Scappaticci would also be a dangerous man to prosecute, knowing what he knew about the extent to which the butchery of the Nutting Squad had been countenanced, or facilitated, by Her Majesty’s Government. It would be exceedingly risky for the state to put Stakeknife into any position where he might feel the need to start talking. When it came to his former comrades in the IRA, Scappaticci may have enjoyed a similar immunity. He knew too much about too many people. Perhaps he had a cache of secret evidence, a dossier locked in a safe somewhere, to be released in the event that anything should happen to him. When his father died, in the spring of 2017, there were rumours in Belfast that Freddie had slipped back into town to attend the funeral. The procession was led by the family ice cream van. It would have been a prime opportunity for anyone with a grudge against the ultimate IRA tout to confront him. But if he was there, nobody did.
If Scappaticci wasn’t criminally prosecuted, perhaps he could be sued. In the vacuum of accountability left by the criminal justice system, private lawyers had taken to signing up clients and bringing civil suits. The families of numerous victims initiated lawsuits against Scappaticci. The Hooded Men, who were tortured during internment, were also pursuing legal action against their former captors. In 2015, the counter-insurgency guru Brigadier Frank Kitson was sued. He was an old man now, long since retired. He had briefly resurfaced in 2002, to testify before an inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday, praising the paratroopers who shot thirteen unarmed civilians as a ‘jolly good’ unit who were ‘ready to go at the drop of a hat’. But otherwise, he lived a quiet life. Lately, he had been assisting his wife, Lady Elizabeth Kitson, with an inspirational book she was writing about a show pony she had owned in her youth.
A woman named Mary Heenan sued Kitson. Her husband had been murdered by loyalists in 1973. ‘Nobody cared,’ she said. ‘We were just left there. We knew nothing.’ In her suit, Heenan claimed that, as the architect of British counter-insurgency strategy in the early years of the Troubles, Kitson was ‘reckless as to whether state agents would be involved in murder’. When she was challenged about the appropriateness of subjecting an old man to such a lawsuit, Heenan, who was eighty-eight, pointed out that Kitson was ‘a year younger than me’.
The little Brigadier denied the charges, observing that he had already left Ireland by 1973. He had been a mere commander of troops, he argued, not someone who set official policy or could be blamed for the broader thrust of British strategy in the Troubles. He added, lamely, ‘We never instigated the use of paramilitary gangs.’
When police and prosecutors pursued cases against former British soldiers, they were accused of a ‘witch hunt’ against young men who were just trying to do their jobs in a difficult environment. To such charges of bias, the top prosecutor, Barra McGrory, responded that there had been no ‘imbalance of approach’ and that investigations of terrorist atrocities far outnumbered cases against the state. But was that not itself a kind of bias? Was it possible to appropriately calibrate the number of investigations of republican murders with those of loyalist murders? Would anything but a perfect one-to-one ratio suffice? People in Northern Ireland talked about the danger of a ‘hierarchy of victims’. Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator. Should the state be accorded more leniency because, legally speaking, it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? Or, conversely, should we hold soldiers and police to a higher standard than paramilitaries?
According to one scholar, the ‘ideal victim’ in the Troubles was someone who was not a combatant, but a passive civilian. To many, Jean McConville was the perfect victim: a widow, a mother of ten. To others, she was not a victim at all, but a combatant by proxy, who courted her own fate. Of course, even if one were to concede, for the sake of argument, that McConville was an informer, there is no moral universe in which her murder and disappearance should be justified. Must it be the case that how one perceives a tragedy will forever depend on where one sits? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, ‘for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.’ When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as ‘whataboutery’ took hold. Utter the name Jean McConville and someone would say, What about Bloody Sunday? To which you could say, What about Bloody Friday? To which they could say, What about Pat Finucane? What about the La Mon bombing? What about the Ballymurphy massacre? What about Enniskillen? What about McGurk’s bar? What about. What about. What about.
After it was revealed that the PSNI was seeking the Boston tapes related to the killing of Jean McConville, there were some who accused the service of bias. This was the embittered rump of the old RUC, perverting justice in a last bid to get their nemesis, Gerry Adams. If the police were interested in historical crimes, why not ask for the loyalist interviews? Loyalists did plenty of murdering during the Troubles, too. Boston College itself said in a statement that, by ‘ignoring the tapes of the UVF members’, the police lent support to the charge that the subpoenas had been politically motivated. The British government’s reaction to this criticism was not to withdraw its request for the republican interviews, but to ask that a loyalist interview be turned over, as Boston College had practically invited it to do.
The police obtained a new subpoena, for the recordings of a former paramilitary, Winston Churchill Rea, a one-time member of a group called the Red Hand Commando. Rea, who went by the misleadingly innocuous nickname ‘Winkie’ and was no relation to Stephen Rea (much less to Winston Churchill), filed a legal challenge to prevent Boston College from handing over his tapes. But he fared no better than Moloney and Mackers had, and the tapes were handed to the police. Rea was eventually charged with offences including conspiracy to murder two Catholic men in 1991. When he showed up in court to deny the charges, he was confined to a wheelchair, a slumped figure with white stubble and milky eyes. In a statement, Ed Moloney decried the ‘cynical attempt by the PSNI to show even-handedness in their pursuit of the Boston College tapes’. Winkie Rea, Moloney said, was ‘the token Prod’.
