To Padraig Yeates

 

Truth Recovery Process (TRP)

 

I must respond to a series of newspaper articles reproduced in TRP based on the reissued Chris Moore book about the Kincora boys’ home, which are stated to be ‘deeply damaging’ to unionism.

 

The so-called revelations are in fact few and noticeable for lack of verification. The allegations of criminal misbehaviour attributed to Lord Mountbatten have been countered on many occasions, not least by members of his staff at Classiebawn Castle in Mullaghmore.

 

The new stories are, for the most part, hard to credit and essentially require one to believe in a conspiracy between the RUC and in turn, the Guards to turn a blind eye to the trafficking of boys across the border from Belfast to Sligo. One, Richard Kerr, is quoted as explaining that he and a friend “were driven by Kincora warden Joe Mains to the car park of the Manor House Country Hotel outside Enniskillen in August 1977. Two of Mountbatten’s security men then allegedly arrived in separate black Ford Cortinas to ferry the boys to Mullaghmore, 45 miles away. The teenagers were dropped off separately at Classiebawn Castle “before being taken individually from a guest reception room to the green boathouse where they were sexually assaulted and then returned to the Manor House.”

 

I understand there is no boathouse at the castle, while the Guards would not have crossed the border. Mountbatten would only have had RUC protection if he travelled into the north which he apparently rarely did. I imagine if he had asked the RUC for security advice they would have said do not go to the Republic, least of all to holiday there.

The problem with Richard Kerr is that he was long associated with Carl Beech and his fantasies about Ted Heath and other prominent political figures. Beech was jailed for 18 years in 2019 for perverting the course of justice and fraud.

The other new story, new to me anyway, is that an RUC detective “contacted by concerned social workers, secretly photographed VIPs visiting Kincora including NIO officials, lay magistrates, police officers and businessmen.” However no names of these recognisable visitors or indeed photographs have been produced. Why not?

The long Sunday Life extract from the book on Chris Moore’s meeting with William McGrath is remarkable for the absence of any substance. McGrath was a practised deceiver and determined homosexual who even misbehaved with a family member. Regardless of his later denials, he pleaded guilty in 1982 to a series of charges relating to boys at Kincora, as did two other staff who were less vicious. 

 

It is important to note that boys’ homes in Northern Ireland were cleaned up decades before those in England or the Republic. 

That the brother of Brian McDermott, the boy murdered and dismembered in Belfast in 1973, allegedly confessed to the crime was, of course, not mentioned when another name, that of a minor unionist figure, is suggested as the culprit with no back-up evidence.

Kincora was heavily investigated by Sir Anthony Hart’s public inquiry (the last of a series) which reported in 2017. It had a whole module devoted to the home whose many chapters are available on the internet.

 

The evidence around a VIP vice ring out of Kincora was forensically examined. Hart’s inquiry concluded they did not find “any credible evidence to show that there is any basis for the allegations that have been made over the years about the involvement of others in sexual abuse of residents in Kincora, or anything to show that the security agencies were complicit in any form of exploitation of sexual abuse in Kincora for any purpose.”

Kerr along with the three other main conspiracy theorists declined to give evidence at the inquiry and are fairly robustly treated in the report, with their various, often conflicting, statements on Kincora taken apart. 

 

On William McGrath, the report stated, “Based on our extensive examination of a very large number of files held by RUC Special Branch, by MI5, by SIS and by the Ministry of Defence, we are satisfied that McGrath was never an agent of the State, although he may have enjoyed creating an air of mystery about his activities, part of which may well have involved him hinting at, or implying in an oblique fashion, that he was an agent of the State.”

 

Journalists who, on the one hand, call for judicial public inquiries in legacy matters and then discount or ignore the findings, as with Hart, lose their credibility and can be seen instead as simply pushing a nationalist line to feed tabloid conspiracy theories.

 

 

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