In Ireland

VAST

Third Damien Walsh Memorial Lecture

Here you will find photos and the talk of the third Damien Walsh Memorial Lecture which was given by Gerry Adams MP president of Sinn Fein.

Click the thumbnails to get the bigger picture.

Gerry Adams MP, with VAST Chairperson Breandan Ó Lochlainn, taking questions from the floor after his talk.

DAMIEN WALSH MEMORIAL LECTURE 2000
GERRY ADAMS

“First of all I want to say that I'm very glad to have been asked and very humble to have been asked to give the Damien Walsh Lecture this evening.

Damien Walsh was a 17-year-old boy.  He was killed by the UFF while working at the Dairy Farm Complex at Twinbrook on March the 25th 1993.  He was on a state funded Youth Training Programme.  As Brendan has described, in the aftermath of Damien's death, his family and friends established VAST. This lecture is a memorial to Damien.  But it’s also a testimony to the courage and to the great vision and generosity of Brendan and the rest of the family.  Who in the face of that huge trauma and tragedy determined themselves to give something back to other people in the same situation.

Two years ago in St Mary's here, I came in and sat at the back of the hall, the big hall down stairs, and listened to the experiences of relatives who had lost loved ones at the hands of the State Forces.  The atmosphere was very charged.  It was very, very emotional.  It was deeply moving, and many people were in tears listening to what had been endured.  A whole succession of people related their experiences.  Many for the first time, like that’s the significant thing, Brendan talked about the enquiry into the Springhill killing up at St Aidan's.  I had to leave the hall because the people speaking there were reliving what had happened to them that day. 

What particularly stayed in my mind was a man called Neilly Rooney.  For Belfast people, for Falls Road people, Patrick Rooney is the name of a young boy, 9 years old, and the first child to be killed in this country.  He was shot dead by the RUC while lying in bed on the 14th of August 1969.  And the RUC attacking the Falls Road at that time was part of the problem, which actually saw the biggest force movement of the civilian population since the last world war onto the Balkan Crisis, the biggest force population move, and 8 people were killed in that immediate period.  Neilly Rooney spoke that day down the stairs, for the first time publicly, first time about how his child was killed.  The event was called "The Forgotten Victims".  And two years on the issues that those relatives described still remain as real and as concrete as they did then.  If anything, now that we're going through a period of transition, a period of moving towards peace, their experience has become an open wound.

I know Dudd very well.  The lad there that you saw limping down Springhill Avenue [A video, made by VAST, of the Springhill Massacre, in which 5 people were murdered by the British Army, was shown before the talk].  It’s an open wound that he can't have redressed for what happened to him.  And it’s an open wound within the Nationalist and Republication community.  Particularly the working class communities from which these people come, which can only be healed, as Brian said, can only be healed when the British Government faces up to its responsibilities. 

We saw recently there when there was a big batch, the last or at least most of the last of the political prisoners were freed under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.  Many commentators and the media concentrated exclusively on articulating the hurt, which is fair enough for people who have been hurt as a result of Republican or Loyalist actions. While that’s understandable, it’s also very clear that that was used by those who are against the agreement, to try and beat the agreement with it.  But there were a few exceptions, no focus whatsoever on the forgotten victims and of the survivors of state sponsored and of state violence.  Now, this is not a minor matter, this is not something involving a small number of people.  Its important to realise there is hundreds of victims and thousands of relatives who were personally and deeply affected by this.  The RUC and the British Army are directly responsible for killing 357 people, 75 of them were children.  And the RUC, which was involved in many of these killings, also investigated the killings. 

So is it little wonder there has been an absence of prosecutions or convictions in these cases.  It is also, I think, worth noting that the manipulation and the distortion of what passes for a Criminal Justice System here points at the need for a fundamental routing branch change in that system.  Now, we have to try and get some sort of an explanation or try and contextualise why this happened.  How these killings happened and what the situation was, because if you look at the people who have been directly killed by the British Forces and then look at the issue of collusion, which is the main thrust of what I want to deal with here this evening.  And the evidence proves that the figures of those killed as a result of collusion between the British Crown Forces and the Loyalist Death Squads runs into many, many hundreds. The enormities of the state forces and indirectly through their puppets show exactly what had happened?  One estimate puts the figure for all those, killed directly and indirectly at over one thousand, or almost a third of the people killed in the last thirty years.

