By James Kinchin-White & Ed Moloney

The document below is an extract from an official Ministry of Defence paper describing the various archives used to store ‘secret’ and ‘top secret’ British military papers dealing with the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The relevant pages which describe the various storage facilities in detail are reproduced beneath this article, but here is a short guide to the different repositories:

1. Some twenty million (20,000,000) documents classified up to ‘secret’ are stored at the Ministry of Defence Main Archive at Swadlincote, South Derbyshire. The archive is run by TNT UK Ltd, a courier service which was awarded a 25-year contract in 2003.

2. The Sensitive Archive – some 100,000 documents with a classification above ‘secret’ are stored at the sensitive archive in Portsmouth which is run by an MoD unit called Defence Business Services (DBS).

3. Amey Archive – Amey is the UK arm of a Spanish infrastructure firm and it runs a storage facility in Whitehall, London, containing 28,000 packages and files, consisting mostly of recently closed inactive files.

4. HQNI Lisburn, Northern Ireland – Thiepval Barracks, the headquarters of the British military in the North, holds about 10 million (10,000,000) documents, in paper, microfiche and microfilm form. The documents deal mostly with operational matters.

5. The Chicksands archive – This is the most sensitive of all the MoD archives dealing with the Troubles. Based in Chicksands, Bedfordshire, it stores some 48,000 ‘top secret’ documents, sometimes referred to as the Intelligence Corps Operational Archive and covers the period from the late 1970’s to the early 00’s.

Here is the full document:

Thanks to some fancy footwork in Brussels and Strasbourg by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Brexit was associated in the international mind with its potential, c/o armed guards at customs posts, to revive republican violence in Northern Ireland and even to re-ignite the Troubles.

To judge by this evocative report by News Letter deputy editor Ben Lowry, the politicians and the media may have misread the story. The real threat to peace, according to Lowry’s report of a Loyalist gathering in Portadown – once memorably described as ‘the citadel of Orangeism’,  by the SDLP’s Brid Rodgers – may instead come from militant Unionism.

I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Lowry’s report should be required reading:

The News Letter was asked to witness it, the latest in a series of meetings across Northern Ireland that have been closed to media. I went along to gauge the atmosphere.

The room was overflowing, by my counts about 320 people – 150 or so people in the main seating, 50 down each side, and 70 standing at the back, out into the stairwell.

An Orangeman, Robert Wallace, was chair, and also on stage was the loyalist Jamie Bryson, and the Upper Bann candidates Carla Lockhart (DUP) and Doug Beattie (UUP).

“We are in the final days of the Union if this withdrawal act goes through,” he said. Noting that the Republic of Ireland was staying in the EU, he added: “When it comes to regulations that would affect Northern Ireland on goods, the Dublin government would have a greater say over Northern Ireland than the sovereign government in Westminster. Is there anyone in this room, any unionist in NI who thinks this is acceptable?”

There were shouts of ‘no’ and ‘never’ from the audience,

Mr Bryson blamed the 1998 Belfast Agreement but said he saw why people voted for it. “No unionist or loyalist voted for it as a process. They voted for it as a settlement.”

Instead, he said, the end of the “peace process” was a “referendum to join a united Ireland and every seven years after that.”

It was, Mr Byrson said, the “politics of hostage, Support the Belfast Agreement and the peace process because if not the IRA might kill us”.

He said: “The British government, the Irish government and the EU have caved into the threat of nationalist violence.

“The Irish prime minister went to the EU and said if there was so much as a camera — so much as a camera on the border — that dissident republicans would attack it and plant bombs and shoot it down.

“Can you imagine for just one moment if the British prime minister had gone to the European Union and said well I can’t have a border in the Irish Sea because if I do the UVF is going to bomb Dublin. There would be chaos. Well for 20 years our community … has been conditioned to think that we must continually appease Irish nationalism.”

He said unionists were “expected to be embarrassed about being British citizens lest we offend the permanently offended Irish nationalists. I’m sorry, I have had enough.”

A voice in the crowd shouted ‘hear hear’, as sustained applause came from the body of the hall.

Mr Bryson went on: “The loyalist and working class unionist community — we have been criminalised, dehumanised, mocked, and sneered at, people have made fun if us, they’ve poked at us, they have done this consistently and then they wonder why they have created this monster.”

