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| IRA bomb maker; Good bomber or bad bomber? |
"An alleged former senior IRA member
charged with aiding and abetting the murder of Jean McConville has been refused
bail.
The Belfast mother-of-10 was taken from her flat by the IRA in December
1972.Ivor Bell, 77, alleged to have been a senior member in the Provisional IRA in the 1970s, was arrested at his home in west Belfast, on Tuesday.
He was refused bail on Saturday after a police officer told the court there was a high risk of him absconding. A solicitor for Mr Bell told Belfast Magistrates Court his client was not involved in the murder of Jean McConville.
He said the case against him was based on the Boston College tapes and "the evidence was not credible". - BBC News, March 22, 2014
The McConville children have a chance at seeing justice done in a case that is decades old. Boston College lost a court case to keep interviews with IRA members from the police. Academics trying to compile an oral history of the Troubles should remember that the voices of the murdered and their children have a right to be heard and to seek justice.
The most compelling voice is that of Michael McConville who was 11 years old and witnessed the kidnapping of his mother. This is what he told he told John Mooney in an interview that was published in The Sunday Times, March 23, 2014.
"The look of terror on his mother’s face has remained etched on his memory for over 40 years. Michael McConville, then aged 11, vividly remembers the night the IRA took his mother. The knock on the door of their home in the Divis flats in west Belfast came at about 6.30pm on December 7, 1972.
“They just barged in when my sister opened the door. Some of them wore masks, others didn’t. They were shouting and screaming,” he said. “I held on to my mother. I think I attached myself to her leg. I was crying, refusing to let go. My mother was in a terrible state. The IRA had taken her the night before and beaten her up. She was terrified. She was crying. I think she probably knew what was going to happen.”
The intruders were local members of the IRA, both men and women. “They tried to calm us down because we were all screaming. My brother Arthur, who was a teenager, said he wanted to go with her. They said OK, and the two of them left, but when Arthur walked down the stairwell of the flats, they put a gun to his head and told him to go home. That was the last we ever saw of her,” McConville recalled.
“I think about it every day. It haunts me. I think she knew what they were going to do. I can still see the terror in her eyes. That look has never left me.”
Jean McConville was 37 and the mother of 10 children. She had been widowed the previous January when her husband Arthur died from cancer. In the months before she was abducted, she had had a series of nervous breakdowns, attempted to take her own life and suffered depression as she tried to cope with her loss and raise 10 children alone.
She is believed to have been interrogated for up to six days until an IRA gunman murdered her with a single shot to the back of the head. Her body was then taken to Shilling Hill beach on the Carlingford peninsula in Co Louth, where she was buried.
The IRA didn’t claim responsibility for the killing. Instead she became one of the Disappeared — paramilitary victims whose bodies were buried in remote bogs south of the border. The McConville family’s ordeal was just beginning.
The IRA returned a week later to take Michael, who had recognised at least three members of the gang: a woman and two men from the local area. The boy was hooded, strapped to a chair and beaten with hurleys in a disused house.
“They held me for three hours. They said that if I said anything about the IRA, they would kill me. They placed a hood over my head, but I could see them through it. They hit me. They fired a cap gun to frighten me and put a knife in my mouth,” he said. “These people were supposed to be protecting our community and this is what they were doing to an 11-year-old boy. I still see them around today. I still won’t make a statement to the police in case they get to my family. The IRA haven’t gone away; people just think they have.” - John Mooney, The Sunday Times
I hope and pray that the McConville children will find some measure of peace. They deserve to have their story heard.
The original article I wrote on April 24, 2013 is posted below. I have updated the links.
Matthew 19:14
But Jesus said to them: Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such.
Whether you are a Catholic, or not, we can probably agree that Jesus was not asking us to send children to Him in pieces, whether from an abortionist's tools, or from nails and ball bearings packed in a container with explosives.
Numbers 14:18
The Lord is patient and full of mercy, taking away iniquity and wickedness, and leaving no man clear, who visitest the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.
There is another way to destroy children without tearing their bodies apart. Old fools who have carefully nursed their bitterness and hatred pass on the darkness in their souls to their children, who in turn become old fools themselves. Generation after generation learn to hate, and some will kill while others will provide support to those who kill in their name. One generation keeps another generation from the kingdom of heaven.
The United States, like every other nation in the world has a history that includes sociopaths who place bombs to kill and maim anyone that are unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of their bombs.
