When Chris Moore started working as a journalist with the BBC in 1979, one of his first assignments was to report on sexual abuse of boys at the Kincora Boys’ Home on the Newtownards Road in Belfast.
That home was being run by three men, Joseph Mains, Raymond Semple and William McGrath, who were convicted of raping boys in their care.
But from an early stage there were indications that the story was much wider than the predations of these three horrors. McGrath was the leader of an eccentric loyalist paramilitary group called Tara, which was interested in reviving Irish identity among Protestants with a view to uniting Ireland inside the UK.
He was an evangelical preacher with a theology which endorsed his homosexual interests. Hadn’t there been loving relationships between men in the Bible? Think Jesus and John.
McGrath’s political connections raised suspicion that men in his wider circle were abusing children at Kincora too and, further, that the security services had an interest in suppressing the story and curtailing Moore’s investigations.
Moore is now in his 70s and an independent researcher and writer, free of some of the constraints he believes the BBC imposed on him. And remarkably, he has stayed with this story and travelled the world to meet the men whose lives were tarnished by McGrath and others.
Much of Moore’s approach is to extrapolate from evidence and in cases his extrapolations are strong and unnerving. There was interference from MI5. McGrath was an agent. MI5’s interest was in exploring the connections between unionist politicians and loyalist paramilitaries.
There are compelling witness accounts here of boys being taken from the home to servicemen with secret lives, most notably Lord Louis Mountbatten, identified retrospectively by boys as their abuser from his picture on television after he was blown up in his boat by the IRA at Mullaghmore in 1979.
The book also reminds us of a time when McGrath’s homosexuality was treated as criminal and sinful. The account of him being subjected on police orders to the discredited anal dilation test is one that, once read, lingers like a bad taste.
But a word to his publisher: a book like this should have end notes and an index.
