Disappeared but not forgotten: the grim secrets the IRA could not bury

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/10/disappeared-ira-troubles-northern-ireland

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The intention had been to bury for ever some of the Provisional IRA's most uncomfortable secrets: the presence of informers close to the heart of the movement; the traitors who hailed from prominent republican families; the decision to murder a widowed, impoverished mother of 10. There would be no bodies, no funerals, no answers to the relatives' questions.

But as the arrest of Gerry Adams demonstrated last week, questions about what happened to "the disappeared", the people who simply vanished during Northern Ireland's Troubles – and about who was responsible – will not go away.

Between 1972 and 1985, 17 people were abducted, sometimes tortured, then killed and buried. They included a former monk, two young men with learning disabilities, a handful of petty criminals and a teacher at a private school in Paris who was "disappeared" by another republican group, the INLA.

In 1999, as part of the peace process, the IRA named nine people it had "disappeared", and apologised for the anguish it had caused to their families. It also said it had tried, but failed, to locate the remains of Robert Nairac, a British army officer killed serving undercover in Northern Ireland in 1977. Most of the nine had been informers in the pay of the British army, the IRA said – a claim bitterly disputed by some families.

The organisation said it was not responsible for any other disappearances. Since then, however, it has admitted to three more, and there are suspicions that it may have been to blame for the disappearance of two further people. Many republicans, including people who were members of the IRA, say they believe the fate of the victims and the suffering of their families to have been a shameful and indefensible part of their movement's history.

But it's not just part of the past. As Northern Ireland struggles with a legacy of decades of conflict, and tries to make sense of what happened – often in a fraught and fitful fashion through re-opened inquests, cold-case police investigations and litigation in the civil courts – the people who were quietly killed and buried have become a highly visible current affair.

The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains (ICLVR), a body established by a treaty between the Irish and British governments, continues to search for the remains of seven of the victims, drawing upon information supplied by the IRA through intermediaries, often priests, and with the assistance of forensic archaeologists from the University of Bradford.

There have been excavations across the border in the mountains of County Wicklow, the beaches of Co Louth and the bogs of Co Meath and Co Monaghan. As a result of an agreement with the IRA, no evidence is gathered at the grave sites.

The remains of one of the disappeared were found in 2010 after a 16-month excavation of an area the size of four football pitches. Another body was found after an area more than twice as big was raised a few inches at a time.

The value of this work was made clear this week by the mother of Brian McKinney, whose remains were found in 1999 after Gardai pumped more than two million gallons of water out of a bog in Monaghan, then slowly peeled back its surface. Alongside his body was that of his friend John McClory, who had vanished on the same day, 21 years earlier.

Margaret McKinney says she still cannot comprehend why anyone would kill her son and then hide his body. "But at least I know where he is now," she told the Guardian. "He's in Milltown Cemetery. And I visit him every day."

During the Anglo-Irish war and the civil war that followed, there were stories about people being shot and buried quietly in the remote bogland of what is now the Republic. The practice was revived in the North in 1972, the bloodiest year of the Troubles.

Joe Lynskey

The first to disappear. A former monk and founder member of the Provisional IRA, Lynskey is said to have been a personal friend of Adams, but was killed in June 1972 after he offended against both IRA rules and Catholic morality.

Lynskey is said to have ordered another IRA man to kill a third member of the organisation, while having an affair with the intended victim's wife. The shooting was bungled and, amid the mayhem of west Belfast at that time, it reignited the violent on-off feud between the Provisional and Official wings of the IRA. The feud claimed the life of an innocent man, Desmond Mackin, shot in a Provisional raid on an Official drinking club.

Lynskey was murdered after being summoned to a meeting outside Belfast. Republicans say he was buried in an attempt to conceal evidence of his conduct, as well as his death, and his name was omitted from the list of the disappeared that the IRA issued in 1999. Eleven years later the organisation admitted the truth in a briefing to the Belfast Telegraph.

Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee

Vanished four months later. Aged 25 and 17, they were members of D Company of the Belfast IRA's 2nd Battalion – the organisation's most active unit in the city, nicknamed "the Dogs" – and were killed after confessing to collaborating with the Military Reaction Force (MRF), a covert British army unit.

The information they gave to the IRA under interrogation enabled it to attack a laundry company and massage parlour that the MRF had established as front operations. It was a major propaganda coup.

