In Defence of Anthony McIntyre

By AM Saturday, May 24, 2014

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Lyra McKee speaks out against Sinn Fein's campaign of villification in the wake of the British police arrest of its party leader Gerry Adams.  It initially featured in The Muckraker on 12 May 2014.

In the wake of Gerry Adams arrest, a lot has been written over the past couple of weeks about the Boston College tapes.

Throughout the furore, one person has been consistently demonised, other than Jean McConville herself: Anthony McIntyre. Anthony was the researcher who interviewed Republican ex-prisoners for the Boston project. He’s been denounced, in various graffiti around Belfast and by Sinn Fein themselves, as a “tout” and an “informer”, a disgruntled ex-Provo motivated by his hatred of the Peace Process and the feeling that Gerry “sold him out”.

As a journalist, I have to be impartial – making judgements based on the evidence I see before me. But all journalists have biases – some just choose to hide them instead of putting them aside (I think that’s wrong but I’ll save that for another post). Growing up, Anthony McIntyre is not someone I ever imagined I’d be defending. As I’ve noted before, I’m the second generation product of a mixed marriage. My Granddad was an Army man, a Scottish Protestant who married a Derry Catholic. I grew up in a Republican area where I took a lot of flak for that. One half of my family line were considered ‘legitimate targets’. And consequently, growing up, I hated the IRA. I hated everyone who sympathised with them and I hated everyone who served for them. I hated them because I thought they hated me, because when I played with their children in the street, they told me all British soldiers should be shot and I felt ashamed of who I was and where I’d come from. Like a lot of people in this country, I had my own emotional baggage to deal with, most of it misconceptions and stereotypes. The hatred wasn’t limited to Republicans – I had plenty in reserve for those on the Loyalist side too.

In hindsight, I realise I was a bigot. I didn’t hate anyone of the same religion but I looked down on people who “had a past”. I thought myself above all ex-prisoners, whether they be Republican or Loyalist. These were evil people who did evil things and I would never do such evil things because I was a good person and above all that.

Then I met Anthony.

If you’d have told 15 year old me that, less than 10 years from now, I’d be friends with an ex-Provo, I’d have thought you were crazy.

Anthony challenged every stereotype that bigoted 15 year old me had of ex-prisoners. Through months of conversations that began with me ringing to ask a question for a story, I came to see that he wasn’t a monster. While I will never agree with the decision to take a human life, it became clear that he – and many others, whether they’d been in the UVF or the INLA – had not been motivated by a desire to inflict suffering. Many had been frightened, naive teenagers. ‘Signing up’, for them, seemed like the only way to protect their community. And once in the organisation, there was no way out. In one story I heard about an induction for UVF recruits, a 15 year old boy was told: “The only way out of this organisation is in a coffin.”

The pain and suffering these recruits caused can never be excused or minimised. And many, unfortunately, were just plain evil. But through getting to know Anthony – and other ex-prisoners – through my job, I started to believe that just as many had been misguided, used by older men who should have known better.

I’ve said all this before. But it seems important now, more than ever, to say it again. Anthony has been savaged in the press and on social media over the last two weeks. Very few have come out to defend him. He’s been denounced by people who have never met him.

So here’s my two cents, for what it’s worth: the Anthony I know is a good person. He’s decent and honourable and sweet. What’s been characterised as his “anti-peace process” agenda is his fury that – as he put it to me last week – “Not one fucking life was worth it.” Every day, like most ex-prisoners, he has to live with what he’s done. He carries both his own sins and the sins of his comrades. Sometimes, publicly, he says he has no regrets – but in private moments, I see him torn by anguish. I see it in the eyes of many ex-combatants. Now that we have peace – even an uneasy one – the body count weighs more heavily on their minds as they wonder if war was really necessary.

The Boston tapes case has brought financial ruin to Anthony and his wife, Carrie. They owe 15,000 in legal fees, having spent years trying to prevent the tapes from falling into the hands of the PSNI. It wasn’t about denying victims justice but ensuring that, one day, the truth would come out. There is so much we still don’t know about The Troubles. Through the Boston tapes, we had a chance at seeing history through the eyes of those who participated in it. That opportunity is gone – and will probably never return.

Of course, above everything and everyone else, the one person we must remember in all this is Jean McConville – and her family. They didn’t deserve any of this and neither did she. Part of me feels guilty for typing this post, knowing that so much attention has been focused on Adams and his detention instead of their suffering.

But Gerry Adams has an entire party machinery and God knows who else to protect him from his critics and “the dark side” of policing. Anthony McIntyre does not. He’s an easy target. His enemies know this. As his friend, I feel obliged to speak up.