Burke Deception and Lies

The Hidden History of the Arms Crisis
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78117-788-4
Verlag: Mercier Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

In May of 1970, two government ministers were dismissed from Cabinet for allegedly purchasing guns for the IRA. The Taoiseach Jack Lynch disavowed any knowledge of the plot. Few believed him. Charles Haughey, Minister for Finance, a captain in Irish military intelligence along with two others were put on trial. All were acquitted. Haughey refused to talk about the crisis for the rest of his life. Fianna Fail endured decades of splits, turmoil and leadership heaves. Until now, no one has revealed the pivotal role of an IRA informer in the affair. The part he played became the best-kept State secret of the last half-century. The book also reveals a dirty tricks campaign by Britain's Foreign Office to conceal the ancillary role of a British agent called Capt. Markham-Randall in the murder of Garda Richard Fallon on the eve of the eruption of the Arms Crisis.

A practising barrister David is the son of Dick Burke, a FG TD in the 1970s. the sat on the Public Accounts Committee in 1971 that investigated how the money given to Charles Haughey in 1969 for the relief of distress in Northern Ireland had been spent, i.e. the source of the funds which was subsequently spent on arms in Hamburg. David has written about the Arms Crisis and related issues for Village Magazine.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Burke, David

Leseproben

1
The Descent into Madness

Ian Paisley bounded onto the political stage in the 1950s, eager to whip up a religious fervour against the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland, a community he later claimed bred ‘like rabbits’ and multiplied ‘like vermin’.1 No one – not even British royalty – was safe from his invective. When the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret visited Pope John in 1958, he accused them of ‘committing spiritual fornication and adultery with the Anti-Christ’.

By the end of the 1960s, Paisley and his fiercely unionist supporters hurled Ireland into turmoil in the fanatical belief they were preserving Northern Ireland from a deeply mendacious pope who was conspiring against them in Rome.

Paisley’s high profile and his eventual elevation to the post of first minister at Stormont in 2007 has overshadowed the pivotal roles played by those around him, especially William McGrath and John McKeague, in the events leading up to the explosion of the ‘Troubles’.

McGrath perceived the Catholic church as the instrument of the anti-Christ and was determined to expunge it from the four corners of Ireland so that the Protestant community – which he believed was descended from the Tribe of Dan of Caanan, one of the Lost Tribes of Israel – could prevail. He perceived himself as a soldier in what he called the ‘battles of the Lord’.2 His self-anointed duty was to prevent the pope enslaving the Protestants of Northern Ireland and Britain. Paisley, who was nearly ten years younger than McGrath, became a British-Israelite too. The pair had met in 1949 through their involvement in the Unionist Association in the Shore Road area of Belfast where Paisley was studying at a bible college.3

McGrath was later convicted of the sexual abuse of teenage boys at Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast in 1981. McKeague was another deviant. He had converted to Paisley’s brand of Free Presbyterianism in 1966, and acted as Paisley’s bodyguard for a time. Bizarrely, he was obsessed with Satanism. McGrath and McKeague would have remained irrelevant figures trapped inside a claustrophobic loyalist cocoon but for the charisma and rhetorical flourish of the young Paisley.

Roy Garland, a one-time ally of McGrath, attended Paisley’s church in the early 1960s where worshippers were led to believe the pope, his cardinals and Fianna Fáil were plotting to take over the island of Ireland as a springboard to enable Rome regain control of Britain. McGrath assured Garland that the Vatican plot would be met with determined resistance.

In 1962 McGrath produced a pamphlet that urged support for the formation of a loyalist militia and alluded to the deeds of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).4 According to Roy Garland, McGrath was ‘fomenting an atmosphere of suspicion’ with allegations of ‘deeply laid plots to destabilise and overthrow’ the Northern Ireland state. ‘For at least a decade he had been predicting that blood would be flowing in the streets of Belfast. The scene was being set for the reintroduction of armed militias’.5

As the 1960s proceeded, Paisley, McGrath and their allies ratcheted up the level of sectarian tension. They were key figures in the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee, which was the parent organisation of the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV), a Christian evangelical paramilitary organisation that would soon become involved in a bomb campaign with the UVF.

During the 1964 Westminster elections, Paisley and McGrath sparked a two-day riot in Belfast in response to the display of a Tricolour and a Starry Plough at the election campaign HQ of Sinn Féin’s West Belfast candidate, Billy McMillen. Jim Kilfedder, the successful Ulster Unionist Party candidate in the contest, thanked Paisley after he won, stating he could not have done it without Paisley’s help.

