NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph
Kincora: the name became a byword for depraved sex attacks on children in care. Is the scandal that threatened to bring the political establishment here crashing down finally about to give up its secrets 35 years on? Ivan Little reports
09 JULY 2014
Amid the non-stop conveyor belt of justice at the old Crumlin Road courthouse in Belfast at the time, a depraved group of senior civil servants, paramilitaries and politicians must have been hoping against hope as they watched the television news that the guilty pleas from the three men in the dock would be the end of their worries.
Court Number One wasn’t exactly packed to the rafters as Kincora Boys’ Home officials Billy McGrath, Raymond Semple and Joseph Mains whispered their one-word admissions to the 23 sex abuse charges against them in December 1981.
I and a small number of other reporters on the Press benches readied ourselves to take notes of what we expected would be a deluge of revelations about what the trio had done to at least 11 boys in their care between 1960 and 1980.
But the full story never came out during the proceedings. And if it hadn’t been for a briefing for a couple of us sitting on a window ledge in the courthouse by a senior RUC detective, it would have been even more difficult to tell what we did of the story of shameful abuse in bedrooms, toilets, landings and the TV room of the home, which stood on the Upper Newtownards Road at its junction with North Road.
Boys were sent there by the courts, or because it was thought they were in moral danger, but their problems were just beginning after they went through the front door of the detached house. …
A unionist councillor, Joss Cardwell, took his own life in 1983 after he was questioned by police. He was chairman of a council welfare committee and said he had statutory visiting responsibilities in relation to care homes. The Rev Ian Paisley was accused of failing to report McGrath’s abuse to police.
A member of his church, Valerie Shaw, claimed she told the DUP leader about McGrath’s homosexual activities eight years before he was arrested and brought to court.
“I approached Dr Paisley on at least seven occasions,” she said in TV interviews. “I asked him time and time again what he intended to do about this. My concern all along was very much for the fact that there were young boys under the threat of this man’s (McGrath’s) corruption.”
Dr Paisley denied the allegations against him and responded by calling for a full judicial inquiry. He said Ms Shaw did tell him about McGrath’s homosexuality, but not that he worked at Kincora. He said he regretted that Ms Shaw didn’t take her concerns to the police, but she countered that she had.
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