Asking the Awkward Questions

Monday December 02, 2002 14:34

by IRISH REPUBLICAN SOCALIST PARTY

IRISH REPUBLICAN SOCALIST PARTY 1 December 2002 Asking the Awkward Questions Terry Harkin Over the last few weeks assisting with the IRSP's effort to expose the use - by an unreconstructed RUC - of child informers to spy on their own people. I was struck with the lack of interest expressed by the media, Policing Board and world in general. Here we were, a legitimate political party with what by any standards was a major story. It had all the elements - sleaze, child abuse, paramilitaries and crooked cops.

IRISH REPUBLICAN SOCALIST PARTY
1 December 2002

Asking the Awkward Questions
Terry Harkin

Over the last few weeks assisting with the IRSP's effort to expose the use
- by an unreconstructed RUC - of child informers to spy on their own
people. I was struck with the lack of interest expressed by the media,
Policing Board and world in general. Here we were, a legitimate political
party with what by any standards was a major story. It had all the elements
- sleaze, child abuse, paramilitaries and crooked cops.

The story as we seen it was this: during August of this year an RUC/PSNI
patrol picked up a drunk, confused and very frightened 13 year old boy with
learning difficulties. They arrested him on suspicion of "going equipped to
steal a car" and took him to the nearest RUC/PSNI barracks. Once there he
was interviewed, illegally without his parents or Social Services being
informed. He was threatened that he would be charged with offences if he
did not spy on his own community. A community that at that point in time
was under daily attack from armed loyalist thugs. The deal was simple -
agree to work for the RUC/PSNI, observing and reporting back to his
handlers on the movements and activities of those volunteers of the Irish
National Liberation Army suspected of involvement in the by now 24 hour a
day defence of North Belfast, go to prison, or worse. He was a frightened,
drunk, wee boy with a mental age of 8. He was in the company of authority
figures who abused him and played on his disabilities to induce terror and
break him to their will. And they did - he cracked like a dropped plate.

These were the circumstances that led to the boy being released without his
parents or any statutory body being informed that he had even been in
custody, never mind interviewed. He'd been given the number of an Orange
mobile phone to call and a name (Johnny) to ask for when he had
information. And, so it was that for the best part of 3 months this
disabled child was exploited and exposed to the risk of harm by those
allegedly there to protect him. He was on an odyssey that involved secret
meetings on far away roads, being driven around Nationalist North Belfast
in an RUC/PSNI Landrover, pointing out suspected INLA personnel and
eventually giving away the location of a weapon being used by those
involved in the defence of his own area. This in turn led to his unmasking
by the INLA. It was then that the INLA displayed a degree of empathy for
this child that was sadly lacking in the forces of the crown. Instead of
the execution the RUC/PSNI would have expected for one of their unmasked
agents, the INLA treated the boy humanely, contacted the Church. And the
IRSP then referred the family an internationally respected human rights
lawyer.

As I said at the start, what a story! Or so you would think. The Irish News
was given the exclusive - they talked to the INLA, the IRSP, and the priest
the boy and the family. They then buried the story on the inside pages. The
Guardian did better, two paragraphs on page 14. The Andytown News said that
the INLA were going to start shooting children as informers. Amid the
crying of the collective babies, covered in dirty water, sitting on their
collective sore bare asses having just been thrown out with the bath water,
two papers got it right. Only the Derry News and North Belfast News caught
the drift of what the INLA had uncovered and what the IRSP is trying to
expose.

This isn't just about one scared wee disabled kid from North Belfast. This
is a tactic. If it's in use in North Belfast, is it in use in the West of
the city? The East and South, Derry, Armagh, Strabane, Dungannon? Are
loyalist children being blackmailed in this way? Take two steps back and
look at the big picture. As part of the so-called UK, the RUC/PSNI are
trained by MI5 and the FBI. Is this tactic in common use by other agencies
of the British government? Are police forces in England, Scotland and Wales
using the children of Muslims in Birmingham, Swansea and Glasgow to spy on
their communities? What of the Miners in the 80's, the Turks and Kurdish,
Scots, Welsh and English Republicans, the firemen? Is North Belfast just
the tip of the iceberg, a ground zero for something that has ramifications
for all political activists and ethnic minorities deemed hostile or
subversive by the state?

