‘Lost Boys’ Film Adds Fuel To Kincora Fire And One Question: ‘Why Did The BBC Drop This Film?’ – Re- Blogged Posts which originally appeared on Ed Moloney’s site, The Broken Elbow

‘Lost Boys’ Film Adds Fuel To Kincora Fire And One Question: ‘Why Did The BBC Drop This Film?’

I had the opportunity yesterday to watch the new Kincora film made by Belfast’s own film company Alleycats. Called ‘Lost Boys’ it asks a simple but necessary question: was the disappearance and murder of four Belfast schoolboys in the 1970’s linked to the subsequent Kincora scandal, which broke some few years afterwards, revealing that all the employees at the home for wayward boys had been abusing inmates for years?

It is a well-researched film which delves into the bizarre world of Belfast pedophiles at the start of the Troubles and asks a question which we journalists should have asked at the time: how, or rather why, did the wholesale rape of young boys go undetected, and not just at Kincora, for such a considerable period of time?

This is not an activist film, advocating action here but inaction elsewhere. Alleycats has simply set out the evidence – and such as treasure trove of evidence did they amass – which says that Kincora can not be seen in isolation but as one aspect of a complex interactive pedophile tableau that embraced an unusually high number of paramilitary and hardline political activists.

And so it was that in the aftermath of August 1969, that British intelligence must have come across (maybe stumbled upon is what really happened) Belfast’s pedophile world, a world that was peopled by some well connected Unionist and hardline Loyalist activists . Not a huge number of them but enough to wonder where their Catholic counterparts sought diversion? (Ans: in the sacristies) And enough for the spooks to put resources into penetrating mainstream political and paramilitary Loyalism.

British spooks had another reason to have interest in that world and one specific part of it especially. One of the leading pedophiles was William McGrath, Kincora’s housekeeper, well known in Orange circles and Loyalist politics, a friend of Ian Paisley, an entree to the two worlds, secular and religious, that defined Loyalism. McGrath had set up a paramilitary group called Tara which the UVF had joined en masse after Gusty Spence was jailed for the 1966 Malvern Street murder. In spookdom, he fell under the heading: a person of interest.

Both MI5 and MI6 would have been guilty of incompetence had they not made hay with all of this but surely even their most hard-skinned members must have blanched at their part in the destruction of so many young lives.

Feel under the skin of this movie and that is what you find.

Not everyone associated with this film is worthy of praise. It was supposed to be a BBC co-production but the people in Ormeau Avenue got cold feet and withdrew, denying the film a high profile screening.

But in an act that betrays the truth, the BBC told Alleycats that it could retain the rights to the film and get it screened wherever it could, a process which the production company began in the last two or so weeks. So the film is good enough to watch in the cinema but not in the living room. Really?

Anyway, if you do get the chance to watch ‘Lost Boys’, take it and wonder how spies get to sleep at night…….

The BBC and the Kincora Files

By Chris Moore

Veteran BBC journailst Chris Moore describes the perils and obstacles of covering the Kincora scandal for an employer seemingly more intent on keeping MI5 informed and protecting powerful political figures

1 JOINING THE BBC

In 1979 I moved from newspapers into the world of radio and television with BBC Northern Ireland.

As it happened, my first day on the BBC payroll was uneventful for me – but yet it was one of the biggest news days in the history of the Northern Ireland conflict. I was due to report for duty on Bank Holiday Monday, August 27, 1979.

But I got a call on the Friday before telling me not to start then because it was a Bank Holiday and there was to be a reduced 10-minute television news programme around six o’clock instead of the usual half hour.

So I spent the Bank Holiday with my family touring round the Mountains of Mourne and enjoying a picnic on a hilltop we walked to after parking the car off a scenic route winding through the Mournes.

It felt remote and was so beautifully tranquil as we enjoyed our sandwiches.

Our peace was shattered by two very loud explosions – one swiftly after the other. The serenity of the Mournes was violated by whatever had caused this sudden disturbance.

We looked at each other in utter puzzlement. We concluded in our complete ignorance of what had truly caused these loud explosions and agreed these must have been quarry blasts. There was no other immediately obvious conclusion and so we finished our picnic and the peacefulness of the Mournes quickly returned.

We thought nothing more about it as we continued our journey through the beautiful surroundings of the Mournes in my Renault 5 with enforced car radio silence as the damned thing was malfunctioning at the time. A news reporter without a functioning car radio news service – now thatwas an issue that needed urgent attention!

