Top Issue 1-2024

9 September 2015

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I beg your (royal) pardon, Nigel

● DUP's Willie McCrea greets sectarian serial killer Billy Wright of the Loyalist Volunteer Force

IT WOULD BE GREAT to know how many of their great leaders either asked, begged or happily received (probably on one knee) royal pardons. It would also be important for people everywhere to know which governments were engaged in these nefarious activities.”

That's DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds speaking in the Westminster parliament in March of this year when he was berating all and sundry following the publication of the Commons Select Committee's report into claims that up to 180 republicans had received what became known as “OTR letters”, stating they were not wanted by the PSNI or any police force in Britain.

Nigel cranked up his contempt for Sinn Féin and Gerry Kelly over the royal pardon that Kelly received while in a Dutch prison in the mid-1980s so that he could be extradited back to Ireland.

And there on the green benches, beside Nigel, was the Reverend 'Boxcar' Willie McCrea – the warbling evangelist and firebrand preacher who was keeping secret that fact that he himself had already been the recipient of a royal pardon.

Reverend Willie confessed this week that he was given a royal pardon 44 years ago while he was serving a six-month sentence in Crumlin Road Prison for rioting.

When an Orange march was banned from the largely nationalist County Derry town of Dungiven in 1971, loyalists (including McCrea) attacked a British Army and RUC cordon. McCrea was arrested during the violence.

While in 'The Crum', then Stormont Prime Minister Brian Faulkner and Home Affairs Minister John Taylor rejected a plea for mercy from the Free Presbyterian Church minister.

The Reverend Willie was not to be easily put off, though, and he appealed to an even higher power. This week he revealed that he had “asked God for help”. God, it would seem, listened, and then spoke to Queen Elizabeth.

“Then, thank God,” Willie beamed this week, “God intervened and I got a royal prerogative of mercy and was released.”

Is this what's behind the House of Lords Appointments Commission refusing an unnamed top DUP nominee a peerage in the House of Lords? Is it Willie McCrea? And if it is, was it also because of Willie McCrea sharing a platform in 1996 with sectarian serial killer Billy Wright, leader of the unionist paramilitary Loyalist Volunteer Force?

I beg your pardon?

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