‘Lost Boys’ Film Adds Fuel To Kincora Fire And One Question: ‘Why Did The BBC Drop This Film?’

I had the opportunity yesterday to watch the new Kincora film made by Belfast’s own film company Alleycats. Called ‘Lost Boys’ it asks a simple but necessary question: was the disappearance and murder of four Belfast schoolboys in the 1970’s linked to the subsequent Kincora scandal, which broke some few years afterwards, revealing that all the employees at the home for wayward boys had been abusing inmates for years?

It is a well-researched film which delves into the bizarre world of Belfast pedophiles at the start of the Troubles and asks a question which we journalists should have asked at the time: how, or rather why, did the wholesale rape of young boys go undetected, and not just at Kincora, for such a considerable period of time?

This is not an activist film, advocating action here but inaction elsewhere. Alleycats has simply set out the evidence – and such as treasure trove of evidence did they amass – which says that Kincora can not be seen in isolation but as one aspect of a complex interactive pedophile tableau that embraced an unusually high number of paramilitary and hardline political activists.

And so it was that in the aftermath of August 1969, that British intelligence must have come across (maybe stumbled upon is what really happened) Belfast’s pedophile world, a world that was peopled by some well connected Unionist and hardline Loyalist activists . Not a huge number of them but enough to wonder where their Catholic counterparts sought diversion? (Ans: in the sacristies) And enough for the spooks to put resources into penetrating mainstream political and paramilitary Loyalism.

British spooks had another reason to have interest in that world and one specific part of it especially. One of the leading pedophiles was William McGrath, Kincora’s housekeeper, well known in Orange circles and Loyalist politics, a friend of Ian Paisley, an entree to the two worlds, secular and religious, that defined Loyalism. McGrath had set up a paramilitary group called Tara which the UVF had joined en masse after Gusty Spence was jailed for the 1966 Malvern Street murder. In spookdom, he fell under the heading: a person of interest.

Both MI5 and MI6 would have been guilty of incompetence had they not made hay with all of this but surely even their most hard-skinned members must have blanched at their part in the destruction of so many young lives.

Feel under the skin of this movie and that is what you find.

Not everyone associated with this film is worthy of praise. It was supposed to be a BBC co-production but the people in Ormeau Avenue got cold feet and withdrew, denying the film a high profile screening.

But in an act that betrays the truth, the BBC told Alleycats that it could retain the rights to the film and get it screened wherever it could, a process which the production company began in the last two or so weeks. So the film is good enough to watch in the cinema but not in the living room. Really?

Anyway, if you do get the chance to watch ‘Lost Boys’, take it and wonder how spies get to sleep at night…….