Anthony McIntyre was also harshly critical of the effort to prosecute Rea. How will the truth of what really happened during the Troubles ever come out, he asked, if the authorities file murder charges against anyone who has the nerve to talk about it? ‘I would describe the PSNI stance as one of prosecuting truth, rather than procuring truth,’ he said in an interview.
The PSNI was well aware of Mackers’s criticism. People in the department had been following his public commentary closely. He was a garrulous type; he liked talking to journalists, and they liked talking to him. Given his attachment to the idea of speaking truth to power, he was not one to hold his tongue when it came to the perfidy of the authorities. But the PSNI took a particular interest in something that Mackers had let slip in a television interview in 2014. On the subject of the sensitivity and confidentiality of the Boston archive, he said, ‘I won’t go into any detail, but I exposed myself to exactly the same risks as anybody else was exposed to.’
Mackers didn’t just gather republican oral histories as an interviewer. He recorded an oral history of his own. In a letter to the Public Prosecution Service, a PSNI detective cited the television interview, noting that ‘not only did he discuss his own terrorist activities … but also that he is opposed to PSNI obtaining the interview content. Implicit is the belief that he fears that prosecutions could be mounted as a result of the interviews being released to investigators.’
One day in April 2016, Mackers was at home in Drogheda when he opened his email to find a message from a lawyer in Boston. ‘I am writing to inform you that Boston College has been served with the enclosed subpoena seeking your Belfast Project interview,’ it said. The authorities were alleging that Mackers had been implicated in an asso
rtment of crimes, from membership of a paramilitary organisation and being in possession of an imitation firearm while he was in prison, in 1978, to involvement in an operation in which a pipe bomb exploded in Belfast. Mackers was terrified: the whole oral history was a chronicle of his years in a banned organisation. His account, like the accounts of other former paramilitaries, was full of stories about illegal things he’d done. If government officials were out to get him, as he believed they were, and if there was no statute of limitations on these crimes, then the state could fish happily from his oral history and bring trumped-up charges against him forever.
The best indication of the government’s bad faith, in Mackers’s view, was the shoddiness of the allegations. Had the police actually checked their own records, they would have discovered that Mackers couldn’t have taken part in the pipe bombing – because he was in police custody when it happened. It seemed unlikely that the authorities would ultimately pursue any formal proceedings against him, but this brought him little comfort. Both Mackers and his wife, Carrie, had been unemployed for some time. They had kids to feed, and they had now spent the better part of a decade dealing virtually full-time with the aftermath of the Belfast Project. They continued to fear retaliation by the IRA, and now they had to contend with the government, whose effort, Mackers was convinced, was motivated purely by revenge – revenge for his public criticism of the PSNI, but also revenge because he had refused to cooperate with the authorities in identifying Z. He found himself wishing, almost daily, that he had left history alone and never undertaken the Belfast Project in the first place.
In the countryside, the digging continued. In 2010, the body of Peter Wilson, a young man with learning disabilities who had been murdered by the IRA, was discovered. His remains were exhumed at a picturesque beach in County Antrim. Over the decades since he disappeared, Wilson’s family had often visited that beach, little knowing.
The scandal of the Boston tapes had been frustrating for the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains. The commissioners felt obliged to assure the public that, notwithstanding the Boston College fiasco, anyone who might have information regarding the whereabouts of the disappeared could share it with the commission in ‘complete confidence’. In the autumn of 2014 they received a tip indicating that the remains of Joe Lynskey might be found in a particular area of County Meath. A team led by the retired Manchester detective Geoff Knupfer got to work. They brought in a sniffer dog and a forensic anthropologist and used ground-penetrating radar to find anomalies in the earth. In December, Lynskey’s niece Maria was cautiously optimistic. ‘We hope and pray that Joe’s remains are found and he can be given a proper burial,’ she said. But for months they continued to dig and did not find him.
Then, at lunchtime one day the following summer, someone shouted, ‘Something’s here!’ Dispensing with the mechanical excavators, the investigators crouched in the dirt and started delicately clearing the earth away with trowels. Gradually, they uncovered a set of bones. In his quiet, methodical way, Knupfer was hugely excited, though there was, inevitably, a bittersweetness to these moments of discovery. Someone alerted Maria Lynskey, and she drove to the site.
The team was still working that evening when, at around 8:30, there was a sudden cry from the grave site. Investigators had discovered something in the grave, lying underneath the bones: a second set of human remains. In an instant, the searchers realised what had happened. There were two bodies buried together, lying one on top of the other. All this time, they had been looking for Joe Lynskey. But they had discovered the young triple agents whom Dolours Price had driven to their deaths, Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee. Maria Lynskey was devastated, but also happy for the families of Wright and McKee. At a requiem Mass for Seamus Wright, his sister, Breige, issued a special plea for any information relating to Lynskey and the other victims who had yet to be discovered.
