges of the Countess.
As Eamon De Valera proved, the IRA was on the correct side of history. Gerry Adams is, too, in making possible the Peace Process along with other key players.
The hatred of those who reject what Adams and others have achieved is hypocritical especially when aired out in a media that mostly ignores a long list of atrocities committed by the British and Loyalists.
Gilroy and the other IRA need to follow through on their media utterances or be quiet. Dry snitching to a media keen to discourage support for Sinn Fein in the democratic process is neither honourable nor democratic. Nor are the lies continually spun about Jean McConville.