We got home after eight that night and unpacked the car. We made tea and toast and sat down to watch the Nine O’Clock News on BBC-1. For the next twenty minutes we were stunned into silence initially until we overcame our shock at the news we were watching and found voice to express our astonishment of what we were trying to take in.

The headline revealed the murder of Lord Mountbatten and three other members of his party killed by an IRA bomb on his boat Shadow that he kept in Mullaghmore in Co Sligo in the Republic of Ireland where he had a holiday home, Classibawn Castle near the small village of Cliffoney.

In all seven people boarded Shadow that sunny day. Along with Lord Mountbatten were his daughter Patricia and her husband Lord John Brabourne and their 14 year old twins Timothy and Nicholas. Lord Brabourne’s mother – the dowager Lady Doreen Brabourne – had joined the party along with a 15-year-old family friend Paul Maxwell from Fermanagh in Northern Ireland who worked on the boat. Maxwell and Nicholas Brabourne died in the blast while Lady Brabourne died the next day.

For around 20 minutes we absorbed the details of this savage act of murder. We wondered about the daring-do of a leading member of the Royal family keeping a holiday home in the land where Royalty had many enemies in the armed Republican movement. How had he survived so long with this seeming act of bravado?

And then came the second story of the day 20 minutes or so into the main news programme of the day on BBC – the Nine O’Clock News. And wait for this…the second story reported the deaths of 18 soldiers in an IRA double bomb ambush at what became known as the Narrow Water ambush.

It was a shocking moment for me. Here was the BBC giving us 20 minutes on the life and death of a leading member of the Royal family and the three other individuals unfortunate to have accepted an invitation from their friend Lord Louis Mountbatten for a fun bank holiday day out on his boat.

But after twenty engrossing minutes learning about the death of a British WW2 hero and a leading member of the Royal family – and almost as an afterthought – the BBC informed us about the other news of the day – 18 soldiers had been killed by the IRA in a double bomb ambush at Narrow Water Castle between Newry and Warrenpoint.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. But it did explain the two loud explosions we heard earlier in the day while enjoying our picnic in the Mournes between Newcastle and Kilkeel.

The BBC coverage made me very uncomfortable because it clearly suggested that my new employers regarded the heaviest death toll for the British Army in the 10 years since its arrival in Northern Ireland and the 18 lost lives as of less importance or significance that the attack and murder of a leading member of the Royal family. In my mind the BBC coverage of Lord Mountbatten’s demise and the savage deaths of 18 British soldiers revealed a disturbing BBC perception that somehow obliged them to adhere to a kind of hierarchy of victims of Northern Ireland’s conflict.

The privileged class establishment figure was clearly regarded as more important than the State’s working class doing their bit on the front line. As far as I was concerned, an impression was undoubtedly created regarding my new employers. And it was not a wholesome one.

So began my career in the BBC. It was a challenge. It meant learning an entirely different code of journalism. The switch from print reportage to broadcast journalism on radio and television required some adjustment.

2. WILLIAM McGRATH, KINCORA HOUSEFATHER WAS AN MI5 AGENT; SPY AGENCY NOBBLES EARLY UK GOVT PROBE

Within months I would become embedded with a story that led me into my first ever long-term investigation. It was January 24, 1980 when Irish Independent reporter, the late Peter McKenna, hit the front page with a story about an unidentified boys’ home in East Belfast where boys in care were being sexually abused.

It took only a few phone calls to establish the home in question was the Kincora Working Boys Hostel at 236 Upper Newtownards Road in Belfast. And it wasn’t long before I was totally absorbed in a story that for the past 40 years has continued to mystify and horrify in equal measures the attention of the Northern Ireland public.

Peter McKenna’s story led to a police investigation that resulted in the trial of the three male care staff at Kincora along with three others the police discovered as child sex abusers at other State-run homes for underage and underprivileged children. All six were convicted.

The three jailed Kincora staff were: Warder Joe Mains who got six years; his deputy Raymond Semple, five years and house father William McGrath who received a four-year prison sentence.

It was after they were convicted in December 1981 that the legal constraints of the trial were removed and the centre of the political intrigue that followed was identified as William McGrath.