Collusion isn't something abstract.  It becomes a sort of a cliché or a slogan.  It is very, very real and very dangerous and thousands of families are living with a legacy of what I believe was a policy pursued by success of British Governments and its also in terms, especially of people, coming to learn about he situation here.  You will understand nothing of the situation here unless you see it in the context of the involvement of Britain and this island.  This is stating the context of Britain's colonial involvement in Ireland, partition of the island and the creation of a Northern State with a routing elite drawn from the unionist section of our people.

To go back slightly.  The Unionist and British Governments rejection of the legitimate demands of the Civil Rights movement in the late sixties, the Unionists states vicious assaults on the civil rights marches.  The Battle of the Bogside.  The provenance here in the City of Belfast.  Brought about the physical collapse of the RUC.  And the introduction of the British troops into here was at the request of the Old Stormont Regime, and of the RUC.  And in support of the state and of the civil power.  Not to save Catholics.  Not to protect Catholics.  But in support of state and civil power.

At that point in 1969, the British Army had been involved in, and had lost more than 50 colonial wars since 1945.  Over 50 colonial wars in that period of forty odd years.  And the experience that it had in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus, and Aidan,  that experience was brought here to the North of Ireland.  Especially through people who had been involved.  People like the Belfast Commander of the British Forces, Brigadier Frank Kitson, who became an expert, if there is such a thing, in these activities.  They saw in terms of low intensity operations; they saw collusion, counter gangs, dirty tricks, as well as the manipulation of the media, the criminal justice system and the apparatus of the state.  All this, integral parts of a political military strategy of an integrated strategy. 

You don't have to believe me in that. Kitson has written about it.  He has written about the needs for all these arms of the state to become agencies of the counter researcher forces.  And while some loyalist groups, particularly the UFF, had been active during the 60's, the UDA and a variant of so-called defence groups emerged following Kitson’s involvement here.  The first leader of the UDA, a man called Charles Hardy Smith admitted in court that he worked for the British Military Intelligence.  David Focal, who was a founder of the UDA, was a British Agent.  Albert Ginger Baker was a British agent.  And there were many, many more.  And the British Government, or at least the establishment, locked into a sort of Colonial mindset that dictated British policies here for centuries, looked to those people, looked to the generals, looked to spooks and the securocrats for a military victory, for a military solution to pacify the people here. 

So what did they do?  They brought in some very limited reforms, and then militarised the situation and the speedy militarisation, that situation led to a deepening crisis and then a very, very vicious war.  Which evolved over time into a war of attrition between the professional soldiers of what was still a war of power and local people. Local young people mostly, in neighbourhoods like this.  And it is into this situation that the British then deployed all of their experience and resources.  If you look at what the British Army trained their people to do in these scenarios.  The British Army's Training Manual Land Operations, Volume 3, Counter Revolutionary Options spells out “Liaison with, an organisation of, training and control of friendly Guerrilla forces operating against the common enemy.”  That’s the part of their context, which saw collusion starting to take shape.  So it didn’t happen by chance.  It happened by design.  And what it was about, was that they were terrorising that population and that section of the population, which the British believe gave support to their enemies. It was about isolating people, marginalizing people, and demolishing people and killing people. 

They also trained the RUC.  Remember the RUC was beat out in 1969. Who trained it to become what it became?  The British Military Intelligence and the other operational people.  What did they train it in?  Torture techniques.  They came in and they trained people in how to torture people in Palace Barracks and in other places.  Shoot to kill tactics, surveillance, intelligence gathering and also the creation of a very sizable political police wing in the RUC Special Branch. 

So what British strategy was about was establishing counter gangs, who were then trained, armed and given information gathered by the RUC, British Army, UDR, RIR as well as various British Intelligence Agencies.  They established groups like Military Reaction Forces and the Forces Research Unit who ran agents, and through them the gangs that would do the killing. And throughout the 70's, the early 80's there were frequent allegations, mainly by Republicans, about collusion and some journalists did occasionally, or writers occasionally, lift the lid on this issue, brought us into the very sordid world of informers and MRFs.  All of the links between them and the various people who ran the intelligence operations. But even against the background, for example of the Dublin and Monaghan bombs, when 33 people were killed.  Even against that background and other actions by the loyalist forces, collision was largely dismissed as republican propaganda by a political system, by a media who was conditioned to seeing us as a problem.  And it was only when we got into the early 1980 period, after the Hunger Strikes, and into maybe the crucial point when the DUP founded a group called Ulster Resistance.  And when that group along with the UDA and the UVF brought in a large shipment of weapons from South Africa.  From the old Apartheid, South African states that there was a renewed focus on the links between loyalists and the British State Forces.

