THE IRA’s “practice or policy” of burying some of its victims and refusing to disclose where the bodies were located was “wrong” and an “injustice”, senior Sinn Féin figure Mitchel McLaughlin has told the Northern Assembly.
Mr McLaughlin, during a discussion on “the disappeared” yesterday, said that while the policy was “wrong”, at least the IRA subsequently came forward to the Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains to try to identify where the bodies were buried. During a discussion on an SDLP motion on the disappeared, the Assembly heard that, while 10 of the bodies have been located, there are seven bodies yet to be found.
Several speakers warned that unless crucial information was forthcoming soon, the work of the commission could be fatally jeopardised, a point also made by the South Antrim Sinn Féin MLA Mr McLaughlin.
He said the commission has “made clear they are almost at the end of the road” because it has such little new information with which to work.
Mr McLaughlin said that anyone with even the “slightest piece of information – either a landowner, a local person who noticed something or anyone who is connected in any shape or form with the burial of these remains” – should pass it on to the commission.
Mr McLaughlin said the IRA’s “policy” on the disappeared was wrong, prompting new Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt to ask was the IRA operating a “policy” or engaging in a “random series of events” in relation to how it dealt with these victims.
Mr McLaughlin said that it was clearly “a practice or a policy” that was unjust. He said the IRA should have much earlier “taken steps to try and identify where the remains were buried”.
In an intervention, the Traditional Unionist Voice leader, Jim Allister, asked Mr McLaughlin would he withdraw a statement he made in January 2005 that the 1972 abduction, murder and disappearance of mother-of-10 Jean McConville was not a criminal act.
Mr McLaughlin, who was fiercely criticised at the time for these remarks, again declined the opportunity to publicly state Ms McConville’s killing was unlawful.
“I will address that issue in the context of a process of truth recovery and in a process of genuine reconciliation,” he said.
“That would mean that I could expect, from all sections from around this room, people to acknowledge the role of the British security services in procuring murder, in procuring collusion with murder gangs,” he said.
The principal deputy speaker Francie Molloy intervened to warn members against making “comments that could jeopardise any future proceedings”.
Mr McLaughlin then said that a “partisan approach” to truth recovery would not work because it would not be a “genuinely inclusive process”.
During the debate, Mr Allister also referred to the controversy over the attempt to have some of the Boston College’s interviews with former republican paramilitaries handed over to the British authorities.
He said that one of the purported participants, former IRA prisoner Dolours Price, had said that Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams presided over the IRA unit that killed Ms McConville.
Mr Adams has denied such claims.
