Families Who Were Lied to

"The life of Joseph was as valuable as any other life.
The right to truth in this case is as fundamental as the right to truth in other cases such as the late Pat Finucane and our loved one Francisco Notaratonio.
We demand justice for all of them.
Does Sinn Fein really think that we would differentiate between our lost loved ones and demand the truth only about Francisco and not about Joseph?
So much for parity of esteem and equality."

All grieving families ‘have the right to truth’
Irish News, Andersonstown News,
9 November 2000
Statement from the Family of Joseph O Connor

On Sunday I learned that Danny Morrison had acknowledged that the ‘IRA did Claudy. Among the awful things my Movement did.’ He was hardly making any earth shattering revelation. Society already knew who did Claudy just as it has always known. Sean McStiofain’s inquiry into the 1972 bombing of the County Derry village which exonerated the IRA of responsibility was a whitewash on a par with Widgery. The Derry Brigade’s statement a few years back that it was not responsible, while most likely true, did not say what most others suspected: that the brigade did not have to be responsible in order for the IRA as a corporate body to be culpable. Some other brigade most likely wreaked the devastation.

Morrison is also said, admirably enough, to have assigned culpability to the IRA for the Whitecross massacre of 1976. Not so admirably he claims that apart from these things, society knows what the IRA did but does not know not all that the British were responsible for. If, as he implies, our knowledge of what the IRA did comes courtesy of the IRA letting us know, then we do not know that it killed Joanne Mathers in 1981, Joe O’Connor in 2000, or was behind the Direct Action Against Drugs spate of killings in the 1990s. These are pulled from memory. There are others.

While hardly on its own, clearly, there is much that the IRA has yet to come clean about.

Why Morrison is making such acknowledgements now seems to me to be linked to the publication of his friend Anne Cadwallader’s book, Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland. As Richard Haass sets about addressing or fudging the past, Cadwallader’s work looks certain to throw a much needed spanner into the works that constitute the woefully incomplete narrative of both the British state and political unionism. It would seriously undermine endorsement of Cadwallader’s seemingly devastating critique of the British state (I have yet to read it) were people like Morrison to continue clinging to denials of IRA involvement in events like Claudy or Whitecross. It would make a mockery of any claim to be serious about backing her call for impartial truth recovery.

Anne Cadwalladers’s work would seem a valuable addition to public understanding, coming as it does at a pivotal juncture. As those once involved in the republican armed campaign are being painted into a corner, increasingly carrying the can for a turbulent past, the type of knowledge Lethal Allies purports to bring to the fore seriously ruptures the dominant discourse. It thrusts a STOP sign squarely in front of a consciously skewed stampede, and the author's call for truth as a process (even though processes may be better) rather than as a weapon for partisan advancement is commendable.

But her ability to discern the truth was not always as strong a feature of her investigative work. In the wake of the killing of Real IRA member Joe O’Connor Anne Cadwallader wrote a fairly substantial newspaper piece which all but exonerated the organisation that killed him, the IRA in West Belfast. She might not have had the time to do the necessary research in the period between O’Connor’s death and the deadline she was working to but I did feel at the time that her conclusion was too hastily arrived at. Ultimately her writing on the topic facilitated the passage of a false narrative that the IRA was not responsible for killing O’Connor and that those who accused it of involvement, including the dead man’s family, were mischievously making false allegations.

In yesterday’s Irish Independent Anne Cadwallader wrote a piece in which she argued that those families who paid the ultimate price and were lied to deserve the truth. Joe O’Connor’s loved ones are one family that was lied to by the IRA, which denied all involvement in his killing. Anne Cadwallader was probably lied to as well as part of the planned cover up. 13 years on the family of Joe O’Connor deserve the same degree of truth that the families covered by Lethal Allies are entitled to. Anything less is what HL Mencken suggested: rumble and bumble, flap and doodle, balder and dash.

If you believe that the Provisional IRA are not responsible, you should be eager for an inquiry to establish who is killing republicans in Ballymurphy, and to prevent further violence between republicans.
My family has suffered greatly for our republican beliefs. As you know, my father was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries, directed by British intelligence to shield a high level mole within the Provisional IRA with a code-name of “Steak Knife”.
Since my son’s murder, my grieving family and those who have spoken for justice have been threatened.
An independent community inquiry could establish the truth, halt the prospects of further violence between republicans and affirm the right of all republicans to their political beliefs.
I urge you to endorse the call for an independent community human rights inquiry into the murder of my son Joseph O Connor.

Sincerely,

Margaret O’Connor

A Belfast Mother's Appeal