MI5 and the Kincora Boys' Home
Settler Paramilitaries and Organized Child Abuse in Northern Ireland
Like the Dutroux article, this essay contains disturbing content, including references to child abuse and sexual exploitation. For the bulk of this article, I have drawn on some of the investigative journalism conducted by Martin Dillon, which can be found in his books The Dirty War and The Trigger Men, as well as by Chris Moore in his book The Kincora Scandal.
In 1984, British Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens prepared and handed over a dossier to Home Secretary Lord Leon Brittan which contained information on what he alleged was a child abuse ring that traded in exploitation materials and included several prominent members of the British government. For roughly three decades following, there would be effectively no follow up on the dossier’s allegations until interest was reignited in 2012. Shortly after the death of prominent British entertainer Jimmy Savile, a deluge of allegations and reports from hundreds of victims came forward about the extensive child sexual abuse he had committed. Beyond just his own monstrous behavior, the fact that Savile’s conduct had been largely concealed for so long was an indictment of many of the United Kingdom’s public institutions. The country’s national broadcaster and Savile’s employer, the British Broadcasting Company, had ignored persistent allegations about his repeated abuse of children he had come into contact within his capacity as a BBC employee, and similarly it came to light that Savile’s work with the National Health Service had also put him in contact with numerous future victims. Savile’s influence at the pinnacle of British society was so enormous that he was an informal marriage counselor for Prince Charles, and was a close friend of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who advocated for his knighthood in 1990 despite her personal awareness of the already numerous suppressed allegations against him. Multiple public institutions had enabled one of the most prolific child abusers on record, and in response to the extent of these revelations increased scrutiny was turned towards other allegations of child abuse.
Shortly after the Savile scandal broke, there was a wave of child sexual abuse allegations against another prominent, recently deceased public figure, Liberal Democrat MP Cyril Smith. Smith had been a friend of Savile’s, and like the latter had received a knighthood after extensive lobbying on the part of Margaret Thatcher. With over a hundred complaints made against Smith, the Crown Prosecution Service was compelled to admit that they should have charged Smith for sexual abuse all the way back in the 1970s but failed to act at any point over the course of four decades. The fact that two powerful men were allowed to carry out these crimes effectively with the protection of the state was enough for members of Parliament to begin calling for the release of the Westminster dossier to the public. The Home Office’s response was that the dossier was missing. Lord Brittan had apparently passed on the materials he deemed “credible” to police, with all other elements being lost or deliberately destroyed. Frustrated with what was beginning to appear like an extensive cover-up, MPs such as Labor’s Tom Watson began making allegations of a network of child abusers operating in Parliament and the rest of the British government and demanding independent investigations into the allegations against different institutions. The outcry was large enough that by 2014 the government was compelled to establish the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) to address allegations levied against national and local government authorities, the Catholic and Anglican churches, and various custodial institutions and residential schools.
One of the areas of investigation during this renewed wave of interest into accusations of powerful child abuse rings was a scandal in Northern Ireland from the 1980’s. Kincora Boys’ Home was a residential institution for high school age boys from “troubled homes” operating in Belfast, Northern Ireland since the 1950’s. The home became the center of controversy during the 1980’s when it was discovered that several staff members had been sexually abusing dozens of the boys there. One of these staff members was William McGrath, a prominent Ulster loyalist and founder of the far-right Unionist paramilitary Tara. As the leader of Tara, McGrath had established several connections beyond the United Kingdom and Ireland, smuggling in guns from the Netherlands and forging connections with the Rhodesian Security Forces. McGrath was not a fringe figure in Unionist politics, having direct connections to other prominent loyalist organizations including Ian Paisley’s Ulster Constitution Defence Committee and Charles Harding Smith’s Ulster Defence Association. In these capacities however, McGrath had also been employed by Britain’s domestic counterintelligence agency, MI5, who had a vested interest in coordinating loyalist paramilitaries against Irish Republicans during the Troubles. When McGrath’s crimes at Kincora were uncovered in 1980, he was sentenced to four years in prison, with the other two abusers receiving comparable sentences. Soon after, there were allegations that a cover-up had taken place, and that Kincora was part of a MI5 blackmail operation and prostitution ring used to keep Ulster loyalists in line with government directives. An attempt at a “private inquiry” into the scandal quickly fell through, and the matter was pushed to the back of public memory until around 2014 when the British government finally began acting on the child abuse epidemic. But instead of assigning the investigation to the IICSA, the Kincora allegations were handled by the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA) which was set up in parallel, a decision which several victims criticized. The HIA’s capabilities were much more limited than the IICSA’s, lacking the ability to compel witness testimony or access any secret service records related to the investigation. While the HIA found that there was no involvement by security agencies or prominent political figures in Kincora, other evidence suggests that at the very least, MI5 was aware of the child abuse going on at the home and took steps to prevent it from initially coming to light.
