Finding a killer is no easy matter – more so when government agencies don’t want you to.

That’s why a small team of highly-committed people proudly refer to themselves as ‘raiders of the lost archives’ and this past weekend they arrived in Letterkenny to discuss what they’ve discovered through their painstaking murder investigations.

Paul O’Connor and Anne Cadwallader are leading members of the Pat Finucane Centre, which, for many years, has been forensically examining sensitive British government documents and interviewing hundreds of people to expose the ruthless collusion between Protestant paramilitary extremists who murdered many Catholics, and the RUC, the former northern Irish police service, and the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), once the largest regiment in the British Army.

Indeed, their investigations have revealed that some of the cold-blooded murderers were actually full-time or part-time members of the above mentioned ‘security forces’ with easy access to rifles, guns, grenades and other weapons used in the killings.

Some of their findings as revealed at the Station House Hotel Friday evening –

• 120 paramilitary murders, one-third of which took place in the Republic, show RUC and UDR involvement;
• At least two members of the UDR were involved in the roadside massacre of the Miami Showband music group in July 1975 in County Down;
• Both members of the RUC and the UDR were involved in the bombing of ‘The Step Inn’ in the town of Keady that killed two people and injured more than twenty;
• RUC officers and UDR members were part of a gang operating from two farms in south Armagh and Tyrone, responsible for the deaths of 120 people between 1972 and 1976;
• British government documents acknowledge authorities knew some UDR and RUC members would also join extreme Loyalist paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF);
• Compensation paid out to families of some of those whose loved ones were murdered amounted to a paltry 750 pounds sterling;
• British government documents listing the amounts of arms that went  ‘missing’ from UDR armories showed a single gun was used to kill 11 people in 11 months;
• No RUC officer has ever been convicted of any of the murders;
• Four British soldiers have been convicted of murder in northern Ireland – all were released after serving less than five years of their life sentences. All were allowed to rejoin their regiments;
• The Special Branch was allowed to operate as “a force within a force” and often decided not to give information to the Criminal Investigation Department;
• The British government will not allow a review of its secret files on bombings that killed many people in Dublin and Monaghan, not even by an agreed judiciary figure;
• In explaining the mere suspension of police officers involved in murder, Lord Chief Justice Lowry said, “…. more than ordinary police work was needed and was justified to rid the land of the pestilence which has been in existence.”
• Scores of cases are now before the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland and civil cases are pending against the Chief Constable and the British government.

In concluding the evening, O’Connor, the centre’s director, and Cadwallader, a former BBC and RTE journalist, posed a number of questions:

• Was truth covered up systematically by the British government to protect the reputation of the RUC?
• Did the British government as a former colonial power adopt the technique of using one tribal group against another through counter gangs as it did in Kenya under General Frank Kitson, who also served in northern Ireland?
• Was there a government policy to kill Catholics in an effort to turn popular opinion within that community against the IRA? In other words ‘if you can’t kill the fish, poison the water.’

Notes

The Pat Finucane Centre, a non-party political, anti-sectarian human rights group supported by the European Union’s PEACE III programme, is named after a Catholic lawyer who was shot dead by Protestant loyalists in front of his wife and children at his north Belfast home in 1989. A review of the case by Sir Desmond de Silva showed RUC officers proposed that Finucane, 39, be killed, passed information to his killers, then obstructed the murder investigation. The findings have been accepted by the Northern Irish Police Service. While describing the level of state collusion as “shocking,” British Prime Minister David Cameron ruled out a full public inquiry.

The event at the Station House Hotel was organized by Abhaile Arís, an EU funded programme supporting the Republican ex-Prisoner community.

A book produced by Anne Cadwallader (Mercier Press) entitled Lethal Allies: British collusion in Ireland, focuses on 120 killings attributed to loyalist groups between 1972 and 1976. It draws on investigations compiled by a specialist group, the Historical Enquiries Team (HET), which is re-examining deaths during the northern Irish conflict.