'One man's collusion, another man's anti-terrorism activity'
'Tradition of British cover-ups protects squeaky clean image'
Evidence 'final proof' for nationalists
British army and NIO answer collusion questions
DOCUMENTS confirming that the British government was aware of large-scale collusion between security forces and loyalists point to a “terrible cover-up”, an expert observer of the Troubles has said.
During the worst years of violence Fr Raymond Murray worked with Mgr Denis Faul and Fr Brian Brady to gather evidence of security-force wrongdoing and IRA activities.
Today he responds to the official files revealed in The Irish News last week.
The documents from 1973 show that British Military Intelligence believed between five and 15 per cent of UDR members were linked to loyalists, while the regiment was the “best single source of weapons” for loyalists.
A further document records how in 1975 Margaret Thatcher was told that “elements in the police” were “close to the UVF”, and that the UDR was “heavily infiltrated” by loyalists.
Fr Murray said the documents were a major development coming after years in which evidence of collusion emerged in a piecemeal fashion.
“As I read these documents, I was quite shocked. Why didn’t [the British government] do something about these things?
“Nobody ever said ‘stop’. It all had to be a terrible cover-up.”
Also in today’s Irish News, the British army and the NIO are questioned on the documents, while Ulster Unionist Lord Maginnis dismisses their contents.
"ONE MAN'S COLLUSION, ANOTHER MAN'S ANTI-TERRORISM ACTIVITY"
DOCUMENTS showing the British government was aware of large scale collusion between security forces and loyalists from as early as 1973 were written by officials who “did not know what they were talking about”, a leading Ulster Unionist has claimed.
Ken Maginnis, now Lord Maginnis of Drumglass, a founder member of the UDR and former company major in the regiment,
dismissed the documents, insisting military intelligence officers were “fishing in the dark” and that leading British politicians of the time were out of touch.
His claims have led a nationalist counterpart to claim unionists were ‘burying their heads in the sand’.
The dispute centres on three sets of official files revealed in The Irish News:
- a report from 1973, stamped ‘secret’ and entitled ‘Subversion in the UDR’, saw military intelligence officers estimate that five to 15 per cent of UDR members were linked to loyalists, and that the regiment was the “best single source of weapons” for loyalists
- separate documents showed how nationalist MPs who asked questions at the time were not told of the evidence of collusion
- finally, a memo from 1975 showed Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his Northern
Ireland Secretary of State Merlyn Rees brief Margaret Thatcher on how “elements of the police” were linked to the UVF, and describing the UDR as “heavily infiltrated by extremist Protestants”.
Mr Maginnis dismissed the documents.
“The guys who came over here and who were responsible for intelligence, and I worked with some of them in the early 1970s, if they had been good, the IRA would never have got off the ground,” he said.
“These are guys who fished in the dark, so I would place remarkably little dependability on their assessment, because they simply did not know what they were talking about.
“As far as the UDR was concerned, by and large, the UDR were decent people who paid a very high price for their desire to maintain law and order.”
The UDR had 197 members and 60 former members killed by republicans during the troubles, while many others were injured.
Mr Maginnis answered the concerns over collusion among the regiment, saying: “It’s not as simple as ‘was there collusion?’. One of the problems is that one man’s collusion is another man’s anti-terrorist activity.
“And if you take a place like Northern Ireland in the early seventies and a great number of murders going on, it was very difficult to keep a tab on who was doing what, when a conversation was, or was not, conspiracy.”
He insisted there was “no wholesale surrender of weapons to loyalists” and said “the real killing machine was the provisional IRA”.
Lord Maginnis, left, said of the Downing Street link in the documents: “How many times was Harold Wilson in Northern Ireland? He was the guy who talked about the people of Northern Ireland as spongers. I didn’t value his judgment greatly.
“Merlyn was a well intentioned fellow but at the same time he was not somebody who had any knowledge of counter-terrorism.”