Carla Lockhart MLA spoke, saying she was known to people in the room and had helped many of them on constituency matters.

“We are utterly opposed to it,” she said of the Boris act. “We voted against and will continue to vote against it if and when we are returned to Westminster.”

Avoiding making a party political point against the UUP, she added: “It is important that everyone no matter who you come out to vote for, you vote. We need to send out a strong message about this deal which will break up the Union.”

Doug Beattie then spoke. He had served his country all his life, as did his parents in forces, and his uncle had been murdered.

“Where we are right now is bad … I have not known NI to be so dislocated from the rest of the UK more than I have seen it now.”

He said that the UUP had “on measure” to back Remain in the EU referendum, because they thought there was a danger to the Union. But the party accepted Brexit as the democratic will of the nation.

The Boris deal would separate NI from GB, he said. Everyone in the room had to reject to that deal, but Jeremy Corbyn would do “everything he can” to cut NI loose.

Mr Beattie too declined an opportunity to criticise the DUP specifically. Neither he, nor anyone in the room during the 90 minute meeting, mentioned that they had agreed a regulatory (but not customs) border in early October, albeit if Stormont had a lock.

“What about South Belfast?” shouted a man as Mr Beattie spoke. He said he would address that later, but the matter did not arise again.

Mr Wallace said threats to Protestants, from 1641, had been resolved by “men on the ground”.

From the floor, a succession of often angry men spoke (90% of the audience was male).

The first said NI had been under a war of attrition from the “pan nationalist front” in every year since his birth in 1949.

Another man said people were looking to be led, like unionists were once led by Lord Carson, but who now would lead them? How would the panel empower people to do what they are talking about?

When Ms Lockhart reiterated that she was there to listen to what people wanted, saying she had delivered for unionism. It all starts on December 12 she said, emphasising that unionists should unite against the deal, whoever they voted for.

Mr Bryson then answered the question more directly saying loyalists have a right to defend themselves in the face of a betrayal.

“We are not being driven into an economic united Ireland … to appease the Provisional IRA …” he said, to loud applause.

Mr Wallace said unionists had won past fights, but then lost the peace due to having no endgame.

A man who said he served in the UDR on a South Armagh “border, which isn’t there any more” railed against unionists who had supported disbandment of the B Specials and Stormont and then backed the Belfast Agreement. Even at Drumcree people were told to go home, “everything will be OK”.

A man from east Belfast said “we all know what the British government is doing to us” but what are we going to do to stop it? “When challenges fail and Boris’s deal is still there, then what?”

He said he was 52 and “fortunate” because he would never see a united Ireland, because it would be “over my dead body” [applause].

A loyalist then said “peaceful protest is finished” and what did the parties on the panel have to say about military resistance if the agreement is pushed through?

Ms Lockhart said she sensed the mood in the room, but she still expected a hung parliament. A man in the crowd shouted, “that is never going to happen Carla”. She said 10 DUP MPs had defeated the deal. “They said it wouldn’t be a hung parliament in 2017,” she said.

“What if it isn’t?” a man shouted? She said she supported law and order, not violence. “What about the Ulster Covenant?” said a voice?

“When politics fails support the people!” shouted another.

“I support the people!” she said, suddenly annoyed, saying she worked daily for the loyalist people.

The independent unionist Paul Berry joined the stage, apologising for being late after a victims’ event. He said unionists had been Tory puppets for a century.

Mr Wallace then asked three questions: whether anyone supported the deal; would accept an Irish identity/unity; whether there were any lengths to which they would not go to resist the destruction of their country? The crowd shouted no each time.

The meeting closed with the national anthem.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

 

Shane Paul O’Doherty, the former Derry IRA activist, has been a controversial figure for republicans ever since the mid-1980’s when he began to publicly disavow and condemn the Provos and his former comrades in Derry for their campaign of violence.

Given the company he sometimes has kept, for instance his friendship with Ruth Dudley Edwards, he has been an easy target for Sinn Fein and their allies. But this lengthy article about Paul O’Connor, the director of the widely respected Pat Finucane Centre (PFC), is something even his bitterest enemies are going to have to take seriously.