According to a recorded interview that senior IRA man Brendan Hughes gave to the Boston College oral history project before his death in 2008, Wright and McKee were buried in secret because they were from staunchly republican families; such was the stigma attached to informing, Hughes explained, that the IRA believed their relatives would be less distressed by their unexplained disappearance than by the discovery that they had become much-hated "touts". It had been done "to protect the family", Hughes insisted. "Looking back on it now … it was totally, totally wrong."

The Irish journalist Ed Moloney, one of the researchers behind the Boston project, advances another theory for the disappearance of informers like Wright and McKee.

"The secret manner of the deaths served another purpose," he has written. "The extent of British intelligence penetration of [Gerry] Adams's IRA units, particularly his own 2nd Batt [Battalion] and D Coy [Company], went to the grave with them."

As with other disappearances, false reports were put about. Wright and McKee had been seen here or there, the stories went, alive and well.

They were probably buried north of Dublin, and their bodies have never been found.

Jean McConville

McConville was dragged from her Belfast home in December 1972, a few months after the death of her husband, as her children looked on. It was this case that led to Gerry Adams's recent arrest.

The police did not open an investigation into McConville's disappearance for 23 years. In 2006, after an inquiry into this failure, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland concluded that there was no evidence that she had been an informer.

Brendan Hughes also spoke about this case, telling the Boston researchers that he had recovered a radio transmitter from McConville's home, questioned her and warned her. "We actually knew what she was doing because we had the transmitter. I took a device out of her house … and warned her."

McConville was taken away and shot a few weeks later, Hughes claimed, after she was found to have a replacement transmitter. Hughes also said that the order for McConville to be shot was given by Gerry Adams, an allegation that Adams denies.

While the bodies of most informers were dumped in public places as a warning to others, Hughes said the IRA decided McConville must vanish.

"I think the reason she [was] disappeared was because she was a woman," he said.

If Hughes's account about the radio was truthful – and McConville's children believe it to be preposterous – many in Northern Ireland would argue that there are serious questions to be asked of the British army, which would have known that the first radio had been confiscated by the IRA and that McConville was in serious danger if she continued to carry out work for them.

While many of those who agreed to inform for the army or police may have had their weaknesses – the "£5 touts" as republicans called them - few could have been as needy or as vulnerable as Jean McConville, an east Belfast Protestant convert to Catholicism, living in the heart of Catholic west Belfast.

Her body was found by chance in 2003, near a beach on the Cooley Peninsula, across the border in Co Louth, after a heavy storm washed away part of an embankment.

Peter Wilson

One of two disappearances the following August. A 21-year-old man with learning disabilities, Wilson spent four days living with an army unit at their base near his home in west Belfast, and was never seen again.

His name was added to the list of the disappeared after a tip-off to the ICLVR in 2009, and his body found at a beach north of the city the following year.

Patrick Duffy

Disappeared, and then "undisappeared" two weeks later. An unemployed father of seven from Derry, he was shot as a suspected informer and buried across the border in Donegal. After members of the clergy protested at his disappearance, a local priest received a telephone call to say that Duffy's body could be found in a coffin that had been left inside a car that was abandoned on the border. The dead man's clothes were found to be caked with mud and lime.

Eamon Molloy

The disappearance of Molloy in July 1975 was so successful that few people noticed that it had happened until the IRA admitted it 24 years later. A quartermaster for the organisation in Belfast, Molloy is said to have confessed to having been an informer for the British for three years, disclosing the location of arms dumps and possibly providing information in 1973 that led to the arrest of 16 leading members, including Adams and Hughes.

Molloy was named by the IRA on the list of the disappeared that it released in March 1999, and a few weeks later his remains were disinterred and placed in a coffin that was left in a graveyard just south of the border.

There is reason to believe that the body was delivered up in this way because it had actually been buried in the front garden of a house, rather than a remote rural location.

Columba McVeigh

Aged 17 when he vanished in November 1975. His parents had bought him clothes for Christmas; they kept them for the next 22 years, unable to believe he was dead. The IRA admitted in 1999 that they had shot him as an informer.

Over the last 15 years, the ICLVR has mounted several searches for his remains at Bragan Bog in Monaghan. His sister, Dympna Kerr, said last year that she could not go to the scene. "I've got an image in my head of Columba standing there crying, looking into a hole."