This bible-thumping evangelical paedophile bigot was preaching the gospel of fear – predicting in the seventies that there would blood on the streets of Northern Ireland during a Republican uprising. He boasted to his followers in the paramilitary group he set up, Tara, that he based his claims – which turned out to be true – on information he received from British intelligence sources.

He established his own Orange Lodge which stood out from all the others because of McGrath’s sense of Irishness which allowed him to put a Gaelic inscription on the lodge’s banner.

I had good sources in the RUC team investigating Kincora and two of them informed me that McGrath’s claims about getting information from British intelligence were true because he was their agent. In late night meetings in deserted car parks, I was told that my stories were ruffling feathers in London more than in Northern Ireland.

So what was so sensitive about the Kincora hostel that MI5 were prepared to use their unique position to manipulate the British government into covering-up their true role in Kincora?

I don’t know for sure what lies behind the government hiding official State papers until 2065 in one case and in another to 2085. I have seen secret State papers dated back to the 1982-1983 period of discussion about setting up the public inquiry under retired Judge William Hughes. In those papers the MI5 legal adviser urges the government not to give a full public inquiry under the 1921 Act as its powers to compel documents and personnel in MI5 could lead to embarrassing disclosures about how MI5 was involved in an operation to spy on Protestant political leaders that linked to Kincora. Judge Hughes is therefore nobbled into confining his Terms of Reference [TOR] to looking at the social care failings…which is exactly what he did.

But whatever secrets MI5 and the British government are preventing us from knowing about even to this day ensure that their secrecy adds to the public perception that fans the flames of a complete lack of trust in the government and MI5 to be totally open and accountable. Kincora has become Britain’s unwanted child and my efforts to report it on the BBC led to a variety of strange occurrences that made me more aware that the BBC was not immune from political pressures.

I think of the strike action taken throughout the United Kingdom by the National Union of Journalists over what was seen as a direct intervention by the then Conservative Home Secretary Leon Brittan over government concerns that a film on a unionist and a republican was somehow giving too much air time to a man with an IRA past and a future Sinn Fein leader.

There was among some of us within the BBC a regular concern about government presence in the corporation and interference in the way the BBC interpreted freedom of speech. It was well known for instance that BBC recruitment regularly accepted university graduates that had already been recruited elsewhere into Britain’s secret services.

3. RUC OFFICER’S FREELANCE PROBE OF PEDOPHILE RING LED TO KINCORA, SURVEILLANCE SHOWED NIO & RUC MEMBERS VISITED HOME

Looking back to my endeavours in the early 80’s to get to the truth of Kincora leads me to recall a story provided to me by a police officer source – let’s call him David to preserve his anonymity. In 1975, yes, five years before the Kincora story emerged, David was investigating allegations of child sex abuse involving a 15-year-old boy in care at a home in Newtownards. I’d been referred to the police officer by the social worker who had called in the police after the boy alleged a relative had sexually abused him and taken him to other men to engage in sex. The boy was in care because his parents were separated and living in England.

David’s inquiries led him to Kincora. He began to watch Kincora. He built up a profile of people coming and going at Kincora who had no legitimate business in going into the building. He told me he took photographs of individuals; captured car registrations and identified the owners. Among those he says he positively identified were Justices of the Peace; two police officers; businessmen and two Englishmen who were officials from the Northern Ireland Office based at Stormont.

I tracked down the boy through his father whom I visited at his London home. His father told me when his son first made his allegations he, the father, returned to Belfast so speak to police. He told how the police showed him what he called ‘pretty innocent’ photographs of his son. But he told me he was also shown another photograph which showed his son involved in ‘homosexual acts with other men and with other boys.’

When I arrived in Lancashire, not far from Liverpool, the boy – now a man in his early 20’s – was expecting me. We chatted and he agreed to be interviewed in silhouette. We did the interview and he admitted being used by a relative to provide sexual favours for between six and 10 men. I’dshown him a copy of the Irish Independent and the Irish Times in which there was a reference to a ‘prostitution ring.’ What did he make of that? He told me he knew his relative ran one and took him to these other men to have sex with them.

I returned to Belfast with my filmed interview with a young man describing his rape and sexual abuse orchestrated by a relative. We ran his story on BBC news and in a BBC Spotlight programme around February 11, 1982. This was a headline catching story…

Next day the Northern Ireland Complaints Commissioner Stephen McGonagle called me to say three of his panel of five on the ‘private inquiry’ set up by Secretary of State James Prior had resigned after seeing the interview with the man in Lancashire so that ended that inquiry. They said they felt that the RUC had failed to carry out an effective investigation.