Shane Paul O’Doherty

I have emailed Anne Cadwallader of the PFC asking if the allegations he makes against O’Connor are true or false but so far have not received a reply. The PFC cannot remain silent on this one, which you can read here:

Paul O’Connor, Director of the Pat Finucane Centre, IRA Volunteer

The Pat Finucane Centre issued this statement on November 29th: https://www.patfinucanecentre.org/statement-pfc-re-allegations-against-paul-oconnor

The Police Ombudsman’s office in Belfast is currently investigating a complaint from myself that in 2011, PSNI detectives under the command of Drew Harris, the then Assistant Chief Constable in charge of crime, ‘bribed’ – or perhaps ‘tricked’ would be a better word – a member of the McConville family into lodging a complaint which would enable the PSNI to gain access to a Troubles-related oral history archive lodged at Boston College.

The allegation is supported by legal documents and contemporary correspondence which show that Jimmy McConville, one of Jean McConville’s sons, had lodged a complaint with the Police Ombudsman’s office in Belfast in October, 2013 alleging that he had been promised access to the Boston archive by PSNI detectives if he made a complaint which would facilitate police access to the Boston files.

His lawyer, in a letter to the PSNI, wrote that the promise that he would gain access to the Boston tapes was a major reason why he gave the PSNI the statement which made their access to the archive possible.

When Jimmy McConville attempted to enforce the promise, the PSNI rebuffed him, saying that the police were unable legally to supply him with copies of tapes from Boston College dealing with his mother’s abduction.

The Ombudsman’s office later rejected a complaint from this writer based on Jimmy McConville’s case, claiming that I was ‘wholly incorrect’ in making the claim and asserting that Jimmy McConville had never lodged a complaint with the agency.

Later the Ombudsman’s office was forced to perform a U-turn, and to make an apology, when shown documentary evidence showing that Jimmy McConville had indeed lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman.

Even so, only a threat by my lawyers to seek a judicial review in the Belfast courts brought a commitment by the Ombudsman to investigate my complaint against the PSNI and, implicitly, Drew Harris.

Drew Harris is currently the Gardai Commissioner. He was appointed to the job, the first outsider and first Northern policeman to hold the post, in September last year amid some controversy over his past links with the British intelligence agency, MI5.

The above is the fuller meaning of a story that appeared in yesterday’s edition of The Sunday Business Post, which I reproduce below:

This story began in the summer of 2015 when I acquired a number of legal documents and letters detailing complaints lodged with the PSNI and the Police Ombudsman’s office in Belfast by Jimmy McConville, one of the ten children of Jean McConville, a widowed housewife from Divis Flats who was secretly killed and buried – ‘disappeared’ – by the IRA in late 1972.

The PSNI had been trying to persuade members of the McConville family to sign a formal complaint, saying that they had reason to believe that tapes stored in an oral history archive at Boston College contained valuable details about their mother’s murder. Without such a complaint the PSNI investigation would be stillborn.

Jimmy McConville, pictured alongside his mother, Jean McConville

Armed with this complaint, the PSNI would then be able to activate the diplomatic machinery associated with the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) that had been signed by the UK and the USA, and via the US State and Justice Departments, thereby gain access to the Boston College tapes.

However all members of the family bar just one had, according to my sources, declined to put their names to an official complaint. The single holdout was Jimmy McConville. If the PSNI failed to persuade him then they would have to abandon their efforts.

Already widely criticised for failing to properly investigate the Jean McConville disappearance over the previous thirty or more years, the PSNI faced the prospect of even more censure if they missed this opportunity to obtain possibly valuable evidence about one of the Troubles’ most notorious killings.

At this time, Jimmy McConville was incarcerated at Magilligan jail in Co. Derry, where he was serving a short sentence. Like his siblings, Jimmy McConville had spent years in care following his mother’s disappearance but he had also drifted into a life of petty crime.

Two PSNI detectives visited Jimmy McConville at Magilligan. They met in a Nissen hut outside the main prison complex at least two times – although Jimmy McConville told his legal advisers there were three encounters – and each time the exchanges were recorded on tape and video.

Jimmy McConville’s story has been consistent. He agreed to put his name to the PSNI complaint but on condition that he and his siblings would gain access to the tapes. His version of events was that the detectives agreed and so he signed the necessary papers; the PSNI then activated the legal machinery that would lead them to the Burns Library at Boston College where the Troubles archive was stored.