President Obama has a close personal friend and political ally, Bill Ayers, who is an unrepentant bomber. Mr. Ayers is a specialist in educational theory, and is well respected by the academic establishment.
Who the victim or victims may be is of no consequence to the bombers, just so there are victims is all that matters. The action soon becomes killing and maiming for the self gratification of the actor. For the bomber the intoxicating power of generating fear, and adulation transcends any political, or religious beliefs. There is no difference between the bombers and serial killers. They both kill because they enjoy killing. The bombers use belief to attract people who will admire the bomber and feed the bomber's ego.
When you read the following paragraphs do not assume that I am pointing out that Irish Catholic Boston got what it deserved in the Marathon bombing. I am merely pointing out the never ending cycle of violence that infects the entire world. People become objects, not individuals that have a right to their own lives whether in Ireland, the United States, or any country you choose to name when they play the patriot game. The patriot game is played by people of every color and belief. Take a look at your own beliefs, whether on the right or the left, but remember a just society cannot be built upon a foundation of violence. One sin does not mitigate another sin.
The following quotes comes from a blog titled Periscope that Niall O'Dowd writes for Irish Central.
"In this great country called America two Chechen boys came to live. Their family was fleeing persecution and had been made refugees according to some reports.
Okay, they may have been foreign and had difficulty, a little, with the language, they may have encountered some racism, but hey, they were in America which had accepted their refugee family and they had the same chance as everyone else in a great country.
In thanks they wanted to blow everybody up.
They did kill a beautiful little boy, a wonderful restaurant manager and a Chinese immigrant and wounded 170 others. They also killed an Irish American cop and wounded another one.
Now I want to throw up when people come on the radio as they have been, especially from overseas, saying America doesn’t understand and they essentially deserved what they got, because they - well they don’t like Muslims.
Wrong! We don’t like fanatics of any kind, people who blow up other people because they may not quite fit in."
I hope that Mr. O'Dowd is including IRA bombers in the last sentence that I have quoted from his blog.
The following quotes come from an article written by Cahir O'Doherty, published by Irish Central on April 19th 2013.
"On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal to keep secret interviews with former Irish Republican Army members from being turned over to police authorities in Northern Ireland.
The court’s move leaves in place a lower court ruling ordering Boston College to give the Justice Department portions of interviews recorded with convicted IRA car bomber Dolours Price.Dolours Price believed that the Peace Accords were a betrayal of the IRA. This is one more indication that violence for the sake of violence becomes the real goal. Like the drug addict chasing that first high the bomber seeks even more violence to satisfy their desire to kill.
Price, 61, who died in January, was interviewed with other former IRA members between 2001 and 2006 as part of the Belfast Project, a Boston College oral history study that was created to be a resource for journalists, scholars and historians studying The Troubles.
But now federal officials want to forward the secret recordings to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), who are investigating the IRA’s 1972 killing of Belfast widow Jean McConville.
Jean McConville was the mother of ten children. One of her sons was involved with the IRA. She was suspected of being an informer. When she was kidnapped I believe her youngest child was approximately six years old. She was a Catholic convert. Dolours Price was the driver for the kidnap team. Jean McConville was probably tortured for six days and then shot in the back of the head. She was buried on a beach in the Republic Ireland.
Researchers Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre, who had assured their subjects that their interviews would remain secret until after their deaths, are now arguing that the participants’ lives could be endangered if their identities are publicly revealed because they could potentially be branded as informers."
We know what happens to informers. The Republic of Ireland still has plenty of beaches.
Brendan Moore, the National President of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, told the Irish Voice, “It’s obviously an egregious application of the MLAT. It’s undermining academic enquiry in this country. Clearly it’s also a fishing expedition on the part of the PSNI. They’re looking for people to be implicated. It’s also most unfortunate in terms of international relations. I think we are all under threat if treaties are going to be twisted in this way.”
With all due respect to Mr. Moore denying justice to victims of terrorists just moves the cycle of violence forward. I hope Boston College will also interview the bombing victims, as well as the children of Jean McConville. The police have an obligation to investigate and speak for the dead victims of the terrorists.
https://bostoncollegesubpoena.wordpress.com/category/jean-mcconville/
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2169
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Irish-groups-vow-to-fight-Boston-College-IRA-interviews-fight-to-stop-NI-police-access-203416951.html
http://www.irishcentral.com/story/news/periscope/im-sick-and-tired-of-hearing-america-blamed-for-latest-terrorist-outrage---us-gave-the-two-chechen-boys-everything-and-they-repaid-in-bombs-203903331.html
