By Sabina Clarke
Parallel to the unprecedented success of Sinn Fein at the polls in the North and Gerry Adams’ election to the Dail in the Republic, is the ongoing attempt to discredit him. The current brouhaha at Boston College demanding the release of confidential taped interviews given by former Irish Republican Army, IRA members and former Ulster Volunteer Force, UVF members in an historical research project conducted in conjunction with Boston College and facilitated by Irish journalist Ed Moloney, a longtime Adams’ critic in collaboration with Irish journalist Anthony McIntyre, a former IRA member and academic from the republican community and Wilson McArthur, an academic from the loyalist community from Queens University in Belfast--is a perfect example of this.
For McIntyre, who broke with Adams and left the republican movement over the Good Friday Agreement, the current situation presents some risk since he lives with his American wife and children in Ireland and due to a previous murder conviction is unable to come to the United States.
In retrospect, this project, led by Moloney may not have been as innocent as it appears since Moloney must have had some awareness of the possibility that this current scenario could have played out given the history of the struggle. He is certainly no neophyte on the subject.
With Adams’ main accuser, Delores Price one of the living interviewees, speaking publicly about her role in the murder of McConville, a mother of 10 and former IRA informant, and stating that Adams ordered the murder--it appears that the Police Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI and Historical Enquiries Team, HET, see a unique opportunity to bring Adams down. The fact that Price was deemed psychologically challenged at the time she gave the interview seems irrelevant to the investigating commissions.
The real reason for the PSNI’s and the HET’s demand for the release of the tapes is transparent. The target is and always was Gerry Adams. With more than three thousand other unsolved murders in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, why the focus on just the Jean McConville murder? As an informant during a war, she was involved in espionage-she was not an innocent victim.
Also, tellingly, the accusations lodged against Adams are by IRA dissidents who had fallen out with him over the Peace Process. Consequently, their testimony may be tainted. Brendan Hughes, a former IRA member and former Adams’ ally and the second Adams’ accuser is dead—making his testimony inadmissible but Delores Price is alive but unlikely to give sworn testimony.
Perhaps, most significantly, there has been a documented pattern through the years with the PSNI and the RUC regarding investigations into murders in the North. They have been very selective in their investigations of unsolved murders.
This was recently illustrated in a January 17th. 2012 letter to the Irish Times from Father Joseph McCullough who asked why the killing of his teenage brother Patrick in 1972 was not investigated despite the fact that there were witnesses to that crime and despite repeated requests from his family to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, RUC and the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the PSNI. Could it have possibly been because the gunmen were from the loyalist’s death squad? And why, is the murder of Jean McConville’s more important than the murder of Patrick McCullough-a murder that happened the same year?
It would behoove the investigating bodies, the PSNI, the RUC and now the Historical Enquiries, HET, all of whom have shown bias and partiality in the past, to remove themselves from this investigation into the McConville murder—if the truth matters at all.
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