The 1965 meeting between Taoiseach Seán Lemass and Northern Ireland Prime Minister Capt. Terence O’Neill incensed Paisley, McGrath and their ilk. Absurdly, they convinced themselves that it was a sham and that Dublin was conspiring in the shadows with the IRA and the pope to subjugate Northern Ireland. In 1965, McGrath told Garland that the UVF was ‘being re-formed to meet the perceived threat’, as indeed it was.6

Paisley and McGrath kept the tribal drums beating. In 1966 they mounted counter-demonstrations to the Easter parades, which had been organised by nationalists for the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. McGrath, believing he was fighting for the very survival of his religion, prepared banners that bore slogans such as, ‘For God and Ireland’ and ‘By Right of Calvary, Ireland belongs to Christ’.7

One of the men who joined the born-again UVF was an ex-British Army soldier called Gusty Spence who hailed from Belfast. When he joined the UVF, some of the dire predictions spouted forth by McGrath appeared to be coming true. In the real world, however, there was no threat from the rather toothless IRA, which was commanded at the time by Cathal Goulding. He had abandoned physical force violence in favour of left-wing political agitation. Hence, the hard men in the UPV/UVF decided to conjure up a faux version of the IRA for public consumption.

The Easter Rising had taken place on 24 April 1916. On the night of 16 April 1966, as the anniversary loomed large, gunmen from the Shankill Brigade of UVF fired two shots through the door of John McQuade, the right-wing unionist MP for Woodvale, and blamed the IRA for it. The following month the UPV/UVF ‘retaliated’ by attempting to petrol bomb an off-licence on the Shankill Road owned by a Catholic but set fire to the building next door, killing Martha Gould, a helpless elderly Protestant lady, instead.

On 21 May the UPV/UVF declared war against the IRA and its splinter groups, threatening that ‘known’ IRA men would be ‘executed mercilessly and without hesitation’.8 Six nights later, Gusty Spence and his gang threw themselves into a mission to assassinate a republican called Leo Martin who lived in a mixed nationalist-loyalist area. The assassins were unable to find him, however, as he had learned of the threat and had left his home. Instead, they torched the property and shot John Scullion, a random Catholic they found walking the streets. Scullion died a fortnight later.

Spence’s gang tried for Martin again the following day but without success. Rather than return home without a scalp, they attacked four young men as they left the Malvern Arms, killing one of them – Peter Ward, aged eighteen – and wounding two others. Spence had seen them in the public house where he had been drinking himself and had ruled they were IRA gunmen and therefore pronounced a death sentence upon them.

It didn’t take the police long to link Spence to the spree of violence and arrest him. In the wake of the detention, McGrath claimed that Scullion had been part of a Communist conspiracy centred on the International Hotel in Belfast, the members of which were intent upon overthrowing the Northern Ireland state. After Spence went on trial for the murder of Ward at Crumlin Road, McGrath published an anonymous pamphlet which attacked Ward, claiming he ‘was an enemy agent who was working in cooperation’ with ‘Anti-Ulster’ MPs at Westminster. In reality, Ward was simply a barman. At Spence’s trial, Lord Chief Justice McDermott felt obliged to warn the jury about the pamphlet. Spence was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment with a stipulation that he serve a minimum of twenty years.

After the conviction, John McKeague published an article in his paper, Loyalist News, which portrayed Spence as the victim of injustice and police brutality. McKeague alleged that, ‘Twenty-four detectives working in relays of four grilled and questioned him, threatening him, so as to make a statement, for over eighteen hours. He refused to make any statement, he was struck on repeated occasions and we have the names of the police officers who used the brutality.’9

There was no let-up in the tempo of sectarian scaremongering. On 25 June 1966 McGrath distributed leaflets at the annual Whiterock Orange parade entitled The National Crisis of Faith in which he claimed a major crisis faced Northern Ireland, one which eventually broke out into armed conflict between those who ‘fight the “battles of the Lord against the mighty” and those who know nothing of “the glorious liberty of the children of God”. Blood had ever been the price of liberty … Oliver Cromwell once said “choose ye out Godly men to be Captains and Godly men will follow them.” We must do the same.’10

McGrath commanded another loyalist paramilitary organisation, which he called Tara. Some of its members were also in the UVF. Tara wanted to close all Catholic schools and...