Kincora and the MI5 agent in Tara

Longstanding allegations of state complicity in sexual abuse at the Kincora Boys' Home in Belfast received an airing in the Belfast High Court this week.

Former Kincora residents Gary Hoy and Richard Kerr claim that housemaster William McGrath was protected as a state agent in the 1970s, enabling him to carry out abuse with impunity. Following a hearing on Monday, a judgement is expected no earlier than September.

As the Mail report of proceedings notes, Northern Ireland's Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry found that 39 boys were abused at Kincora, but concluded that the security services were not complicit in the abuse.

The intelligence questions around Kincora were only one aspect of a much wider-ranging investigation into institutions across Northern Ireland. While the HIA Inquiry put a lot of intelligence material into the public domain, two key witnesses, Roy Garland and Colin Wallace, refused to testify because it lacked the powers of the Goddard Inquiry in Great Britain.

The inquiry concluded that such evidence as did reach the security services in the 1970s referred to McGrath's homosexuality rather than to his paedophilia, although some of the young men he was grooming in unionist circles were not much older than the inmates of Kincora. The distinction was, in any case, not clearcut in a society with no gay age of consent.

One agent, James Miller, did tell MI5 in April 1972 that McGrath had been accused of 'assaulting small boys'. Although the inquiry essentially dismissed this report as hearsay, it did accept that it might have expedited investigation if it had been passed on to the RUC (ref 1).

One of the inquiry's least convincing judgments was it's dismissal of McGrath's intelligence significance on the grounds that Tara, the paramilitary group he led 'was never more than an organisation of occasional interest to the intelligence agencies’ (ref 2).

Few of those who have written about Kincora have suggested Tara was important in its own right. It's significance lay in its contacts with larger loyalist paramilitary groups and with unionist political parties. Indeed, a close reading of the evidence at the inquiry reveals that one of McGrath's associates in Tara was an agent.

This was certainly one reason for MI5's reticence during the RUC investigations that followed McGrath's conviction in 1980. Yet the HIA inquiry never seems to have considered whether the existence of the agent gave MI5 a stake in Tara's survival, and hence McGrath's leadership of it.

References

Ref 1: Report of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, Chapter 29: Module 15, Kincora Boys' Home (part 2), p.10.

Ref 2: Report of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, Chapter 29: Module 15, Kincora Boys' Home (part 2), p.10.