Where the Bodies Are Buried? Gerry Adams has long denied being a member of the I.R.A. But his former compatriots claim that he authorized murder.

ean McConville had just taken a bath when the intruders knocked on the door. A small woman with a guarded smile, she was, at thirty-seven, a mother of ten. She was also a widow: her husband, Arthur, had died eleven months earlier, of cancer. The family continued to live in Divis Flats—a housing complex just off the Falls Road, in the heart of Catholic West Belfast—but had recently moved to a slightly larger apartment. The stove was not connected yet, so Jean’s daughter Helen, who was fifteen, had gone to a nearby chip shop to bring back dinner. “Don’t be stopping for a sneaky smoke,” Jean told her. It was December, 1972, and already dark at 6:30 P.M. When the children heard the knock, they assumed that it was Helen with the food. Four men and four women burst in; some wore balaclavas, others had covered their faces with nylon stockings that ghoulishly distorted their features. One brandished a gun. “Put your coat on,” they told Jean. She trembled violently as they tried to pull her out of the apartment. “Help me!” she shrieked.

“I can remember trying to grab my mother,” her son Michael told me recently. He was eleven at the time. “We were all crying. My mother was crying.” Billy and Jim, six-year-old twins, threw their arms around Jean’s legs and wailed. The intruders tried to calm the children by saying that they would bring their mother back: they just needed to talk to her, and she would be gone for only “a few hours.” Archie, who, at sixteen, was the oldest child at home, asked if he could accompany his mother, and the members of the gang agreed. Jean McConville put on a tweed overcoat and a head scarf as the younger children were herded into one of the bedrooms. The intruders called the children by name. A couple of the men were not wearing masks, and Michael realized, to his horror, that the people taking his mother away were not strangers—they were his neighbors. Divis Flats had been constructed in the late nineteen-sixties, in one of those fits of architectural utopianism that yield dystopian results. A “slum clearance” program had razed a neighborhood of narrow, overcrowded nineteenth-century dwellings, replacing them with a hulking complex of eight hundred and fifty units. To Michael McConville, Divis’s warren of balconies and ramps seemed like “a maze for rats.”

By 1972, it had become a stronghold for the Irish Republican Army, which was waging an escalating guerrilla battle against the British Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and loyalist paramilitary groups. A nineteen-story tower stood on one edge of Divis. It was one of the tallest buildings in Belfast, and the British Army had established an operational post on the top two floors. Because this aerie was in the middle of enemy territory, there were times when the British could get to it only by helicopter. From the rooftop, British snipers traded fire with I.R.A. gunmen below. Michael and his siblings had grown accustomed to the reverberation of bombs and the percussion of gun battles. On bad nights, the children dragged their mattresses off the beds and away from the windows and slept on the floor. The I.R.A. had disabled the elevators at Divis to hamper British patrols, so the masked gang hustled Jean and Archie McConville down a stairwell. When they reached the bottom, one of the men pointed a gun at Archie’s face, so close that he could feel the cold barrel on his skin, and said, “Fuck off.” Archie was just a boy, outnumbered and unarmed. He reluctantly ascended the stairs. On the second level, one of the walls was perforated with a series of vertical slats. Peering through the holes, Archie watched as his mother was bundled into a Volkswagen van and driven away.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/where-the-bodies-are-buried


I have no doubt at all he was involved and he should face punishemnt for his crimes through the courts..

I feel the same way about Darren Wilson. A lot of good it does.

On the day they call Bloody Sunday he was seen by a member of my squad carrying a Thomson Machine gun [Tommy Gun] The man who saw him was an Irish man who had no reason to lie!

nicko wrote:On the day they call Bloody Sunday he was seen by a member of my squad carrying a Thomson Machine gun [Tommy Gun] The man who saw him was an Irish man who had no reason to lie!

Gd' morning, nicko.

Haha...the Irish don't need a reason.  The greatest fiction novelists are Irish.

Too true mate.

again an open secret for a very long time. Did anyone really buy into him and McGuiness going "legit"?

Cass wrote:again an open secret for a very long time. Did anyone really buy into him and McGuiness going "legit"?

I never did Cass, as I know that fucker was instrumentally behind the order to execute my uncle.
My uncle the Catholic that believed in a united Ireland, one that was born not from hate and violence, hence why he stood openly against the IRA and paid with it for his life.
So to me more than many, Adams deserves to pay for his crimes.

Brasidas wrote:

Cass wrote:again an open secret for a very long time. Did anyone really buy into him and McGuiness going "legit"?

I never did Cass, as I know that fucker was instrumentally behind the order to execute my uncle.
My uncle the Catholic that believed in a united Ireland, one that was born not from hate and violence, hence why he stood openly against the IRA and paid with it for his life.
So to me more than many, Adams deserves to pay for his crimes.

So sorry to hear that Didge. Your uncle sounds like a brave man x
Let's hope he didn't die in vain and let's hope Adams does indeed, get the punishment he deserves!