Back in 1975, David had been ordered to drop his Kincora investigations and his appeal for more manpower to expand his investigation was rejected. He was ordered to prosecute only the relative -a man called William ‘Billy’ Baird who was subsequently convicted on May 18, 1976 on three counts of buggery and one of gross indecency. But now there was a developing possibility that through me and the BBC his story could be aired.

4. SENIOR BBC EXECUTIVE LEAKS NAME OF POLICE SOURCE TO RUC

But then a strange thing then happened. David stopped taking my calls. No mobile phones in those days so contact was dependent on landline telephones. Eventually, I persuaded my source to meet me outside his station at our usual meeting place on the Lisburn Road in Belfast.

What he told me at that meeting left me stunned, angry and feeling in some way betrayed and isolated. David said I had let him down. David had been spoken to firmly by his bosses that they knew he was my source for stories that had been publicised in my reports on BBC. What was going on? How did they know?

The answer to that was the cause of my discomfort. David said he had been hauled over the coals because one of my superiors in the BBC had allegedly informed an Asst. Chief Constable that David was my source and had identified him by name. Wow! Really? If David was correct, in my first ever investigative story I had been betrayed by someone within my place of work and who had also betrayed the principle of source protection adopted by journalists. I learned a painful lesson about trust. I thought I knew who had given up my source but never confronted that individual. Just learned an important message about trust!

Understandably David severed all communication with me. With his disappearance from my life went all the material he had gathered and which he said he might hand over to me someday as it was obviously extremely relevant to Kincora. So if the aim was to kill off any prospect of a Kincora story emerging, it was now gone. Dead in the water, as they say. Somehow someone had managed to close down this potentially harmful information about Kincora.

The photographs, the identities of male visitors with unaccountable reasons for their attendance – the Justices of the Peace and the businessmen and the Englishmen who worked as civil servants at the Northern Ireland Office based at Stormont. I tracked David down in 2014 and asked him what had become of his Kincora material. “Destroyed when I left service,” he told me.

But when I look back at his disclosures to me and to what happened to end our connection I am bamboozled in the manner of the ending of our contact but now I am wondering if the closing down of his case and the closing down or our connection actually served MI5’s and the British government’s desire to dampen interest in Kincora. They closed him down and effectively silenced me and the BBC from developing that line of Kincora inquiry. Why?

But here’s something relevant I need to tell you. When in January 1980 the Kincora story made headlines, the RUC invited any officers who had been involved in any child sex investigations to meet with the Kincora investigation team at Knock HQ in Belfast. David went along and gave details of his investigation and the outcome. He fully expected to be seconded on to the Kincora investigation. He never heard another word about it.

And that is very strange. I mean what was it that attracted David to Kincora? Didn’t the police think it was worth pursuing an answer to that question? No, apparently not. The recent pathetic latest attempt by the British to keep MI5’s Kincora secrets secret was the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry [HIA] under the chairmanship of the late retired judge Anthony Hart.

Det. Ch. Supt. George Clarke in his statement to the HIA reflected on the Billy Baird case when he stated (Page KIN-1560): “It is noted that the boy who was the source/subject of this Spotlight programme and in respect of whose abuse prosecution had previously been directed, was never a resident at Kincora and had no links to Kincora at all. No further charges were brought as a result of this investigation.”

This was related to my interview with the relative of the late Billy Baird who spoke of being taken to between six and 10 other men by Billy Baird for the purposes of having sex with them. He told me about going to public toilets at Ward Park in Bangor and how Billy Baird would use his headlights or windscreen wipers as a means of signalling other men as to his presence there with a young boy. Or how he would be taken to a bar in East Belfast for sex sessions with other men. David told me about these venues and said he had checked them out and found out that the boy was correct.

As I said it was his first interview and our broadcast was the first to cover his story. Det. Ch. Supt. George Caskey personally heard this interview and he knew the boy told me about being taken to between six to 10 men for sex. I know this because when he interviewed me about it, Mr Caskey was able to read out details of the interview from a transcript he held in his hand. I wrote up the notes and typed out a statement for Mr Caskey and I have copies to hand.

