A Trust Betrayed

By AM Sunday, October 6, 2013

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Guest writer Antaine Mac Dhomhnaill writes of his experience of the systemic cover-up of sexual abuse within the Provisional Republican Movement.

I watched the initial exposure of child rapist Liam Adams some time ago in the company of a Belfast Republican and former POW who had served a sentence in Long Kesh. There was sadness in the room along with obvious horror and confusion. I do not know and I have never asked if my company that evening had known beforehand of this case, but it will always be, in my mind, the night when many worlds met.


As a very young and naïve Republican I discovered that a member of Sinn Féin was abusing his position as a community welfare officer to groom young men for sex. When I confronted the man about his behaviour he became extremely aggressive and so I went to a then PIRA member to have him deal with the issue. The Sinn Féin man, in tears apologised to me while admitting a number of offences to the IRA man, whose response led me to believe that this was not the first complaint regarding the Sinn Féin man that he had dealt with. Within a week Sinn Féin had “found” me “new” housing well outside the Republican /Nationalist community and from then, all contact that I had with the party in that area ceased.

I was very young then; I had neither care for personal vindication nor any interest in living so close to Sandy Row and so I returned to the Republican Community. The Provisional movement was my God and in my infinite trust of that movement I approached them again, and again and again in the belief the only people capable of resolving the issue were the Provisionals. My refusal to be silent on the issue was derived from a desire to protect the vulnerable adults and young children this man was in regular contact with through his role in the community.

The level of hostility I met with socially was frightening; yet in the meetings I was asked to attend, held in various parts of Belfast, sometimes in houses, sometimes in Sinn Féin offices, I was treated with a respect beyond what I had ever earned, by people who could never earn more respect than I had for them.

As time went on it became apparent that, while I was no longer welcome in certain company outside these meetings, within them I was becoming a source of amusement for the inquisitors. So many sinister events occurred I cannot begin to list them; individually they seem so petty they are naught, twenty together adding up to one event, it was far from petty, for all of it was the process of meticulous psychological emasculation that aimed to render a human voice obsolete.

Eventually I was called to a Sinn Féin office in the area I then resided. A number of people were present and the atmosphere was tense. The phone rang and a member of Sinn Féin from my home area was placed on the monitor option. Those present asked that person a number of questions which were all answered against my character. I was dismissed from the Republican Movement and told not to enter West Belfast (where I went to school).

In terror at what was unfolding I approached a friend of mine in the INLA. They had been aware from their sources I was under immediate threat, and they received an immediate assurance from the local IRA I was not going to be harmed. The RSM asked me to record the entire chain of events into a Dictaphone; they approached the Sinn Féin leadership and told them that were I harmed they would be releasing the tape to the media.

That was only the beginning of the blackening and a period of unrelenting orchestrated humiliation, lies, accusations, and social exclusion that destroyed the majority part of my youth and continues to affect my associations and relationships to this day. I believe that being exiled from the minds of those you love most is an impossible event to ever truly recover from, especially in Irish Republicanism.

I was not a victim in the way Aine Tyrell is a victim. I do have an understanding of the means deployed against her voice and I do empathise with her frustration from the understanding I have of how her voice was suppressed.

A belief is growing that the silencing of victims and complainants was necessary: although on the comparative scale of abuse (if there is one) my experiences are minor, their exposure may have illuminated other cases and given others the courage to speak out and then others, and others, and others, until Aine’s voice was heard. We are all aware that if the Liam Adams case had have been exposed 10--15 years ago, we would be dealing with a very different political scenario than we are now.

There is no doubt in my mind that the leadership of the Provisional Movement were actively and knowingly engaged in the systematic cover up of sex crimes, and I believe that this was as a consequence of the need to protect the Adams family from being exposed as containing both a number of paedophiles and a number of people prepared to conceal their crimes for self interest.

When I watched the pain consume the faces of my company on the evening we listened to Aine Tyrell first explain the level of her abuse and its concealment, many past lives met, and I was thankful that I had been exiled from the Provisional Movement for telling the truth about a sexual predator and thus was spared those personal feeling of attachment to the betrayal of Sinn Féin unfolding there.

Though I continue to ask my self how many victims did not survive the process I went through?

How many alcoholics have been created, how many human presences have been rendered obsolete and unworthy through slander to diminish the credibility of their voice, because behind that voice is a story of being abused by someone in the Republican Movement?

How many headstones have been engraved by the systematic cover up of sex abuse in the Republican/Nationalist community? As many as the Catholic church? More?

The irony is, we would have never went further than the IRA anyway. We trusted them.