He added: “What I would say to nationalists is that if they are going to give credibility to these documents, then they must give credibility to those who arranged who would be interned at that time. They must either think both were not credible or both were credible.”
At the beginning of the ‘Subversion in the UDR’ document its authors record that their report was based on contacts with UDR headquarters, army intelligence, personnel files, weapons loss reports, intelligence reports, and visits to UDR battalions.
Sinn Fein has said the revelations confirmed longheld republican beliefs on the scale of collusion.
Alban Maginness of the SDLP, above left, said: “I think I, like many people in the nationalist community, long suspected a degree of collusion between the UDR and loyalists paramilitaries.
“But I think when one is confronted with the cold analytical facts of military documentation more or less confirming that this was in fact true, and was on an organised basis over a prolonged period, I think in those circumstances I do think you do become quite shocked.
“I think the unionist reaction is one of denial. I think that it’s very unhelpful for them simply to bury their head in the sand.
“I think a much healthier approach would be for them to face up to the historic facts, analyse them carefully and try to explain how this all happened. Because it did happen.”
"TRADITION OF BRITISH COVER-UPS PROTECTS SQUEAKY CLEAN IMAGE"
A CLERGYMAN who pioneered research into security force activities during the troubles has said the collusion documents revealed in The Irish News point to a “terrible cover-up”.
Fr Raymond Murray worked with Monsignor Denis Faul and Fr Brian Brady to catalogue allegations of wrongdoing in the police and army, plus IRA activities, during the worst years of the troubles.
He pointed to what he said was a longstanding tradition of the British government suppressing evidence of security force wrongdoing.
“How much have they given to us? Stalker/Sampson – not revealed. We’ve had John Stevens and a mention about discovering 10,000 documents, but have we not got a right to see these things?
“The whole business has been to close them up.
“In England people were unjustly imprisoned. What did we get there? They were covering it all up and it was only by an accident that Gareth Pierce found a document.”
Turning his attention to the documents that have now emerged on collusion, he said: “What I am saying is that it is almost by accident that this has come out and it is so unfair.
“What have we been depending on over the years? We have been depending on incidental information coming out in the courts, we have been depending on investigative journalists coming on different things almost by accident.
“But there is no principle of law and morality coming from the government themselves to reveal these things.
“As I read these documents, I was quite shocked. Why didn’t they [government] do something about these things?”
He responded to claims that such documents are the stuff of history, saying: “This is part of the programme coming from Britain, that they are squeaky clean.
“You had it from Blair himself, ‘to draw a line through history’. You had it from Hugh Orde and some of his associates, introducing this new word of ‘closure’, whereas the most important word is not closure but disclosure.
“The point is that there has been an injustice and people in charge of the law have violated the law.”
With nationalist and unionist politicians clashing over the documents, he added: “The truth will never do any harm. There is a healing in the truth. It is the more important thing. Let the punishments go by. Enough justice is contained in the truth.
“No matter how hard it might seem, that is more healing than people that continue to live on the legends and the myths. It’s more important that the plain truth be told.
“I think these were valuable documents, but the tragedy was they [government] knew the situation and they let it continue and it was their policy to let it continue.
“Nobody ever said stop, and that involved not only those on top of the army and the police but also politicians and civil service. It all had to be a terrible cover-up.”
EVIDENCE 'FINAL PROOF' FOR NATIONALISTS
THE emergence of the first documented evidence of large scale collusion and government knowledge of it, represented “final proof” for nationalists of a long-standing grievance, according to one media observer.
As the story unfolded it sparked a lengthy debate on the north’s leading internet platform for political discussion. Mick Fealty, editor of the Slugger O’Toole site said the publication of the documents saw contributors post more than 250 comments within two days.
The Slugger debate, he said, seemed particularly important to nationalists.
He noted how some sought to use the new information as a “silver bullet” – using it to support a range of nationalist theories over the troubles – but he pointed to one contribution that summed-up the wider nationalist reaction.