Yet the police evidence to the HIA inquiry states that the subject of this story was never a resident at Kincora. So what? What is staggering is that in the weeks immediately after Kincora is publicly identified as a place of abuse for young boys in public care the police team set up to investigate Kincora is approached by a detective who found himself being led to Kincora in another child sex abuse case. He was way ahead of them. He had been watching Kincora and had gathered vital information such as car registrations and the identities of men coming and going at the hostel. Surely useful information? But no. They boy was not a resident of Kincora, so just leave it at that.

The question that should have been asked is what was it that led David to Kincora? What leads had he followed? So then the police tell the HIA inquiry that because the relative of Billy Baird was never a resident at Kincora no further charges were brought. Totally irrelevant that he was not a resident at Kincora.

A police detective (David) told the team set up to investigate Kincora about how he’d been drawn to the East Belfast home when investigating allegations that a 15-year-old schoolboy was being sexually abused by a male relative. That should at least have raised an interest – a coincidence or a timely lead to follow up? I do not know why David ended up there. He never told me. Did the police ever ask him when he turned up at headquarters armed with all the information? What did he say?

Because the survivor of a relative’s abuse had not been a resident at Kincora the police appeared to just rule it out and disregard it. Who ordered that David’s investigation should be closed down? And why was it closed down? Did anyone ask?

Had the police investigated thoroughly they might have discovered potential links between Billy Baird and William McGrath. Both were homosexual paedophiles. Both were in the Orange Order. Did they know one another either through the illegal and secretive homosexual community or through their interest in sex with boys or even perhaps through the Orange Order? Or all three? Is that not how paedophile rings work?

Surely it was worth finding out why David’s investigation of Billy Baird led him to conduct surveillance on Kincora five years before Kincora first came to public attention. And did that original 1980 police enquiry bother to check up on the names David had gathered? If so what was found? Or did no one in in the 1980 police investigation bother to follow up on what David had discovered five years earlier about Kincora? Did the 1980 police investigation report on why David was told to drop his investigation as it related to Kincora?

5. BBC’S LONDON LAWYER HELPS KILL OFF PROGRAMME SHOWING PAISLEY LIED ABOUT McGRATH CONNECTION – HEAD of NEWS & DEPUTY, HEAD OF PROGRAMMES, HEAD OF RADIO TOOK UNPRECEDENTED VOTE TO KILL ITEM

As it happens this was not the first strange occurrence during my Kincora reportage in the BBC. There was the occasion I spent an entire weekend preparing a story which would have put DUP leader Ian Paisley right on the spot about his failure to tell the truth about his connection to and knowledge of William McGrath. He brazenly held a news conference after being approached at his home by Irish Times journalists Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak. I was encouraged by my bosses to push hard over the weekend to get this story out.

At his news conference, Paisley insisted that he did not know McGrath was employed in Kincora; he simply did not know where McGrath was employed. Later Paisley said he did not know ‘anything about Kincora or McGrath until it broke’.

Seated just behind Paisley was his church secretary James Heyburn, someone who knew McGrath well enough to attend meetings in McGrath’s home and to sign as guarantor for a loan to buy a printer for use by Tara. Heyburn was adamant that he did not know of McGrath’s homosexuality. The aim of this press conference was to put as much distance as possible between Paisley and the convicted sex offender.

For weeks after the news conference I continued to dig around, becoming more and more fascinated by McGrath’s political connections and the apparent interest of the British intelligence services. It was during this period that I made something of a breakthrough when I found out that two of McGrath’s children had been married in the Free Presbyterian Martyrs Memorial Church on the Ravenhill Road in Belfast, the headquarters of Paisley’s own church. The marriage certificates of both Worthington and Elizabeth McGrath revealed that the officiating clergyman was one Ian Paisley. These facts had not been volunteered by Paisley at his news conference, which was held in a room at the same church on the Ravenhill Road.

On 25 February 1982 I obtained copies of the marriage certificates from the official registration office in Belfast. The first wedding – that of McGrath’s son William Worthington and Dora Dorothy Haire – took place on 15 June 1971. On the certificate McGrath’s home address is given as 4 Greenwood Avenue, off the Upper Newtownards Road, and William McGrath’s occupation is given as ‘clerk’. McGrath’s other son Harvey Andrew was a witness, along with Roberta Lunn.

The second certificate is for the marriage of McGrath’s daughter Elizabeth Jean Frances to Francis Millar on 22 January 1976. The McGraths’ home address is given as 188 Upper Newtownards Road and William McGrath’s stated occupation is given as ‘welfare officer.’

