The Broken Elbow

You can read about it here.

Chief Constable Jon Boutcher, who heads the investigation into IRA spycatcher Freddie Scappaticci and his dealings with British military intelligence and MI5, recently told MP’s at Westminster that he would expect prosecutions resulting from his probe ‘to be very much the exception’.

This statement, made in writing to the Northern Ireland Grand Committee on June 23rd, will be widely interpreted as meaning that British intelligence officers who oversaw Scappaticci’s spying career and may well have been party to the murders of alleged IRA informers over many years, will escape prosecution.

IRA spycatcher and British double agent, Freddie Scappaticci

The head of the so-called Kenova inquiry, as Boutcher’s probe is officially called, leaned quite heavily in his submission to the Grand Committee on the sentiment of victims’ families, that they were more interested in learning the truth behind their family members’ deaths than bringing those responsible before the courts.

This development, which Mr Boutcher also justified on the grounds that ‘significant legal and practical obstacles (exist) to bringing cases from so many years ago to the criminal courts now’, will be greeted with expressions of relief not just in the British Ministry of Defence and at MI5 headquarters but within the ranks of Sinn Fein and the IRA, who faced embarrassing and possibly damaging courtroom revelations.

Cynics will point out that such considerations did not deter the PSNI from pursuing the Boston College tapes or charging individuals with decades old offences.

Jon Boutcher, former Chief Constable of Bedfordshire and head of the Kenova inquiry

Both Sinn Fein and the IRA are well practised in controlling civilian dissent but details emerging in open court would be beyond their power to influence.

It remains to be seen but the argument used by the Kenova chief to avoid bringing British intelligence officers and others to trial, could also be used to strengthen the case for a general amnesty followed by a full recounting of the Troubles.

The full statement given to the Grand Committee can be accessed and read here, but these are the relevant extracts:

I see The Irish Times has today devoted what must be the equivalent of a whole page (in the days when people read paper newspapers) to an encomium to Bobby Storey, the fixer to Gerry Adams who was buried in Milltown cemetery in West Belfast yesterday after succumbing during an unsuccessful attempt to transplant one or both of his lungs at a hospital in, all of places, England.

In a more objective and considered time, in studies of this period and of the Provisional IRA’s journey to the Good Friday Agreement, Storey would merit a few paragraphs and several footnotes. But a whole page or thereabouts in Ireland’s paper of record? I think not. But such is the journalism of the peace process.

Storey was a character whose pre-Good Friday Agreement IRA career was marked notably by failure. He was arrested during a compromised effort to spring Brian Keenan from Brixton jail and then when he beat that rap, was arrested after an almost suicidal attempt to shoot British soldiers, and spent much of next two decades in the Maze prison.

Big Bobby’s moment came when he was released from the Maze at a point which coincided with the beginnings of the IRA’s final lap to the 1994 and 1997 ceasefires and it was his job to make sure that his boss, Gerry Adams both survived the experience and emerged triumphant.

A big, burly character with a menacing manner, as Malachy O’ Doherty can bear witness, he was largely successful in that task. But he was mostly a Belfast phenomenon, where he was most effective, and he was never, at least at a time when it really mattered to journalists and British spies trying to get a fix on such things, on the Army Council.

It was his principal job to intimidate and terrify Republicans in Belfast who had some interesting and awkward questions to ask about how happily the Adams’ ceasefire strategy sat with the Provos’ founding raison d’etre.

Bobby Storey’s real job was to ensure such people knew they were being watched so that Gerry could rest more easily in his bed. In that sense he was really Adams’ Luka Brasi, albeit with more brains, which would not be difficult (as the clip below demonstrates).

Far be it for me to try to guess who the Provo sources for The Irish Times piece were, but there is an interesting clue in this sentence: “Storey and North Belfast Assembly member Gerry Kelly were two of the masterminds in what was the biggest jailbreak in UK prison history, dubbed by republicans, The Great Escape, after the film.”

Actually no. Larry Marley was the brains behind the great escape and everyone knows that. One book has been written and a very good movie made, showing how it was the Ardoyne IRA man who conceived the plan for what became, with the escape of 38 IRA inmates, nineteen of who made a getaway, the largest escape in British penal history.

But it seems someone is intent on writing Larry Marley out of this spectacular episode And this piece is not the first time this has happened since Storey’s death. Who could be doing that, and why?

Well, here’s a possible clue.

Larry Marley, who did not take part in the escape because he was due to be released not long afterwards, was shot dead by the UVF at his home in Ardoyne in 1987 and this April one of his sons wrote that he had information that three IRA informers set up his father for assassination, presumably with the co-operation of British spooks who handled them.

One of those alleged informers, who also has a ranking position in Sinn Fein, has been outed very publicly a number of times before Marley’s son went public, but the Provo leadership has refused consistently to either take the allegation seriously or do anything about it.

