Facts, Myths and Jean McConville May 8, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite, Contemporary , trackback
The Jean McConville case is now history in as much as it took place over forty years ago: but it is living, bleeding history and in the last days it has landed an important Irish politician in the cells and rocked the peace process in the six counties. For non-British and non-Irish readers, who may not have heard of JM or her demise, the sorry story unwound as follows. In Dec 1972 JM was a widow with ten children (Helen is holding the picture of her mother above), living on the Lower Falls Road in Belfast. Elements in the local Catholic community – the Falls Road is the green heart of West Belfast – came to believe that she had been assisting the British ‘forces of occupation’ (we’ll return to ‘assisting’ in a moment). She was consequently ‘arrested’ by the IRA, questioned and, sometime in mid December, killed. She was then buried in secret and her body was not found until 2003. The previous few sentences are uncontroversial. The IRA admitted in 1999 that it ‘executed’ Jean McConville. The IRA excused itself for this killing by asserting in 2005 that JM was a British informer – a spy’ – though some regret was expressed about her death: the IRA ‘executed’, by the way, a score plus of ‘traitors’ in the years of struggle so her killing was a rare but not an unprecedented act.
While talking about the murder of Jean McConville in a lesson last semester I gave a series of ‘facts’ that I later came to suspect were not well founded: though they are repeated endlessly by even the most reputable news outlets. This post is an attempt to show these myths/facts for what they are and, if there is good evidence for them, to throw open the question to other better informed readers/surfers: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com As regular readers will know I have a longstanding fascination in the way myth and history conflate.
1) Jean McConville was killed because she had gone to the aid of a wounded British soldier. There is something particularly revolting about the idea that anyone should be inconvenienced, punished, let alone killed for helping an injured man or woman, be they friend or enemy. But did such a thing actually happen? The family – namely the surviving children – say that it did. The Ombudsman Report underlines though that any such event was apparently disconnected to the killing: ‘Mrs McConville’s children recall that she went to help a soldier who had been shot but recall that the incident happened before their father’s death in January 1972, which was a year before the abduction, when they were living at a different address.’ Interestingly a similar incident did happen at an address within yards of JM’s final home but to a different person. One Mary Kennedy helped a British soldier who’d got a brick on his head and she got graffitted for her troubles by local toughs. The IRA, of course, claim that JM was killed for being an informer and not for any help she may or may not have given to a soldier. At this distance from the actual events perhaps the safest forumulation is that JM helped an injured soldier but this did not lead directly (or indirectly?) to her killing.
2) It has been demonstrated that Jean McConville was not a British informer. Here it should be noted immediately that the British did use informers in Republican areas. And JM who had converted to Catholicism to get married but who was born Protestant and whose husband had served in the British army sounds like a likely candidate for British intelligence. Nuala O’Loan the first Police Ombudsman in Northern Ireland went on record, in 2006, as saying that she had looked through intelligence reports from those years and had found no evidence that JM had helped the authorities: ‘[JM] was an innocent woman who was abducted and murdered’. But to what extent were records complete? Had the records been vetted? Is it possible that some informers were off the books? Was there overlap with different agencies? Here an absence of evidence may not be as decisive as it appeared to O’Loan. Likewise, the fact that the children of the murdered woman claim that she was not an informer is inconclusive. Would they have known? Mrs McConville would have been particularly irresponsible to have told her family. The IRA insist, meanwhile, that JM was a British informer. Various sources with IRA connections in Belfast, among them Evelyn Gilroy state that a radio was found in JM’s house. (Normal British protocol in NI in the 1970s?! I’ve not been able to find out.) It is difficult to believe that the IRA would have taken such drastic action as killing a civilian without excellent proof: but having said this their publicly admitted acts in this case hardly instill confidence in their humanity or their political nouse.
3) Jean McConville was tortured before she was killed. This is repeated again and again in reports. However, Marie Cassidy, the Irish State Pathologist responsible for examining JM’s skeleton stated that there was ‘no evidence on her skeleton to show she had suffered any other injuries before her death’, the one injury that was recorded was a bullet wound to the back of the head. None of this to say that JM was not intimidated, maltreated or tortured, perhaps for information prior to being murdered. But there is no forensic proof for this and until someone involved in the killing comes forward and says that torture took place there is no reason for claiming that it did. The last glimpse we have of JM from a reliable (?) witness is the IRA driver (Dolours Price) who took her over the border to be killed and who claims that JM incriminated herself while speaking in the car. According to this witness JM was ‘foul-mouthed’ and disrespectful of the IRA on the trip, believing that she was being driven somewhere safe (the reaction of a relieved woman?): she did not know she was being escorted to her death.
4) The IRA refused to give up Jean McConville’s body. In 1999 as the peace process was getting underway the IRA admitted to having killing JM and several other ‘traitors’ : they also admitted that these bodies had been buried secretly. They were, naturally enough, asked for the bodies on behalf of still grieving families and there seems to have been a sincere attempt to supply locations. In many cases the bodies were not found simply because the exact burial place had been forgotten: some of these bodies are still ‘out there’. The information in the case of JM was indicatively correct but not precise enough for a body to be found. The corpse only turned up on the beach at Templetown in 2003 when it was found by chance after a storm.
Can these threads be drawn together to make something meaningful out of a dreadful event and the way we report and remember the past? Perhaps the first thing to say is that the IRA acted brutally and stupidly. A one time member of the IRA, already mentioned above, Evelyn Gilroy, who had close family connections in the area, summed it up particularly well. She believed that JM was an informer but that JM’s killing was a mistake: ‘I can’t get my head around how the IRA would kill a mother with all those wee children. They could easily have ordered her out of the country and put her on a boat to England or Scotland with her kids. She should never have been executed.’ The youngest children were six (twins), the oldest (at home) was seventeen: the elder daughter who was twenty was ill in hospital. The father had died in January of the same year after a battle with cancer. If only for public relations it would be foolish to kill someone who was in such a difficult situation and on whom so many innocents depended. Even Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein politician, who according to some sources ordered the killing, has admitted as much in statements in recent years. Then, there is the broader question about whether JM was ‘guilty’. The only evidence external to the IRA claim of a radio is that JM had been physically abused some nights before she was abducted at a local bingo evening: British military sources, incidentally, concur with this. It seems that there was rising suspicion among her neighbours about this outsider, with a Protestant past and a dead soldier husband. But were these suspicions based on good information (perhaps an IRA investigation) or was it just a local witch hunt? The kind of people that beat each other up at bingo evenings are not normally bona fide witnesses. If the IRA acted solely on the basis of a bingo hall rumour then they acted not just horribly but despicabaly and this murder stands as one of the most dreadful acts in their sanguinary history. With renewed legal interest in the case, some more definite answers may now start to leak out and just possibly some heads may be put on blocks. As to the four factoids above… These four have grown up around the case not because of British propaganda or willful misunderstandings: they have grown up because they chime with the fundamental injustice of what happened sometime in December 1972 to a mother of ten children, most of whom would spend the rest of their childhood, separated from each other, in institutions.
At the coda of this piece it should be noted that the present case has remained ‘news’ and justice may one day be done thanks to the children, the only people to come out of the events of 1972 with any credit. Though there is not time to cover the other facts of the case here, the police and the British government failed the family in the immediate aftermath and the years that followed: it beggars belief but the first proper investigation into JM’s death took place in 1995.