As the Catholic death toll rose, if you remember, those of you who were about, how the death toll rose tremendously in the period coming into the early 1990’s and the allegations of collusion then grew against this background.  And then it was fuelled further when three members of Ulster Resistance were arrested in Paris in 1989 trying to secure more weapons from South Africa.  But it was the killing of a man called Loughlin Maginn, in Rathfrisland, which blew the lid off the whole mess.  Because there were assertions by his neighbours and family as we have seen in so many of these other cases.  That Loughlin Maginn was an ordinary Catholic.  That he wasn’t involved politically and what the UDA did, the UDA showed a BBC reporter a photomontage that was clearly a British Intelligence montage as proof that they had killed a republican.  Or at least to backup the allegation that they had killed a Republican and we could maybe leave it at that if we were going to have a discussion later on.

Well they were broadcast.  Those photos of Loughlin Maginn were broadcast. At the same time Sinn Fein in Belfast became aware that documents belonging to the RUC had gone missing.  Those of you who live here must remember, all the time you heard on the news, of the security files going missing.  This happened every month or so.  We challenged the British Government on this issue.  And as part, and I myself, I cant prove this, but I think this was part of the tension between the Brits and the agents that within weeks saw 2000, 2000 photo montages of nationalists given to the media by the loyalists.  And we saw them plastered about different gable walls.  So the idea or the logic was, to prove from the Loyalist point of view that they weren't killing innocent Catholics, but that they were acting on information given to them by British Military Forces.  And out of that the British were forced to establish the Steven's Enquiry. 

At the conclusion of the Steven's Enquiry, 28 Loyalists were charged by Stevens, but not one member of the RUC, not one. Even though all these documents were stolen from within the RUC or the British Army itself.  And the person who I think holds the key to open all this can of worms up is Brian Nelson.  Nelson was a British Double Agent.  He had planned the importation of the weapons from South Africa.  He did it with the full knowledge and involvement of the British Military Intelligence.  He also the UDA's most senior Intelligence Officer.  He provided the information for example, on the killing of the Human Rights lawyer, Pat Finucane, local men Gerard Slane, Terrance McDaid.  And young Damien Walsh was killed with weapons in 1993 which were brought in as part of that South African shipment and the information in terms of all that can be brought straight back into the people working with Brian Nelson at that time. 

Now, where's Nelson?  And who was involved with the business of Nelson not being charged with these offences?  It's interesting that when the deal was done that the British Attorney General at the time was Patrick Mayhew.  Its interesting that the reference given to the court included, these were references of his good character, included one from Tom King, who was the British Minister of Defence and a British Colonel who wasn’t identified in the court.  I think he was identified as Colonel J, put out a testimony to the court also, that all charges of murder and of conspiracy were dropped in return for him being silent and not taking the witness stand.  In my view that is the core of the can of worms that collusion was involved here.  If that can be prised open then there can be some sort of light shining into that.  There are all sorts of people.  The killing of Sam Marshall, a guy from Lurgan, Sinn Fein activist, former prisoner shot dead, later revealed which accompanied the vehicle carrying the killers who'd been part of the covert Military operation.  Sam Marshall was under surveillance at the time he was killed.  The grandmother, Roseanne Mullan, from Co. Tyrone was shot dead in 1994, which an Army Surveillance camera was secreted out in a tree overlooking the home, and there were two covert units of the British Army, including the SAS watching the operation. 

So if we explore all of this you will find that these aren't odd cases.  They aren’t just the case of Roseanne or Sam Marshall, or Damien Walsh.  You'll find they are not isolated incidents.  And the Irish Government Junior Minister for Foreign Affairs, Liz O'Donnell, when the Irish Government called for a full independent investigation, said collusion is all-pervasive.  It’s a big thing for a Minister of another Government to say about a neighbouring Government, the collusion is all pervasive.  And since that shipment of weapons arrived into this country, Loyalists from that time, up until this year, killed 277 people.  Many, many more people were wounded.  These weapons brought in as part of Nelson’s shipment killed the majority of those.

The Loyalists, some were charged with some of these killings, probably didn’t have any great sense of where this was coming from.  Geraldine Finucane, who is the widow of Pat Finucane, has said "The loyalist triggermen are a dime a dozen and they’re expendable in Britain's dirty war.  Relatives are not only interested in who pulled the trigger, but also in those who pulled the strings."  So the whole Finucane affair.  The role of Nelson in his killing. In Pat's killing, and in many other killings.  The failure of the RUC and the British Army to act on information, which would have protected Pat Finucane’s life, all, indicates, the type of hidden agenda of control systematic collusion.