That in turn has fueled suspicions that someone in the Provo hierarchy approves of this man’s double life and maybe gains an advantage from it – such as removing obstacles to, or/and opponents of the official strategy which Bobby Storey did so much to protect.

Writing Larry Marley out of the Maze prison escape by elevating Storey (and Gerry Kelly) as the real brains behind the plan, as seems to have happened in The Irish Times’ piece on Storey, can mean that in the background, at a level few journalists penetrate, Larry Marley is being badmouthed so that these sort of allegations appear more credible. Believe me this is an old Provo trick.

Big Bobby would have been very familiar with this sort of strategem. So Luca Brasi with brains might indeed be the best way to describe Gerry Adams’ late protector.

The Balaclava Street blog takes a closer look at the supposed UVF threat to Charles Haughey, sent in a letter carrying a supposed UVF letterhead, which was eventually released publicly by the Dublin authorities in 2017: https://balaclavastreet.wordpress.com/2020/06/28/charles-haughey-dodgy-dets-a-bogus-uvf-letter-and-a-water-pistol-full-of-sheep-spit/

Two things about the photo below: even without the virus, this seems to me to be the very least compelling way to spend a sunny day. Just imagine, for instance, how much piss and shit is floating near the shore. Talking of such things, the second thing is that Boris Johnson is in deep doo-do. His government has given the green light to behaviour that will likely cause a new spike in Coronavirus deaths with consequent economic damage. It might even mark the end of his political career, for which we will have one thing to thank the virus for. And with luck Trump will be with him.

Crowds at the beach in Bournemouth today

I can’t say I knew ‘Big’ Bobby Storey at all well, not least because he was in jail for a lot of the time that I worked as a journalist in Belfast. And when he came out of jail the peace process was in acceleration mode and my life was dominated by the need to keep up with that story.

But I knew that he had been an acolyte of Gerry Adams’ down to his fingertips in jail and that Adams recognised that he needed to keep Storey on his side as the process trundled towards…well, where it is now.

I also suspected then and more so later, that such was his uncritical adoration of the Big Lad that he was either naive in the extreme about Adams, what drove him and where he was going politically, or that he chose cynically to ignore the obvious.

My suspicions in this regard were rooted in  the episode I know best about Storey’s relationship with Gerry, and that was about the disappearance of Jean McConville.

In pursuit of the fiction that none of this had anything to do with him, Adams had given Storey the job of finding out what had happened to Mrs McConville, who had been involved in her disappearance and, most importantly, where her remains had been buried.

This was at a point in the peace process when clearing up the issue of the ‘disappeared’ had assumed urgency and priority, so much so that Bill Clinton had taken sides in favour of justice for the disappeared.

For Adams to ask Storey to find out what happened to Jean McConville was like Stalin asking Beria to discover who gave the order to bury an icepick in Trotsky’s skull. Gerry knew, and knows more about what happened to Jean McConville and why, and who was involved in her ‘disappearance’ and how, than anyone still living.

When Storey went to interview Dolours Price he was, according to her account to me, astonished to hear her side of the story, which was of course that Gerry had given the order to ‘the unknowns’ to send Jean McConville to her maker. Clearly Gerry had denied all knowledge and put the blame on others, especially Ivor Bell, a line the British state and their police chiefs dutifully followed in later years.

From that point on ‘Big’ Bobby knew the truth but it didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest or raise doubts in his mind about his leader, who he continued to serve unquestioningly and, in terms of his intelligence work, very effectively.

But he must have known, or at least strongly suspected that Gerry had lied to him about Jean McConville and in the process laid the blame for his actions onto comrades. In that respect he was the Big Lad’s patsy, or maybe his Beria would be nearer the mark.

Here it is: https://www.flipsnack.com/workersparty1/enough-is-enough-may-2020/full-view.html – many thanks to a source who must remain anonymous.

The kernel of the dissidents’ argument, against the current WP leadership, written last month, comes in the fourth paragraph in a description of the leadership’s reaction to a request by the dissidents to meet the party leadership to outline a complaint about the increasingly nationalist direction being taken by the WP.

It reads: “Within 24 hours of that meeting request being made, a train of events was put in motion which is on track to set this party back a generation which seeks to align the party with a dangerous and divisive nationalist narrative and signal to the world that we are comfortable with that’.

So, you could say that the Workers Party is being riven by a split between its Sticky wing and its Provo wing…..yes?

A year’s free subscription to the Elbow to anyone who can explain what the heck this is about….! And more to the point who is leading it…..? And where are Seamus Lynch and Mary MacMahon these days? Thanks to JM for the tip.

ADDITION: This post recently appeared in the Cedar Lounge Revolution:

1. Gavin Mendel-Gleason – June 19, 2020