Interior shot of Magilligan jail, now scheduled for demolition

But when Jimmy McConville later attempted to gain access to the tapes he hit a brick wall at PSNI headquarters in east Belfast.

In October 2013, a year or so after the MLAT had been activated, Jimmy’s legal advisers wrote to the Detective Inspector heading the Jean McConville probe to complain and to demand that the PSNI keep its promise to make the tapes available to the family.

What follows is that letter, one of several complaints to the authorities made by Jimmy’s legal advisors about the PSNI’s broken promise. (Note: I have removed one sentence of that letter because it contains the surname of one of the detectives who visited Jimmy in jail. Since the policeman cannot defend himself on this blog, I think it only fair that I excise his name. I have instead typed the sentence minus his surname and identify him only by the letter ‘C’.)

instructs us that your Detective C informed him during the course of his interviews at

It is worth noting that Jimmy McConville had told his lawyer that the PSNI promise that he could access the Boston material ‘was a major reason why he furnished police with the statement seeking access to the Boston College Tapes’.

Detective Inspector Montgomery replied on November 27th and rejected the request:

While D.I. Montgomery cited a 2003 UK law preventing the release of material obtained abroad from being used in criminal proceedings, the rules governing the MLAT also prohibit anything but criminal use of material obtained via the treaty. In other words material obtained by the MLAT cannot be used in civil actions.

If the detectives who visited Jimmy McConville in Magilligan jail did give him a promise to make the Boston tapes available to his family, it was a promise they could never keep.

Armed with this and other material in October 2015, I filed a formal complaint to the office of the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland (PONI), which read:

What followed was two and a half years of bureaucratic obstruction by the Ombudsman’s office and an attempt to dismiss my complaint on procedural grounds. Entirely by chance and because I believed there were no reasons to reveal what I knew about Jimmy McConville’s complaint, I did not tell PONI about the documents in my possession.

The back and forth culminated in the following letter from Seamus McIlroy, the Ombudsman’s legal director, i.e. the organisation’s top lawyer. It was written in April 2018, two-and-a-half years after I had lodged my complaint. The full letter, which dismissed my complaint, is reproduced below but the key section is this:

Here is the entire letter:

Seamus McIlroy PONI letter 30418

So, according to PONI’s top lawyer, my complaint was entirely groundless: there was never a complaint from Jimmy McConville, the PSNI had no record of tape recordings made at Magilligan jail and I was not able to produce any supporting material to back up my complaint:

I had not supplied any supporting material because I did not think it necessary. Jimmy McConville had made a complaint and I was following in his footsteps. I did not for a moment imagine that the Ombudsman’s office would deny that Jimmy had lodged a complaint or that the PSNI would lie about their meetings with Jimmy at Magilligan jail; providing supporting material would, I believed, be unnecessary. Nor, incidentally, had anyone in the PONI office asked me for additional information.

Jimmy McConville’s lawyers had lodged an official complaint with PONI on October 16th, 2013 and the letter to the Ombudsman listed some eleven grievances, of which the complaint that the PSNI had reneged on the promise to give him and his family access to the tapes was listed at number 5 (see below).

But the PONI’s outright denial that Jimmy McConville had ever lodged a complaint demanded a dramatic response. So, my lawyer, Philip Breen contacted PONI to ask for a meeting and in August, I flew to Belfast where we met a senior official at the Ombudsman’s central Belfast office.

There we handed over a number of documents showing beyond any doubt that Jimmy McConville had complained that the PSNI had reneged on a promise to make the Boston tapes available to him and his siblings and that recordings had been made of Jimmy’s conversations with PSNI detectives in Magilligan jail.

The following letter from Philip Breen to PONI spelled all this out in detail (names of PSNI detectives and lawyers have been edited out):

All this happened in August 2018 but it was not until the following June, ten months later, that PONI responded with an offer to launch an inquiry into my complaint – and to offer an apology for the Ombudsman’s mistreatment of myself.

It needs to be noted however that PONI’s response came following a threat from Philip Breen, via a procedure known as a pre-action protocol letter, to seek a judicial review of the whole affair in the Belfast courts which would have made the story – and PONI’s embarrassing failures – public.

