Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (18 page)

In March 1999 the IRA admitted that it had killed and secretly buried nine people during the course of the Troubles, all in the 1970s, and offered to help locate their graves. The statement came during a moment of crisis in the peace process. The Good Friday Agreement had been successfully negotiated the previous year but a number of obstacles still stood in the way of implementing the power-sharing government that lay at the centre of the deal, most notably the refusal of the IRA to begin decommissioning its weapons. Towards the end of March, the deadline for devolution was extended and crisis talks with British premier Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, were convened in Northern Ireland, during which the IRA’s statement on the disappeared was made public. Some saw the move as an effort to deflect pressure on the weapons issue but on the day it was released the British and Irish governments granted immunity to anyone providing information about the whereabouts of the disappeareds’ remains, a sign that the Provos and the governments were co-ordinating their approach to the issue in the face of growing pressure. Families of the missing had been campaigning for the truth for some time and when President Clinton gave them his support, signalling what the
United States, a partner in the peace process, wished to see happen, the satisfactory resolution of the issue was thus elevated to something of a test of the IRA’s peace-process bona fides.

In that, and a subsequent statement, the IRA said that Jean McConville was killed because she was an informer and that she had admitted so at the time. This was an allegation that her family, especially her daughter Helen, who was fifteen when her mother disappeared, and her husband Seamus McKendry angrily denied. They maintained that she had been killed because she had gone to the aid of a British soldier who had been shot near her flat in Divis by the IRA, that her crime was to show compassion to a fellow human being who happened to be wearing a British uniform. Their narrative depicted the IRA in the worst possible light and created even more sympathy for the family.

Although the IRA had given the impression that it knew where the bodies of the missing had been hidden, this was far from the case. A cross-border commission established to co-ordinate efforts to find the bodies had, by 2003, been able to locate just three of the nine victims. In Jean McConville’s case, the IRA had given a location that was not precise: a beach near Carlingford Lough in County Louth in the Irish Republic, a picturesque spot at the southern foot of the Mourne mountains. Repeated searches of the area had produced nothing. Then, in August 2003, a walker discovered her remains on Shelling Hill beach some distance from the spot identified by the IRA. A storm the previous spring had washed away part of a car park and roadway constructed on top of her unmarked grave and eventually erosion exposed her body.
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An autopsy established that she had been killed by a single gunshot fired into the back of her head, the classic hallmark of an IRA execution.

Confirmation that Jean McConville had been killed and dis appeared by the IRA, together with growing public disquiet about the case, was the spur for an official British inquiry carried out by the new Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O’Loan, at the behest of two of McConville’s children. In July and again in August 2006, O’Loan pronounced her verdict. While her
inquiry centred on whether the police had properly investigated McConville’s disappearance at the time – she concluded that they hadn’t – O’Loan also dealt with the vexed question of the reason for her death. Her conclusion left the matter unresolved, vindicating neither the IRA nor her family. ‘As part of our investigation’, O’Loan pronounced, ‘we have looked very extensively at all the intelligence available at the time. There is no evidence that Mrs McConville gave information to the police, the military or the Security Service. She was not an informant.’ But O’Loan also discounted the family’s explanation, that she had been killed after she had helped a wounded soldier; the only soldier shot around the time she disappeared was wounded after she had been abducted. Some of her children had a memory of her aiding a wounded soldier, she said, but that had been in January 1972, ten months before she was taken away by the IRA. If this had angered the IRA, it had taken an inordinately long time, ten months or so, for them to take their revenge.

Gerry Adams had by this stage become enmeshed in the Jean McConville saga, formally by virtue of the fact that at the time of her disappearance he had been Brigade Commander of the IRA, the figure at whose metaphorical desk the buck stopped. Under pressure to respond to demands that Republicans should come clean about the affair, Adams met McConville’s daughter Helen and her husband, Seamus McKendry, in 2000 and denied all knowledge to them about her disappearance. During one exchange with McKendry, Adams had told the couple that he could not have been involved as he had been interned at the time. According to McKendry, ‘He told Helen and I: “Thank God I was in prison when she disappeared.”’
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In fact Adams was very much at large when Jean McConville was abducted and was not arrested and interned until July 1973, more than six months after her death. None the less, the efforts by Gerry Adams and his colleagues to distance the Sinn Fein leader from the McConville scandal have been largely successful because no other participant in Jean McConville’s abduction and disappearance has come forward publicly to say what actually did happen. Until now.

Brendan Hughes was deeply involved in the affair – he handled McConville’s initial questioning by the IRA and took the first decisions on how to deal with her case. When the IRA was told that Jean McConville had a radio transmitter in her apartment, they searched her flat and discovered it. Hughes said he confiscated the transmitter – given to her by a British Army handler – and she was taken away to be interrogated. Hughes said that she had admitted working for the Army but, because she was a woman, she was set free with a warning not to do it again. Shortly afterwards, the IRA in the area discovered she had resumed working for the military and this time she was taken away and killed. On the vexed questions of who decided to disappear her and why, Hughes confirmed there was a dispute between Adams and his deputy, Ivor Bell, about whether to hide her body or to leave it in a public place, with Adams advocating her disappearance. The reason for hiding her body, he said, was because she was a woman – the same reason Hughes gave for releasing her the first time. Adams prevailed and, Hughes alleged, gave the order for her to be taken away and buried. It is evident that Hughes decided to reveal what he knew about the Jean McConville affair because of his anger at Adams’s own efforts to distance himself from the IRA and the various decisions that caused the loss of human life. When the Jean McConville scandal worsened in the peace-process years, Hughes confirmed, Gerry Adams attempted internally to place the blame for her disappearance on Bell. Hughes’s testimony from the grave brings the Jean McConville case to a new level.