When the IRA admitted last week that it killed 14-year-old Kathleen Feeney, after denying it for 30 years, Gerry Adams hoped it would bring closure. But can it? And would it if the British Army had been the perpetrators? In a sense the killing of the girl in November 1973 in Londonderry can be understood if not excused. A republican who appeared in court for the offence was 16 at the time of the shooting, and was acquitted on the grounds that another gunman may have fired the fatal shot. We are dealing here with a “war” waged by inexperienced teenagers on the streets using children as cover. The senior IRA commanders — and at the time Martin McGuinness was in charge — deserve far more censure, more than the ill-trained teenage volunteers who were their foot soldiers.
McGuinness was not long out of jail after serving a six-month stretch for IRA membership after telling gardai, in an unguarded moment, that he had been an officer in the Derry Brigade of the IRA for the previous two years.
By the time of Feeney’s killing, McGuinness had become director of operations of the IRA’s GHQ staff and was nominally on the run in the comfort of his grandmother’s farmhouse in Co Donegal. He frequently slipped across the border to Derry and remained in control. In August 1973, for instance, he pledged at a commemoration in the city that the IRA would fight on and he applauded when his friend Barney McFadden defended the murder of Patrick Duffy who the Derry IRA had wrongly accused of being an informer. Duffy’s body was still missing as the two men spoke and McGuinness was still clapping when McFadden lambasted local priests who had condemned the killing as heartless.
No apology of closure was offered to the Duffy family. The murder was claimed when the IRA placed a death notice in the paper and it was weeks later before his decomposing remains were abandoned in a coffin on a Donegal roadside. They were soaking wet and sprinkled in lime as if they had been dug up from a quicklime grave in boggy ground. To this day there has been no apology for the murder of this man who valued his life as much as any Sinn Fein politician or dead IRA man.
With McGuinness in command, the IRA formed the tactic of launching attacks using children for cover. On the day Kathleen Feeney was killed a whistle was blown seconds before the IRA opened fire, apparently to give the kids a brief opportunity to scatter. Feeney, whose brother Danny was an SDLP councillor, may not have known the score, or was too slow to get out of the way. Whatever the reason, she was shot dead in a hail of IRA gunfire directed at a British Army foot patrol.
It may not have been the first time a 14-year-old girl was killed by the Derry IRA while McGuinness was an officer. In 1971, Annette McGavigan was shot during an exchange of gunfire between the IRA and the British Army after republicans fired nail bombs at troops. The circumstances have always been disputed, and the IRA’s denial was far from convincing at the time. What it admitted in a statement is that it initiated a skirmish with heavily armed troops while children were in the area. The same tactic was used when it killed Kathleen Feeney two years later.
This happened on McGuinness’s watch and logic dictates that he was in on the decision not only to deny the Feeney killing, and escape any awkward questions about the tactics employed, but to blame the army.
That had the effect of stirring up hatred and boosting IRA recruitment. Rioting followed the death and the final macabre twist came when the IRA claimed it had killed a British soldier “in revenge” for Feeney’s death.
They never named the military victim but two soldiers were gunned down 11 days later. They were Eric Pisareck, a German-born father of two who was shot in the back, and Joseph Ronald Brookes, 20, who died of a bullet wound to the head.
Last week no apology was offered to Pisareck’s widow and orphans or Brookes’s family for their deaths in this counterfeit act of revenge. No explanation is forthcoming from McGuinness; he has not made himself amenable. He has not answered for the strategy or the cover-up over which he presided and he has not, so far, given interviews on the subject.
Perhaps at the time he felt justified. Bloody Sunday and the death of several friends, some of them uninvolved civilians, at the hands of troops may have made him callous and prepared to take risks with the lives of others. We can but speculate because, when asked to explain, he reaches for his lawyer Barra McGrory. McGuinness had an opportunity to explain himself, with immunity from prosecution, during the Bloody Sunday tribunal but he refused to do so, citing an “IRA honour code” as the reason for his silence.
When my wife Kathryn Johnston and I asked him about his career for a biography we co-authored, we received a letter from McGrory, who is normally in the forefront of demands for full disclosure from the British government, telling us that McGuinness would not be co-operating. McGuinness later issued a press release warning all republicans not to speak to us and saying that nobody who spoke could be considered a friend of his.
When it comes to IRA killings, we are asked to take selective apologies decades after the event as brave gestures. They are said, by republicans, to be designed to bring closure to victims, but the suspicion must be that they are instead intended to buy their silence and dispensed as political bargaining chips.
