Monthly Archives: February 2022

You can read here, the full statement given to a US Congressional committee by Kenova chief Jon Boutcher earlier this week covering the various investigations, from Freddie Scappaticci onwards, that he is leading. Boutcher did not appear in person but his statement was placed into the committee’s record. His report is expected later this year, although few prosecutions are expected.

It has been largely forgotten and written out of accounts of the Parachute Regiment’s lamentable record during the Troubles, that after Bloody Sunday in Derry, the Paras spilled more blood on the Shankill Road. My good friend Peter Sefton revisits the killing of uninvolved civilian Ritchie McKinnie at the hands of the same regiment that tore the heart out of the Bogside. You can read his piece here.

By James Kinchin-White & Ed Moloney

He was controversial in life, and even more so in death. When veteran Troubles and Middle East correspondent Bob Fisk died, it took only days for other journalists to make public what many in the profession knew for years or had been told about him, which was that he sometimes made it up.

The extracts below from files unearthed at the Kew archive in England demonstrate that it was not only his colleagues in the print media who harbored doubts about him but also the British Army, an irony since controversial British Army press officer Colin Wallace was, by some accounts, one of his favoured contacts.

The story at the centre of this row between the military and Fisk has to do with an alleged newly introduced procedure by which suspects arrested by troops in Northern Ireland would first be handed over to the Royal Military Police for processing before being delivered to the RUC, an arrangement that could open the way for evidence tampering.

The British Army’s anger at Fisk’s coverage of the story (see documents below) derives from his failure to include their input which was that this was an old story about a procedure that had actually been introduced about a year beforehand, i.e. in mid-1972 and not August 1973 as alleged by Fisk.

Fisk’s copy as published makes no mention of the Army’s version of what happened or his conversation about the story with two senior officers in the military press unit.

(Ed Moloney adds: ‘I had no personal experience of Bob Fisk and had met him only once when he agreed to be interviewed for our RTE documentary ‘Voices From The Grave’, although his insistence that we fly him First Class from Beirut to Dublin and back (his fans apparently would otherwise pester him) did not exactly endear him to me. When I queried the cost of all that I was told that this was one way we could win RTE over to a film about which they were already terrified, and so I relented. RTE doted over him, it seems.

‘I hadn’t heard the other side of the Bob Fisk story until after our interview when I was told in detail a another disturbing, not to say alarming tale of journalistic deceit that was told to me by a colleague of Fisk’s who had worked alongside him in the Middle East. That source I absolutely trusted and believed‘)

Thanks to MM for digging it out. Here it is.

As I write, the latest version of the Good Friday Settlement is struggling for breath, half way between death and an existence dependent on one of those respirators that have become all too familiar in these Covid-ridden days.

I am tempted to say that I told you so, and now I have. If this collapse in Belfast takes hold it will be because of a fatal but foreseeable error in the post-Brexit architecture insisted upon by Europe, with the eager support of Dublin and, to a lesser extent, London.

The choice was between two models. One was to regard Northern Ireland as part and parcel of the UK’s non-membership of the EU, in which customs controls would approximate to the political border between North and South. The other was what we ended up with: no customs border on land, but at some mythical, invisible point in the Irish Sea, and the North, a part of an all-island set up.

I needn’t spell out the politics of this to most of my readers. It was a pro-Nationalist solution and everyone could see that, especially the Unionists. But of course it wasn’t sold like that at the time. Instead the Irish government summoned up ghosts from the Troubles and warned that establishing Europe’s Border in Ireland would remind people of partition, provoke republican hardliners and nourish a renaissance of republican violence. Remember Leo Varadkar’s trip to Europe, his briefcase stuffed with scary photographs of the IRA bombing of Newry customs station way back in the 1970’s’.

This is what we could return to, warned the bold Leo, if we re-erect a land border in Ireland. Europe agreed, the Brits went along and we ended up with an arrangement which, because it had been erected at the urging of Irish nationalists, would always be opposed by Unionists.

If that was the real plan, and the name of the game was to stick one into the Unionists, then fine; be honest about it. But in this debate, honesty had been in short supply,

At the core of the Varadkar proposition was a claim that it was the Border that had fueled the Troubles, when all the evidence was that while the Border certainly facilitated conflict, Unionist misbehavior was the real culprit. It is a cliche but true nonetheless: had Unionists reached out, as Captain Terence O’Neill urged them to do, and won the support of their Catholic neighbours way back in the 1960’s, it is very possible the Troubles would never have happened and the Border would hardly have mattered.

In this context the Brexit solution that was chosen has brought Northern Ireland to a different crisis. With the theoretical Border now somewhere in the Irish Sea, the absence of a land border serves to underline Unionists sense of insecurity and has led, inevitably, to yesterday’s resignations at Stormont. Putting Humpty together again will be, to put it mildly, a challenge.

The fault in the analysis and what it says about the South’s political understanding of the Provos – and the North – makes depressing reading. For Leo Varadkar to be correct then one would have to argue that people joined the IRA in Ballymurphy, the Short Strand and Andersonstown not because they had just had their heads kicked in by Paras, but because they had caught a glimpse of a barrier straddling a Border road.

To my mind, that’s a flimsy basis for such a big bet.