Headline Story 11th July 2006

MAGINNESS: DIRTY MCCONVILLE LIE AT HEART OF DIRTY PROVO WAR

SDLP Justice Spokesperson Alban Maginness said the Police Ombudsman’s report on the murder of Jean McConville exposes the dirty lie at the heart of the Provos’ dirty war.

He said: “The Provo lies began when Jean McConville was kidnapped and her small children were told she would be returned unharmed. They continued when the Provo rumour machine was set in motion to suggest she had gone away for personal reasons, compounding her children’s pain. Then came the decades of claims - repeated in person to her children - that the Provos had notmurdered her. Her remains were found without help from her killers or their paramilitary or political organisations.

“Now the lies have started again. The Provo bureaucracy that could find nothing about her in their records for 27 years can suddenly produce their own ‘thorough investigation’ to try to justify murder.

“The Sinn Fein spin machine, skilled in distracting from Provo atrocities, has suddenly gone silent. This dirty little murder is far beneath the gaze of Adams the international statesman, the confidante of presidents and governments.

“The family were told by Gerry Adams that he was interned when it happened, although no one else believes that. He claims he was not in the Provisional IRA, and definitely not its Belfast commander, when a 37-year-old widowed mother of ten was shot in the back of the head.

“Sinn Fein has a long-term strategy of whitewashing the Provos’ dirty war, of replacing it with their heroic concept of Armed Struggle. It is nonsense. When the Provos finally admitted they had killed Jean McConville, Gerry Adams said such things happen in war. They do, and they are called war crimes, whether done by the British army or the Provos. The whitewash is creating new suffering for victims.”

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