Robert Nairac

A 29-year-old old captain in the Grenadier Guards, Nairac disappeared in May 1977 after being abducted by the IRA from a pub in South Armagh, where he is said to have been attempting to pass himself off as a republican from Belfast. He was taken across the border into the Republic and shot dead.

A number of men have been prosecuted and imprisoned on both sides of the border for their roles in the kidnap and murder, but Nairac's body has never been found.

Brendan Megraw

Megraw, 22, was abducted after masked men arrived at his home in west Belfast in April 1978, reportedly sedated his wife with a forced injection, and waited for him to return home. His name was on a list of the disappeared published in 1999 by the IRA, who said he had admitted to having been a British "agent provocateur" - which his family deny. His remains have never been found.

John McClory and Brian McKinney

In May 1978, a time when IRA members in west Belfast were guarding their weapons even more zealously than usual, McClory, 17, and Brian McKinney, a 22-year-old with learning disabilities, were abducted and beaten because they had used one of the group's handguns in a robbery at a bar near their home in west Belfast. The pair were released after two days, and returned the money they had taken.

A week later they vanished again. McKinney's mother, Margaret, knew immediately that he had been killed. "I went out walking around the fields, until four or five in the morning, looking for his body. I couldn't look after my other children, I was walking the streets, crying. People would stop and stare at me. I was warned to stop talking, I was warned to stop blaming the IRA."

Twenty one years later the IRA admitted having killed both men, and provided information to the ICLVR that led to their remains being found.

Gerard Evans

Evans, 24, an unemployed man from Crossmaglen in South Armagh, was last seen alive in March 1979, while hitchhiking home from a dance. The IRA has not admitted responsibility for his disappearance. In 2009, a man who identified himself as one of the killers told the Irish Sunday Tribune that Evans had been condemned to death by the IRA because he was a police informer. But while plenty of informers were killed and their bodies dumped in the lanes of South Armagh, they were usually outsiders, brought to the area to be murdered by local men.

"There are dozens of Evanses around Crossmaglen," the killer was reported as saying. "It wasn't in our interests to kill Gerry openly just in case we alienated any of them. It was easier to do it secretly. It was an act of self-preservation." The following year, Evans's body was found in the area identified by the newspaper's source.

Eugene Simons

Aged 26 and married with three children, he vanished on New Year's Day 1981. His body was found by chance three years later in a bog, south of the border near Dundalk. He is believed to have been an IRA member who had betrayed the whereabouts of bomb-making material.

Danny McIlhone

Went missing from west Belfast during the summer of 1981. In 1999 the IRA said he had been killed after admitting to having stolen the organisation's weapons for use in robberies. Some reports suggest that he was shot during a struggle with the man who was guarding him. His remains were found in bogland in Co Wicklow in November 2008.

Charlie Armstrong

Nobody has admitted responsibility for the kidnap and murder of Armstrong in August 1981. Aged 54 and married with five children, he left his home at Crossmaglen one Sunday morning to collect an elderly neighbour and take her to mass, and was not seen by his family again. The priest Father Denis Faul was in no doubt that the Provisional IRA were to blame, saying: "It's a very serious religious, cultural and anti-Irish action to deny these people a burial. Of all the most savage and barbarous acts the Provos have committed over the years, this is the worst."

In 2001, Armstrong's widow received a letter purportedly written by a member of the IRA, saying the group had killed her husband. Gerry Adams later said that the IRA leadership did not authorise the killing. The ICLVR recovered his remains in Co Monaghan in July 2010 after a map was sent anonymously.

Seamus Ruddy

In 1985 Ruddy, a former gun-runner for the INLA, had broken his ties with the organisation and settled in Paris, teaching English at a private college. In May that year, when the INLA was short of weapons, a number of members travelled to France, convinced that Ruddy was still in control of a cache. According to former members of the group he was tortured and shot dead by INLA leader John O'Reilly, who was himself shot dead two years later. French police and teams from the ICLVR have carried out excavations in woodland in Normandy, but without success.

Lisa Dorrian

Seven years after the 1998 Good Friday agreement largely brought the conflict to an end, Dorrian, 25, disappeared from a caravan park on the County Down coast, south of Belfast. There are suspicions that people associated with loyalist paramilitaries are responsible. If so, she will be the only person to have been "disappeared" by loyalists. Police have made arrests and searches have been conducted, but her remains have not been found.