The amnesty report in 1994 said that amnesty is not convinced the British Government has taken adequate steps to halt collusion.  To investigate thoroughly and make known the full truth about political killings of suspected Government opponents.  To bring to justice the perpetrators and to dismantle prostate organisations dedicated to political violence or to otherwise deter such killings.  So, unlike the 357 people killed directly by the state it's impossible to calculate an exact death/injury figure in relation to collusion, but it certainly runs into many, many hundreds.

The weaponry acquired by the Loyalists, the information and files provided to the Loyalists has seen a campaign, which is rarely mentioned in the media.  And if you think of some of the people you see on television, some of the Loyalist killers are fairly well known.  For example, most people know of Michael Stone, and of Michael Stones involvement in the killings in Milltown, and in other killings.  But what of the people who provided him with the information?  What of the people who supplied the weapons?  The guy has told us this.  He has told us he used files.  He has told the world he used files which were provided by the British, and one of those may be, if you like, may even be more responsible than Stone.  They’ve been promoted. They’ve been honoured.  The English Queen has decorated many of them in the time since then and even recently we’ve been informed that one of the military handlers of Brian Nelson is now a serving member of the RUC.  So this whole notion of a hierarchy of victims, of forgotten victims, of those who are expendable, of the presentation of this conflict in a certain way, is all part of trying to marginalize survivors and victims in a tactical and propaganda war which continues even today.  Its aim is to depict and reflect a very inaccurate picture, which presents the British in the role as neutral or benign.  And it's about them trying to claim some moral platform for involvement here in our country and its nothing new.  It's also about the British Government attempting to divert focus away from their role and their activities.  There is, I think a very strange sense of revisionism taking place.  Most of those who are affected, and those who were responsible, and on those who participated in the conflict.  And it makes a complete nonsense of what is a fundamental historical compromise that is the Good Friday Agreement.

Go back to the issue of prisoners.  There were no British soldiers or RUC officers coming out of the prisons.  Because there weren’t any of them in prison.  There was no need for any early release scheme.  If you remember, of the small handful of British or RUC officers who were in prison, the big outcry and outrage wasn’t over the offences or the crimes they had committed it was the fact that they were in prison at all.  And all of them were quickly released and now back, most of them, into their regiments. 

So I think there’s a responsibility on all of us to highlight collusion.  To be involved in projects like VAST or even in you’re own small way, to try and bring forward information. Knowledge in those situations is power.  To bring out little leaflets, little pamphlets to help those who are, as Dudd says in that video blames himself, for other people that were killed for coming to his help.  We have raised this with the British Government and I have raised it personally with Tony Blair, I think practically every single time that we ’ve met him.  Every single time we presented him with a very detailed report on the whole Brian Nelson affair.  We’ve raised it with the Irish Government.  We’ve raised it with the White House, with Congress and even just over the last few weeks, I wrote Blair a very detailed letter asking specific questions on the role of the FRU.  And I think in everybody who is concerned about trying to get the healing process, which is required, if the peace process is to bed in, has to be constantly in support of relatives demands for international enquires and for proper investigations into these particular killings.  It’s also, I think, solidly to remind us that this will not be easily achieved.  The British Government aren’t all of a sudden going to roll over and let people know what happened.  I mean, what happened in Springhill was that the Brits were in Curry’s and that they opened fire on local people, and the next day, as you saw on the video the Belfast Telegraph said 5 or 6 gunmen had been killed!  They were all kids!  I mean the funny thing about it, is when you watch what happened in 1972 you have to take thirty years of all those people. When you see them now as people in their 40s or 50s they were all only teenagers or in their early 20s.  So I think the video is remarkable.  You’re setting an example of what can be done be communities.  I think the state has to face up to this issue.  We can’t have any cover up.  I think that the work of all the relatives and Community and Justice Groups, the Bloody Sunday People, the Dublin-Monaghan relatives, the Finucane family, the Hamill family, Rosemary Nelson’s family and many, many, many more deserve our support.

So there you are.  That’s sort of my sense of trying to put a context, a context in which people like Damien Walsh was killed.  And you know it isn’t just senseless violence.  It isn’t just a Catholic-Protestant thing.  It isn't just because the Irish are in some way afflicted with psychological hatred for each other.  Its because the British, in terms of trying to hold the line here, deployed scary people to do it for them.  Scary people that know no regret or sense of killing a young person like Damien Walsh in what was seen by them as the cause for Ulster, or the cause for British involvement in this island.  So I want to commend all of you who have been involved in trying to shine a light into this, and I would like to encourage everyone and anyone, wherever you live, to get information about this to other people.