“It went along the lines of saying, some nationalists thought they were going insane, because it was never conclusively confirmed that there had been this kind of dual membership going on between the UDR and loyalist paramilitaries,” he said.
“But finally now they had got official confirmation of what they had known, but which was being officially denied.
“There is a sense that for this longterm grievance, finally they have proof, not only that the British government now know about it, but that it knew about it back then. And we are talking about the times of the Miami Showband and so on.”
The Irish News had exclusive access to the documents and carried a series of detailed reports across two days of special coverage.
The publication of the documents sparked a dispute over their contents, with Sinn Fein, the SDLP, the DUP and Ulster Unionist Party clashing over the issue.
Victims’ groups representing those bereaved by loyalists and security forces said that after years of campaigning on individual cases they were shocked at the “revelations”, adding that the arming of loyalists “has now been acknowledged in official documents”.
Among the groups to speak out were the Pat Finucane Centre and Justice for the Forgotten, who discovered the documents buried among public records office files, and who have since passed them to the police Historic Enquiries Team.
After the first day of Irish News coverage the story was taken up by the Press Association (PA) news agency.
Its stories are fed to media outlets throughout Ireland and Britain.
The PA story was carried by The Belfast Telegraph, UTV online, The Examiner, The Daily Mail and The Daily Express. The Guardian, The Irish Times, The News Letter and The Sunday Business Post all wrote their own follow-up stories.
RTE reported on the emergence of the documents in their in-depth news programme, This Week.
BBC Northern Ireland did not carry any news coverage on the emergence of the documents. A BBC spokesman said, however, that The Irish News reports were mentioned in Radio Ulster’s early morning newspaper review.
BRITISH ARMY AND NIO ANSWER COLLUSION QUESTIONS
THE Irish News put the following questions to the British army and the Northern Ireland Office
1. The Subversion in the UDR document written in 1973 and reproduced in The Irish News shows that military intelligence estimated five to 15 per cent of UDR soldiers were linked to loyalists, it said the ‘best single source of weapons, and only significant source of modern weapons, for Protestant extremist groups, has been the UDR’, and believed weeding out potential subversives ‘could well result in a very small regiment indeed’.
- Why was none of this not made public at the time?
2. An annex to the document lists how a weapon stolen by loyalists with the collusion of UDR soldiers was subsequently recovered by the security forces and linked by them to a murder, 11 attempted murders and a kidnapping.
- Why was this not made public at the time?
3. A memo from a civil servant recording a meeting in September 1975 between the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, and then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees, was reproduced in The Irish News. It reads: “The Secretary of State said that he was more worried by the current sectarian murders than by the bombings in Belfast. Unfortunately there were certain elements in the police who were very close to the UVF, and who were prepared to hand over information, for example, to Mr Paisley. The army’s judgment was that the UDR were heavily infiltrated by extremist Protestants, and that in a crisis situation they could not be relied upon to be loyal.”
- Why was this not made public at the time?
- Why in the face of such intelligence did government routinely reject allegations of collusion of this type and deny its existence?
- Why were politicians who asked parliamentary questions on these matters not told the whole truth?
THE British army replied:
“The document to which you allude appears to have been classified and, as such, would not have been for public disclosure.”
AN NIO spokesperson replied:
“These questions can only be answered by those in government at the time. The documents referred to are not NIO documents.”
THE Irish News then put two further questions to the NIO
1. Was the Northern Ireland Office today, or the present secretary of state, surprised or shocked by the contents of the documents published in The Irish News?
2. Did the Northern Ireland Office or the present secretary of state have prior knowledge of these documents or similar evidence of collusion between security force members and loyalist paramilitary groups?
IN response to the additional questions, a NIO spokesperson said: “If there is evidence of criminal activity in these documents then that is a matter for the police.”
[Were you or a member of your family affected by incidents outlined in these documents? If you wish to discuss this information you can contact The Irish News on 028 9033 7544]
Part 1/ 02.05.2006
Part 2/ 03.05.2006
Part 4/ 15.05.2006