I was immediately struck by the thought that any minister involved in marrying the children of a man who had been such an active friend in politics going back many years would surely know something about the man and his family, would surely have had some idea of what the man did for a living. After all McGrath had been a member of the Paisley-led delegation which went to see Prime Minister Chichester-Clark in 1969, had visited Paisley’s home in the company of members of Tara such as Garland, in 1966 had gone to warn him that certain individuals were linking him with the UVF and had recruited men with him at the very church where the weddings had taken place.

Yet at his news conference, Paisley chose not to reveal that he had married two of McGrath’s children in his church – and one of the weddings had taken place after, on Paisley’s own admission, Miss Shaw had told him about McGrath. As a result Paisley claimed that he had personally confronted McGrath (whom he was frequently heard to call ‘Billy’) about serious allegations concerning his sexuality and told McGrath he would not be permitted to take part in the Gunpowder Plot services in the Free Presbyterian John Knox Church.

When I returned to the office that day I showed the marriage certificates to my bosses and they agreed that this was significant, given what Paisley had said at his news conference and now knowing some of what he chose not to say. They instructed me to continue working over the weekend to build towards a special report on the teatime television news on the Monday evening, 1 March. There was no mistaking their encouragement for this story and that they regarded it as having the potential for a major impact in the Kincora story.

It turned out to be a very busy weekend. On Friday 26 February Roy Garland got in touch with me and told me a London Sunday paper was planning to name him over the weekend. I had been in contact with Garland for many weeks but had agreed to conceal his name – up until this point he was known to the public only as Mr ‘X’. He was formerly a close associate of McGrath’s both in business, in membership of both McGrath’s Orange Lodge and Tara as well as being a Christian who for a time regarded McGrath as an evangelical mentor. But now he said he wanted to feel in control of his own destiny and if he was going to be forced out into the open he would rather choose the time and place. We therefore agreed to do a television interview on camera next day, the Saturday, at the BBC offices. With Garland forced into going public there was one other element of the story which could now be told. Sometime earlier Garland let me see a copy of the loan McGrath received for the printing machine, but because his name was prominent I could not use the document. Now this was going to be possible and it was going to reveal Paisley’s secretary Heyburn as a guarantor. The BBC’s head of News and Current Affairs at the time was an Englishman, Stephen Claypole, his deputy a local man, John Conway. All agreed on the Friday that I should work all weekend towards a lengthy report for the Monday programme, possibly a piece of ten minutes duration.

Filming took place on the Saturday, when Roy Garland came to the BBC and before doing an interview read a prepared statement seated in front of a film camera. We then did an interview about his life and times in Tara and his association with McGrath. On the teatime television news that Saturday evening we ran the story about Mr ‘X’ going public on his allegations about William McGrath and Kincora.

After a busy weekend, on the Monday I spent time with a film editor choosing the clips of Garland’s interview and statement for insertion in a report which I would link in the studio. The report was to be recorded on VT (video tape) for transmission on Scene Around Six. As I typed out my script in the reporters’ room, the pages were taken immediately to Claypole’s office where he and a BBC solicitor from London carefully read them. By late afternoon I had finished writing and a newsroom secretary had processed the script which she then ran off on a copier. Before the recording there was to be a viewing in the film editor’s cutting room. There was considerable excitement in the newsroom about the story, which looked as though it might run for almost twelve minutes.

Film editor Ray Allen had spliced the selected clips on to one reel and we were ready for the screening in front of the BBC management. Present in the cutting room were Stephen Claypole, Head of News and Current Affairs; John Conway, his deputy; Cecil Taylor, Head of Programmes; Don Anderson, Head of Radio; the BBC’s London solicitor and I. I read the script and on cue, Ray played in the clips of interview.

At its conclusion there was a discussion about the appropriateness of running with the story. Initially I was alarmed at the tone of the conversation although I suspected we were simply playing devil’s advocate, looking at what might happen in the worst case scenario. But the longer the discussion continued, the more alarmed I became.

There were few people in the room speaking up in favour of showing the item at all, and, amazingly, the very people who had encouraged me to work all weekend on this ‘special’ report which we had flagged at the end of the Saturday news story, were now ambivalent, to say the least. Programme time loomed and if we were going to drop the story, the news producer had to be informed so that other material could replace it. In the end someone, I cannot remember who, suggested we take a show of hands. This was incredible to me. Even more unbelievable was the vote. Only two people in that room voted in favour of transmitting the report. I was one of them. The second person was Don Anderson.

