BELFAST: The son of a mother-of-ten murdered by the IRA voiced disappointment yesterday after Irish republican leader Gerry Adams was released without charge following four days of questioning over the notorious paramilitary killing.
Michael McConville, whose newly-widowed mother Jean was abducted and murdered in 1972, said Sinn Fein president Adams had warned him of a “backlash” if he ever gave the names of those he witnessed taking her.
Adams, a key figure in the Northern Irish peace process and an elected lawmaker in the Republic of Ireland, was released on Sunday and was due back out on the campaign trail for the European Parliament elections later this month.
“We were disappointed. We thought the length of time the police had him in custody, we thought we were going to get Gerry Adams brought to court,” McConville told BBC radio.
McConville and several of his siblings watched as their mother was dragged screaming from their Belfast home after the IRA wrongly accused her of being an informer. Her remains were found buried on a beach in 2003. She had been shot in the head. McConville says he fears being shot himself were he ever to disclose the abductors’ identities.
Between 2004 and 2006, Adams brokered meetings between McConville and members of the now-defunct Irish Republican Army, of which Sinn Fein is the political wing. McConville was seeking to know if the IRA would apologise if a police ombudsman report concluded there was no evidence his mother was an informer—which it eventually did.
When the IRA figures said they would not, McConville said he would release the names of those involved. “Gerry Adams says to me, Michael... ‘if you release the names I hope you are ready for the backlash’,” he said. “I took it as a threat... I think he meant by Republican people and that’s the way I took it.”
“Some of these people might be part of dissident republicans — and they’re not on ceasefire. So if I told their names, me or my family members, something would happen to some of us,” Michael McConville said.
McConville called for the case to be taken out of the hands of Northern Ireland’s police and prosecutors, “because we don’t think we can get justice for our mother the way things are happening in this country”.
Adams was arrested on Wednesday and held a press conference at a Belfast hotel after his release on Sunday. He strongly denies any involvement in the murder.
On receiving a file from the police, prosecutors must decide whether there is enough evidence to charge Adams, and then whether prosecution would be in the public interest. The Times newspaper reported police would be recommending prosecution, while the BBC said it was understood that police want Adams charged with membership of the IRA, something he has always denied.
“I have never dissociated myself from the IRA and I never will. But... the IRA is gone. It is finished,” Adams told the press conference.
AFP
