generalspeaking

Justice Awaits...

"I'm hoping against hope that he doesn't walk out free. Everybody, the dogs in the street, knew he was the top IRA man in Belfast at that time."
"I couldn't get to the end of my life not knowing what happened to my mother. I had to take a stand, to tell the world what happened. But Adams is never going to admit anything. He's never even going to admit he was in the IRA."
"I wish I'd been there and seen them. I'd tell the police what I know."
Helen McKendry, Killyleagh, Northern Ireland

"I do know the names of the people. I wouldn't tell the police. I knew the ones that hadn't got masks on, they were neighbours from the area. My older brother Archie probably recognized more of them. My older sister Agnes probably recognized more of them, as well. But everybody tells you the IRA's gone away. They haven't. They're still our neighbours and we're still afraid of them."
Michael McConville, Belfast, Ireland

Left orphans in 1972 with the death of their 37-year-old widowed mother, her ten children ranging in age from six to 17 years of age were placed by authorities in various foster homes. They were separated, and grew up estranged from one another. Some of them eventually become IRA supporters. They gave credence to the IRA story that Jean McConville, their mother, was an agent of the British Army tasked with informing the Army of the whereabouts of neighbourhood IRA gunmen.

It was an inaccurately slanderous and deliberately deadly description of a woman who was completely innocent. It wasn't until 2003 that someone walking their dog came across the skeletal remains of a woman, skull shattered by bullets, on a bluff above a beach south of Belfast in the Republic of Ireland. The remains were identified as that of Jean McConville whom earlier attempts to find ended in failure.

Helen McKendry along with her husband has spent years insisting that the IRA members behind her mother's disappearance should be charged with her murder. According to former IRA members, Jerry Adams who has since shed notoriety and achieved respectability, commanded the unit responsible for targeting Belfast civilians to have them 'vanish' in the early 1970s, her mother among them.

Audiotapes of a few IRA veterans discussing their paramilitary careers in a Boston College history project were used by police in their investigation of Mr. Adams. The taped interviews were meant to be kept secret but the Northern Ireland police sued in U.S. courts for the tapes making mention of the McConville killing to be released to them. One of the former IRA men died; but his accusation of Mr. Adams in the ordering of the killing and secret burial is at the heart of the investigation.

Which led to the arrest and interrogation of Mr. Adams. At a time when Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland and British Protestants in theory are united under a power-sharing government following 45 years of sectarian bloodshed. Protestant leaders have been accused by Sinn Fein, the major Irish-backed party in Northern Ireland of pressuring police to make Mr. Adams' arrest as a political ploy before elections take place in May.

The Protestant leading Northern Ireland's government, First Minister Peter Robinson, has appealed to the children of Ms. McConville to help with the authorities achieve an overdue act of political accountability, and identify those members of the IRA who had burst into their home in the Divis Flats welfare housing project before Christmas of 1972.
 

Michael McConville, 11 at the time of the event, remembers frightened, screaming children grasping their mother's legs as IRA members dragged her in tears and collapsing in fear, out the door of their flat. Unmasked IRA members, he recalled, calmed the children, referring to them by their first names. One older brother was permitted to accompany their mother outside the flat. In the stairwell a man put a gun to the boy's head, snarling at him to get lost.

Asked in an interview whether she was concerned about retaliation if she named names, she responded: "Are they going to come and shoot me like they did with my mother all those years ago? I don't think so, not any more. As I said before, I spent the first half of my life in terror of those people, but now that fear is gone. It is they who are afraid these days, of the truth and of justice catching up on them."

Meanwhile, the reality of life for many people who lived in fear decades ago is that living among them as their neighbours are the very religion-inspired psychopaths who preyed on them and their families back then, and they can never shed the memory of the atrocities that took place impacting their lives to the present. Within each of them lives dread and anguish that those neighbours have never paid for their crimes.

Labels: Atrocities, Conflict, Crimes, Justice, Northern Ireland, Religion

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, May 03, 2014