Here is the PONI email:

PONI Apology 10 June 2019

The Ombudsman’s office did indeed eventually launch an investigation which we believe may be concluded some time in December. PONI agreed to investigate all my complaints but have refused to include the behaviour of their legal chief, Seamus McIlroy in the brief.

The question of McIlroy’s denial, on the PSNI’s behalf as well as PONI, that there had ever been a complaint lodged by Jimmy McConville will not be examined by the Ombudsman’s office. Attempts by myself and Philip Breen to get an explanation from PONI or to persuade the Ombudsman to include this in their investigation, have so far failed.

We do now know that at some point Jimmy McConville abandoned his effort to force the PSNI to make good the promise he says they gave him in Magilligan jail. Why he gave up the fight I do not know but given the powerful forces ranged against him it is not difficult to understand his decision.

Drew Harris in his PSNI days

Drew Harris, now Garda Commissioner

Meanwhile a number of questions remain unanswered, or even unasked:

1. Why and when did Seamus McIlroy leave PONI?

2. Why did Seamus McIlroy, in his letter to me about a) Jimmy McConville’s complaint and b) the PSNI recordings made at Magilligan jail, lie about these crucial details? If, on the other hand, he was lied to, who was the culprit and what was their motive?

3. Did PSNI detectives effectively bribe – or trick – Jimmy McConville into making a complaint against the Boston archive?

4. If that is what happened, what role did Drew Harris play? Did he know and approve of the agreement with Jimmy McConville allegedly made by his detectives?

5. If Jimmy McConville’s story is correct does that not make the subpoenas which were served when the Boston tapes were handed over, the fruit of a poisoned tree?

6. PONI have said that transcripts of the conversations in Magilligan jail have been partially recovered; transcripts can be doctored so where are the actual tapes? And how many tapes were there – two, according to PONI or three, according to Jimmy McConville’s lawyers?

I see that Long Island Congressman Peter King has today announced his retirement from politics and the House of Representatives’ seat he held for Republicans (the American variety) for the best part of two decades.

Peter King, marches with the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York. Chosen as Grand Marshall in the 1980’s he made the IRA respectable in America and forged an unlikely political career for himself

Unlike most Irish-American aficionados of the Provos, Peter King did not come to the IRA via friends of Gerry Adams but via the family of Bobby Sands and from them to the IRA in south Armagh, where he became a pal to some of the most senior figures in the organisation. He knew the IRA long before he knew Sinn Fein.

Perhaps one day, that story can be told in full. But not yet.

It was only later that he was plugged into Adams & co. All of which made him an unusually interesting character and worth profiling.

Nearly fifteen years ago I wrote the following profile of a politician who was the Provisional IRA’s closest – and arguably most unlikely – American friends for The New York Sun, one of the city’s oldest newspapers. You can read what I wrote here: Rep. King and the IRA_ The End of an Extraordinary Affair copy

You can read it here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/06/what-northern-ireland-legal-case-means-historians/

I was very sad to hear this week of the passing of Fr. Des Wilson, a man who I greatly respected, even in more recent years when it became more difficult for he and I to speak with the honesty and forthrightness which had characterized our relationship in earlier, simpler years.

Notwithstanding that I will always be grateful to Fr. Des for agreeing to baptize our son, Ciaran, even though he knew that neither of his parents believed in the religion which had guided his own life and led him, through devotion to great political principle, into sometimes bitter conflict with his superiors.

Our difficulty was that the mother of Ciaran’s birth-mom, Joan, was planning a lengthy trip from New York to look after Ciaran following his birth and being a traditional Catholic from Co. Mayo would expect her grandson to be inducted into the faith of her fathers.

So what were a couple of atheists to do? Fr. Des was the answer. He was the next best thing to, if not an atheist priest, then at least a slightly agnostic one. And he readily agreed. The brief ceremony was held down in the Markets and after the necessaries, we all retired to Ireton Street for a fine lunch, some intoxicating liquor and good craic. And a happy and contented mother-in-law.

Many thanks, Des. Sleep well.

….of the day he wondered, over a coffee in the Beeb’s canteen, whether I’d be interested in working at Ormeau Ave. I liked Seamus, he was always a decent spud to me and a good journalist. So I let him down gently and made a polite excuse. The truth was that me and the BBC would get along like a fart in a crowded tent. I knew that but it was a tribute to the man’s generosity of spirit that he thought it might be otherwise.