But for now, all we can be sure of is this one scared child in Belfast. The
trail starts with him. The Orange phone number he was given has been
removed from Orange's database - that much has been uncovered by the IRSP.
It is our understanding that this phone was not a "pay as you go", but
rather had an account and as such must have generated a bill. Who paid that
bill and, more importantly, who approached Orange to remove the number and
who at Orange acted to cover up this act of state sponsored child abuse?

At every meeting the boy was given 80 pounds by his RUC/PSNI handlers. Who
signed for this money, who authorised its use and who put it into the boy's
hands?

Alan McQuillan, the deputy chief constable of the RUC/PSNI who would, under
law, need to approve the use of such a young and "vulnerable" intelligence
source has been quick to wash his hands in public over this:
"I would have to authorise something like this and I have not. If an
officer has done this it would be a serious breach," or words to that
effect.

I've been an Irp all my life and I've never seen a peeler so quick to get
his denial in first. Surprisingly he did not say, 'I'm confident the PSNI
would never do such a thing', he just said, 'I didn't do it'. A strange
thing for a senior RUC/PSNI officer to say about his force, or is it?

Let's take two steps forward and look again just at the North of Ireland.
It has been clear for sometime those elements within the RUC/PSNI loyal to
the old Ascendancy have been working with people inside the media with a
similar agenda to destabilise the Peace Process. The raid on the Sinn Fein
office was so media staged that it turned out campier than a Whitehall
farce. In the interviews outside Stormont, Hugh Orde would only say that he
knew the raid was going to take place. No one in the press pack thought to
ask why the warrant was not executed at the same time as the homes of Sinn
Fein employees and supporters were raided. Sure any police force in the
world would know how to co-ordinate an operation like that.

They came for the press and the press dutifully bayed for the blood of
alleged spies. A democratically elected Assembly was brought down, two
peoples were disenfranchised.

Let's face it, the Assembly was a lame duck and a waste of money that would
have been better spent in pay raises in the public sector and kidney
machines. But, there is an unmissible parallel between these two spy
stories. In one, a police force abuses its power and brings down a
democratically elected body and the media don't ask questions. In the
other, that same force are exposed using a mentally under developed child
to spy for them. And still the media don't ask questions.

There is no press pack hounding Orde and Mc Quillan. The Policing Board
took two weeks to get back to the IRSP when they tried to contact them.
Questions need to be asked about what happened to this boy and no one seems
to want to ask them or even consider the wider ranging implications of what
has been uncovered by the INLA. Why? Are nationalist politicians and
newspapers so wedded to this sectarian agreement that they are willing to
sacrifice the rights and welfare of this child and who knows how many
others on its altar? Are the organs of the state, the BBC and ITN, so
toothless that they turn a blind eye while the State and/or Ascendancy
blackmail and corrupt the innocent? Of course they are, that's a given.
Their only concern is to spoon-feed the population drivel and sanitised
versions of the truth. A version that cannot be allowed to show that the
Agreement has not worked and will not work. How can it work when unionists
are still empowered with a built-in veto and the much vaunted reform of the
RUC cannot prevent a disabled boy from being abused and debased for low
grade intelligence work? The deafening silence that surrounds the October
15th break in at the Bloody Sunday Inquire in London and the fact that
English MP's are forced to ask questions as to why the writings of LVF
murder victim, journalist Martin O' Hagan have yet to be returned to his
family and publisher only serve to add grist to this mill. What has
changed? The only thing that I can see that has changed is the
unwillingness of the nationalist press to take up any issue that is not
rubber stamped by Sinn Fein or the Brits.

This has happened before of course, the media manipulation, the covering up
of dissent, control of perception, control of the population by using their
children to spy on them. I wonder where it was?

In closing, and at the risk of being sued by John Grisham, I would like to
pose a challenge to those of the nationalist press in Ireland and the
middle-Left broadsheets of Britain. Close your eyes, imagine the terror of
a 13 year old Irish boy with learning difficulties lifted off the street at
his most vulnerable, denied his basic human and legal right to be seen by
his family or by social services. Alone, scared, with the police all around
you, telling you that you're going to prison if you don't sell the
defenders of your community for 80 pounds a time. Imagine the fear he then
had to live with, the stress the fear of exposure must have generated in
his young mind every time he left his home. Then forget that the boy is
Irish. Don't see him as Muslim or the son of some Lefty trade unionist.
Imagine it's your son. Then open your eyes, take your fingers out of your
backsides and drag this whole sordid mess out into the public domain where
it belongs.

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