PEOPLE STILL searching for the bodies of relatives killed by republicans in the first half of the Troubles launched their own little emblem last Sunday in St Patrick's Cathedral in Armagh: an image of forget-me-not flowers. Sunday was International Day of the Disappeared, the forget-me-nots intended primarily to persuade public figures to keep demanding more information from the killers, and what is left of their organisations, writes FIONNUALA O CONNOR
SDLP leader Mark Durkan did his bit by saying relatives were convinced the IRA could provide better information. These are tough times for Durkan’s party. Some react by tearing into Sinn Féin about the IRA past of its leaders, with a vehemence that outdoes most unionists.
Durkan indicted republican violence without sounding exploitative, his message more resonant because of his restraint. Families believed, he said, that with “greater will”, the bodies could be found and given proper burial.
If there is to be satisfaction for the grieving, the guilty have to act. The touching new emblem of forget-me-nots was designed by Anne Morgan, whose brother Séamus Ruddy is believed to have been killed in France by the INLA, a shambles of a group, long disintegrated.
The IRA, shorn of authority by its own politics and self-declared redundancy, has been credibly blamed for the murders of all but one of those still missing. Its tactics have been inconsistent, sometimes clearly meant to help Sinn Féin negotiations, at other times incomprehensible.
One of the lasting riddles about modern republicans – up there with the insistence by Gerry Adams that he never was an IRA member – is that they deny killing two of the missing, while admitting responsibility for two deaths never previously identified as among “the disappeared”.
The IRA in 1999 left the remains of Belfast man Eamon Molloy in a new coffin, in a lonely border cemetery. Campaigners on “the disappeared” had never heard of him.
But the IRA still insists it had nothing to do with the disappearance in south Armagh of Gerald Evans and Charles Armstrong. Confusion also surrounds the information given to the commission set up to find remains. With the demise of an operational IRA, the commission may receive more tip-offs from individuals. In a new political dispensation, the best hope may be the working of conscience on ageing minds.
Anyone who heard Helen McKendry phone into the Radio Ulster programme Talkback years ago knows how she helped lodge “the disappeared” in the fickle public consciousness.
She did it by telling the story of her mother, Jean McConville, dragged away in December 1972 by an IRA gang from her crying, pleading children, never to be seen by them again. Her husband had died of cancer months before. They had 13 children, 10 of whom survived, and moved to Divis Flats when they were intimidated out of loyalist east Belfast.
“Four girls dragged her from the bathroom at gunpoint,” her daughter said. “The twins, who were only six, were clinging to her, screaming.”
Her mother’s disappearance “ruined us”, she said. Her younger siblings were sent to various orphanages and came out with various problems. The broadcast made her mother the first to be mentioned ever after when the subject came up, and gave it a name freighted with the horror of the thousands “disappeared” in Latin America.
McKendry broke a long silence. Though some relatives appealed for help to anyone they could think of, others stayed quiet: out of terror, and sometimes misplaced shame. A few people vanished with no comment – others became the subject of rumour, sometimes deliberately spread, as with Jean McConville.
Up to three years ago the IRA was still claiming that she passed information to soldiers. That followed a report from police ombudsman Nuala O’Loan, which said there was no evidence the missing woman gave information to anyone.
In the hellish months of early 1973, when violence was at a peak it never reached later, the older McConville children told police, social services and some others what had happened. (This and other details come from Lost Lives, the book that chronicles, almost dispassionately, each Troubles death.) None could rescue their mother, who, it turned out, died soon after those four “girls”, ageing women now if still alive, dragged her away.
Eventually, after Helen McKendry and her husband Séamus had waged a long campaign to force Sinn Féin, and party president Gerry Adams in particular, to take responsibility for the missing woman, a man walking a dog found bones on a beach in Co Louth. Like those who took others away, the girls who took a terrified woman out of Divis Flats knew what was likely to happen next. Forensics quickly established that someone had shot her in the head.
Recovery of the “disappeared” still missing will only happen if the detail of long-ago murder troubles killers, and their helpers, into long overdue reparation.