I was amazed and utterly confused. In my opinion too much attention was paid to the London solicitor who because he had not been present for the story from the beginning viewed the material as dangerous, fearing it might be seen as a gratuitous attack on Paisley. Even though it was pointed out several times that Paisley had had an opportunity to reveal the details of the wedding at his news conference but had chosen not to, and even though it was pointed out that by holding the news conference Paisley had thrown his role in the whole affair into the public arena, the solicitor could not be moved. I left the cutting room in disgust.

Although I was desperately disappointed by the refusal of the BBC to run with the marriage certificates story, I continued working on Kincora. But a show of hands to decide whether or not to run an important news story was new to me and in all my career thereafter, it was never repeated thankfully. The untransmitted film of Roy Garland’s first public interview lay in a box under my desk in Broadcasting House in Belfast – a victim of the strange U-turn that resulted in the decision not to broadcast what was a serious challenge to Paisley’s version of events.

6. A STRANGE ENCOUNTER WITH A BBC SECURITY OFFICER

There were more strange events relating to my coverage of Kincora at the BBC. What I am about to recount for you is a moment in my life that I cannot explain and which left me wondering about the true value of some BBC employees.

In June 1982, I was visited at the BBC offices in Belfast by two officers from the Sussex police – Supt. Gordon Harrison and Ch. Insp. Dick Flenley. The Ch. Const. of Sussex police, Sir George Terry, was reviewing Ch. Supt. George Caskey’s original investigation that concluded in the convictions of six men in December 1981. Terry was also supervising Caskey’s ongoing second investigation.

I was interviewed by Flenley and Harrison in news editor Stephen Claypole’s office. It proceeded in the clichéd good cop, bad cop manner for a short time. Stephen Claypole intervened and asked the two officers to leave the building. Next time I’d be accompanied by a BBC lawyer, he told them. I escorted the two men down one flight of stairs to the front door and said goodbye.

But as I turned to return to my office one of the security men spoke to me and I stopped to talk. Were those two of the English police officers here about Kincora, he asked. Yes, I said, reckoning that he would have known that when they entered the building and spoke to someone on the reception desk. But he then asked something I immediately thought was intriguing. He asked me if they were here about my untransmitted film. I was taken aback. What do you know about untransmitted film I asked. He told me: “I was told about it when I had dinner at an Asst. Ch. Constable’s house at the weekend.” I asked how he knew an Asst. Ch. Constable so well. He told me he used to carry the diplomatic bag between the Middle East and London and that for a time he had played a key role in liaising between Special Branch and MI5. I agreed to meet him later that evening when he finished his shift.

He took me to a room which I thought was too public and there was quite a bit of pedestrian traffic. So I took him to a quiet room of choice at the end of a corridor. We sat in a room lit only by a street light outside one of the windows. For the next 30-40 minutes I asked him about vetting

system for officers in secret services. I did not take notes – just sat and talked. I asked if an MI5 officer could survive being convicted of soliciting for sex at male toilets in a London railway station that resulted in newspaper coverage and a £100 fine? His answer I do not recall but there was little by way of enlightenment in this chat. But there was an interesting conclusion to the evening.

After the meeting as we walked down a darkened corridor he stopped me to say: “I still have good contacts Chris. If you want to give me the names of the four Under-Secretaries at Stormont I can have them checked out for you.” I was staggered. I hadn’t mentioned four Under-Secretaries during our conversation. So I was surprised he knew that I was interested in four such individuals. I had of course told one person in the BBC about my interest in these four but had not provided names given my previous experience with David. I said I would think about his kind offer.

I didn’t take him up on his offer. And we never again spoke about any of this. Life resumed as it had been before this interlude and me and the security man went back to normal daily greetings.

7. CASKEY HELPS TO CONFIRM MI5 INTERFERENCE IN KINCORA PROBE

In 1990 I was told about MI5 obstruction of the Kincora investigations by the officer who led the Kincora investigation, (the late) Ch. Supt. George Caskey. I took the story to London and became involved in a one-hour BBC-2 film for Public Eye. With a bit of help from Mr Caskey in Belfast we traced a retired Army Intelligence officer to his hotel business in Yorkshire.