In 2016, the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin, premiered a provocative new play by the East Belfast playwright David Ireland called Cyprus Avenue. It is a scabrous black comedy, the story of a Belfast loyalist named Eric Miller. His daughter has recently given birth to a baby girl, but Eric is seized by a mad delusion: he thinks that the baby looks like Gerry Adams. At first, this is played for a joke. Eric asks his daughter whether the Sinn Féin president is not in fact the father of her child. At one point, when he is alone with the baby, he takes a big magic marker and scribbles a black beard onto the child’s cheeks. ‘The Gerry Adams beard is part and parcel of the Gerry Adams persona,’ Eric points out. ‘It symbolises his revolutionary ardour, his passion for constitutional change. And now as it whitens it cements his status as éminence grise, ageing philosopher king.’
Eric was played by Stephen Rea. He had worked steadily since the death of his ex-wife, in television and in theatre, and had still not spoken in any substantial way about the life or legacy of Dolours Price. But now he was playing a man who is undone by his own obsession with Gerry Adams. Eric’s delusion intensifies, and Adams seems to represent, for him, all that threatens his identity as a Belfast Protestant and as a loyalist. He comes to believe that the baby actually is Gerry Adams. When he encounters a loyalist gunman named Slim in a local park, Eric confides, ‘I think that Gerry Adams has disguised himself as a new-born baby and successfully infiltrated my family home.’
Slim, without skipping a beat, replies, ‘That’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do!’
The play is hilarious and absurd, but it ends in horrific violence. It is a study in the derangement of bigotry, a portrait of Northern Ireland as a land consumed by feverish pathology, an inquiry into the inability to shake free of what has come before.
‘This is the past,’ Eric tells Slim at one point.
‘No, this is the now,’ Slim corrects him.
‘No,’ Eric says. ‘It’s the past.’
In the summer of 2017, the McConville children came together once again when one of the two youngest brothers, Billy, died of cancer. Before his death, Billy had testified, along with several of his siblings, at an inquiry into child abuse at institutions in Northern Ireland. ‘After a while I was like – what do you call it? – like a robot; you know what I mean? Because I was so institutionalised,’ he said. As he was succumbing to cancer, Billy asked his family, as a dying wish, that he be carried into the church for his funeral feet first, in a final gesture of defiance.
‘You were so strong and unbelievably brave, braver than anyone I knew,’ Billy’s daughter said at the funeral. He had been only six years old when Jean was taken away. He died at fifty. ‘The whole world knows the name of a simple Belfast mother who loved her children and who was cruelly abducted, murdered and secretly buried, in December 1972,’ a priest said. Her disappearance was an ‘act of inexcusable wickedness’, which ‘plunged Billy and his brothers and sisters into a lifelong nightmare’.
It remained unclear whether the children would ever get their wish of seeing someone held accountable. Michael and his siblings attended the hearings in the case of Ivor Bell, sitting silently in the public gallery, serving as a kind of moral witness. But at a hearing in December 2016, a lawyer representing Bell announced that he could not be fairly tried in the case – because he was suffering from vascular dementia and wouldn’t be able ‘to properly follow the course of proceedings’. The government announced that it wanted to inspect Bell’s medical record and have him seen by its own specialists. But it seemed increasingly unlikely that anyone would ever face trial for the murder.
After prosecutors said that they would not bring charges against Gerry Adams, Helen consulted with a London-based law firm that had won a landmark settlement of nearly £2 million in a case against four members of the Real IRA over a 1998 car bomb attack in Omagh. The firm announced that Helen had instructed them to explore the possibility of launching a civil suit against Adams. ‘The McConville family is going to stay to the bitter end,’ Michael said. ‘We have already been fighting for justice for forty-odd years and we ar
e not going to stop now.’
30
The Unknown
According to the census, some thirty-three million Americans – roughly 10 per cent of the total population – claim Irish heritage. I’m one of them. My forebears on my father’s side emigrated from Cork and Donegal in the nineteenth century. I’m actually more Australian than Irish – my mother is from Melbourne – but I grew up in Boston, where Irish Americans who have never set foot in the old country can still feel an intense emotional connection to the place. With my conspicuously Irish name, you might think that I would, too.
But, at least when I was growing up, I didn’t. If the unionists of Ulster were a people ‘more British than the British’, the Irish Americans of Boston could sometimes seem more Irish than the Irish, and I found that I did not always relate to the shamrock-and-Guinness clichés and the sentimental attitudes of tribal solidarity. In the Boston I grew up in, during the 1980s, there was a fair degree of ambient support for the IRA, even as the group perpetrated some of its most devastating acts of terror. I can still remember my father telling me that inside the local Irish pub, down the street from my childhood home, a man would circulate among the patrons with a jar full of money, soliciting contributions ‘for the lads’. A black wreath hung above the bar, in tribute to the IRA dead. But I never felt any particular interest in the conflict in Northern Ireland. My heritage notwithstanding, I read about it with the detached concern you might accord to any story about a war in a foreign country.
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