The August 1972 murder and secret burial of Joe Lynskey by the IRA made him the first of the “disappeared”, the group of 17 people buried by republican paramilitaries in secret locations.
A former Cistercian monk, Lynskey was a founding member of the Provisional IRA and at 40 years of age was considerably older than most in the organisation at the time of his death.
On Tuesday evening the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains confirmed that a grave in the village of Annyalla in Co Monaghan was exhumed by a team of experts searching for Lynskey.
The decision to kill Lynskey followed an internal IRA investigation into an attempt on the life of another member, which at first was thought to be the work of the official IRA. This led to an attack by the provisionals in Belfast during which a member or supporter of the officials was killed, and the near eruption of an all-out feud.
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However, an internal investigation by the provisionals led to Lynskey becoming the target of suspicion for the first of the attacks. Former IRA member Dolours Price claimed before she died that she drove Lynskey across the Border to face interrogation.
In 1999 the British and Irish governments established the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, to search for the bodies of the disappeared. It was not until 2010 that the IRA admitted to the commission that Lynskey was one of the people it had murdered and secretly buried.
[ Monaghan grave exhumed in search for Disappeared victim Joe LynskeyOpens in new window ]
[ Say Nothing: Bingeable yet sober-minded eulogy for the tragedy of the TroublesOpens in new window ]
In February of that year, briefings were given to the media by a man on behalf of the republican movement. He claimed Lynskey had been killed by the IRA after he was “summoned” to a meeting with the then IRA leadership at a location outside Belfast, not knowing he was under suspicion.
He was then “court-martialled for breaches of IRA standing orders”, murdered and buried, the man said. Lynskey, it was claimed, had ordered an IRA member to shoot another member. “Joe Lynskey was having an affair with that man’s wife,” the man claimed. The target survived the attack.
That same month in 2010, the commission got its first confidential contact about what had happened to Lynskey, and added him to the list of the disappeared. In March 2015, its inquiries led to the excavation of a site in Coghalstown, Co Meath, where Lynskey’s body was not found, but the remains of two others, Seamus Wright (25 when he was killed) and Kevin McKee (17), were.
According to Price and others, the IRA unit involved in the killing of Lynskey, Wright and McKee was the same as that involved in the killing of Jean McConville (37 when she was killed).
This unit reported to Gerry Adams, who was then in a leadership position in the Belfast IRA, Price claimed (as have former IRA members Ivor Bell and the late Brendan Hughes).
However, Adams has claimed he was never a member of the IRA and, in a recent statement to The Irish Times, said he “had no involvement in the killing or burial of any of those secretly buried by the IRA”.
Disney+ has recently aired a drama series centred on the killing of McConville, as well as Lynskey, McKee and Wright. Called Say Nothing, it is based on the book of the same name by Patrick Radden Keefe.
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