This was former Army Intelligence officer Capt. Brian Gemmell – the man who told Ch. Supt. Caskey that he tried to get MI5 to allow him to report to police his suspicions about children at risk in Kincora from housefather William McGrath.

Mr Gemmell – who has since died – told us he had put a report through to MI5 about William McGrath being a homosexual and potentially a risk to children in his care at Kincora. He told Peter Taylor – who presented the programme – during an interview in silhouette that MI5 officer Ian Cameron had called him in for a meeting at which he was told in no uncertain terms that MI5 was not interested in gossip about homosexuals. He was shocked that MI5 were apparently closing down an opportunity to gain a foot hold into William McGrath’s Orange, unionist and loyalist world. At the time we were told that there was some MI5 interest in Kincora but it was really an insignificant part of a much wider MI5 intelligence gathering operation. The emphasis was on ‘insignificant.’

Well I think we know differently now, don’t we. Shortly after this programme was broadcast in 1990 a very good friend of mine who was a government press officer in Belfast found himself on the receiving end of a bit of MI5 muscle. He was given a rollicking and warned about his future conduct if he wanted to keep his job and his pension. What had he done? Unknown to me he had asked a question that related to MI5 and Kincora immediately in the aftermath of the BBC Public Eye broadcast. The result was that like David the policeman, he stopped taking my calls. Months went by…but nothing I could do or say was persuading him to meet me. I was lucky that I turned up at a Press facility for the BBC where my friend was working and where he could not avoid me. When I eventually got him on his own I was able to find out what had happened. I noticed my friend was extremely nervous and was constantly looking around and obviously in fear of being discovered talking to me. He explained that MI5 told him to break off contact with me if he wanted to finish his career with a good pension. He said they told him I was at risk if I persisted with the Kincora story and went so far as to say I could end up in prison like many others if I carried on.

For the second time a valued source of mine who had dared to help me with Kincora was bullied into giving up contact with me. And why were they silenced? MI5 knew they were telling the truth and had to be stopped.

It was at this point, in 1991, I decided to take a break from Kincora and Northern Ireland and went to Manchester to work on an investigative sports current affairs BBC-2 programme called On TheLine. I remained there for two years.

My press officer contact is sadly no longer with us.

FOOTNOTE: During my two years in Manchester a large crate of my office belongings in BBC Belfast went missing – I’d unpacked my desk to leave it free for someone else to use. As well as losing all my notes stored in the BBC’s earliest version of newsroom computers I could not find any trace of the crate of belongings. Inside the box was a corduroy bullet proof jacket issued at one dangerous moment in my BBC line of duty as well as pens, notebooks and the kind of paraphernalia you store in your desk. Also in the box was the untransmitted film material intended for broadcast with my story about how Paisley said he knew little about McGrath when in fact McGrath was a member of his Martyr’s Memorial Church and Paisley was the officiating clergyman at weddings of two of McGrath’s children. In this circumstance I was left to ponder the whereabouts of my desk contents. And was their disappearance due to negligence on my part or did someone happily dispose of them? Who knows?

Moutbatten featured at the start of my BBC career when he was assassinated in an indiscriminate IRA bomb that killed several others. And as things have turned out recently perhaps he is the real reason for the British government and MI5 to want to hide away the truth about MI5’s links to Kincora until 2085. Thanks to distinguished historian and author Andrew Lownie in his book, ‘The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves,’ evidence is beginning to emerge that Mountbatten was a paedophile who had sexual relations with one former resident of Kincora trafficked to his castle in Co Sligo. And recently I spoke to a survivor of Mountbatten’s alleged abuse inside Kincora who said he was raped twice by Mountbatten in the office there. And there’s more evidence in FBI files on Lord Mounttbatten and his wife. The FBI focussed on Mountbatten’s homosexuality and his “perversion for young boys” and described Mountbatten’s wife’s infidelity with a number of men. The FBI report described the Mountbattens’ as being “considered persons of extremely low morals.”

It may yet prove to be another example of the kind I saw on my first day of employment at the BBC where the establishment places the protection of its most honoured and privileged citizens above those with less political clout and who are regarded as disposable. As things stand in the absence of some truthful disclosures from MI5 and the British government it does seem to offer a reasonable explanation for the battle to hide away Britain’s most unwanted child.

Tomás Ó Flatharta