One source on the Kincora allegations that suggests government awareness is the testimony of Captain Colin Wallace, a former Army psychological operations officer turned whistleblower who exposed the “Clockwork Orange” operation orchestrated by elements in MI5 to facilitate a soft coup against Harold Wilson’s Labour government using forged documents distributed to the press to paint high ranking government officials as communist and Irish republican sympathizers. Wallace had first become aware of the ongoing abuse at Kincora in the early 1970’s as part of his surveillance of McGrath due to the latter’s role as the leader of Tara. Wallace received approval from his immediate superiors to publicize information about his findings on McGrath and attempted to reach out to several newspapers to cover the subject, but this ended up provoking the frustration of MI5 head Ian Cameron, who filed internal reports accusing Wallace of breaching security with his press briefings - McGrath’s child abuse was apparently considered important to national security. Targeted by Cameron for talking to journalists about McGrath and refusing to participate in the Clockwork Orange propaganda effort, Wallace resigned from his position in 1975. Only a year after, Wallace's briefings on McGrath were finally turned into an article in The New Statesman, and even then, it would be several years before any action was taken by authorities on this basis.
Another Army officer turned whistleblower on Clockwork Orange, Captain Fred Holroyd, had attested to the fact that at least as early as before 1973, Tara was considered under the control of British intelligence and not a threat. Between the fact that William McGrath and the entire Tara organization were under the control of British intelligence and Ian Cameron’s targeting of Captain Wallace for his attempts to expose the abuse going on at Kincora, it seems at the very least there was a knowledge of McGrath’s abuse of children and that this ongoing abuse was tolerated because of his usefulness to the agency. When the police eventually began investigating the allegations of abuse at Kincora, any attempts to question Cameron about MI5’s awareness of the abuse was barred by the agency. For his part, Wallace was charged with and convicted of manslaughter in 1980 before serving a six-year sentence. Roughly a decade after he was released however, Wallace’s conviction was retroactively quashed due to forensic evidence absolving him. Naturally, the whole affair has led to speculations of a “frame-up” in retaliation for Wallace embarrassing the agency.
Like Wallace, Captain Brian Gemmell was an Army intelligence officer who became aware of the abuse being conducted by McGrath and others at Kincora during the mid-1970s but was forcefully told by superiors in MI5 to stop all further investigation into the boys’ home. According to Gemmell, McGrath wasn’t the only Ulster loyalist leader who was known to MI5 as heavily involved in serial child abuse and sexual exploitation. John McKeague was, like McGrath, a former member of Ian Paisley’s Ulster Constitution Defence Committee who would go on to form his own Loyalist paramilitary, the Red Hand Commando, which killed numerous Catholic civilians throughout the 1970s, and according to investigative journalists McKeague was either a founding member of Tara with McGrath or merely a close associate of him. Gemmell claimed that MI5 was aware of McKeague’s predilections and leveraged this in order to make him an informant and an asset. McKeague was known to have visited McGrath during his time at Kincora, which one witness claimed was arranged to facilitate a weapons exchange. In early 1982, McKeague was approached by detectives about his knowledge of what was happening in Kincora. Only a few weeks later, he was shot dead by two Irish National Liberation Army members, both of whom allegedly also served as informants for Military Intelligence.
Captain Wallace has also attested to the fact that there were others who were not employed at Kincora but were involved in Unionist politics and complicit in the abuse happening at the home, including Sir Knox Cunningham, a Northern Irish MP for the Ulster Unionist Party who had served as a Private Parliamentary Secretary to Prime Minister Harold McMillan during the 1950s. Former members of Tara have attested that during the 1970s, Cunningham had served as a primary source of funding for their organization. Cunningham died in 1976, well before any police action was taken on Kincora. Several former residents of Kincora who were subject to abuse have corroborated Wallace’s claims of prominent outside visitors. One Kincora victim, Clint Massey claimed that “he saw many mysterious English men with posh accents who were regular visitors,” though he was never subject to any abuse from them specifically. Other Kincora victims, such as Richard Kerr and Gary Hoy, attested that they were sexually abused by guests, who included Loyalist paramilitary members and British military officials, both at the house and hotels around the United Kingdom, and that the network of abusers involved included Cunningham and Lord Louis Mountbatten, a member of the Royal Family and former defense minister who was known to be a child predator by the FBI as early as the 1940s. For their part, the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry has dismissed such claims.
Like the extended connections of the Dutroux case, Kincora shows how child abuse rings tend to go together with state-backed right-wing paramilitaries and their operations: McGrath’s connections to Rhodesia and Dutch reactionaries ties in Tara with the same globe-spanning network of fascists that also encompassed the members of the Dutroux ring. At the same time, the Kincora case adds the dimension of colonialism. The operations of Ulster Unionist and Loyalist paramilitaries, as extensions of British intelligence in opposing Irish Republicanism and national liberation in the occupied counties, overlapped with organized child sexual abuse as means of blackmail and control, a means of coordinating reactionary forces to retain British power during the Troubles. The intertwined nature of the colonized territory and organized child abuse goes beyond just these intelligence operations: consider the mass graves of indigenous children found at the residential schools in Canada, or the disproportionate percentage of black children in the Texas foster care system notorious for rampant sexual abuse and violence, or the child abuse ring on Bird Island of the coast of South Africa run by David Allen, a wealthy businessman who had close ties to high ranking members of the Apartheid government before his suicide when made to stand trial for sexually abusing underage boys in 1987. Beyond serving its role as leverage in intelligence operations, organized child abuse is frequently symptomatic of deeper structural dynamics, and part of a wider effort to address such problems must entail uprooting the material and political basis of the relations between the imperial metropole and its colonies, both internal and external.