The Mary Nelis Column

McGurk’s Bar Bombing: The Police Ombudsman’s Report

PSNI chief at odds over faults of RUC

Matt Baggott: Treading the same path as his predecessors ?

WOULDN’T YOU imagine that coming from a fundamentalist Protestant evangelical background PSNI Chief Constable Matt Baggott would be concerned with the truth. Yet his pronouncement on the 1971 bombing of McGurk’s Bar appears to indicate that he is at odds with the revised report of the bombing released by Police Ombudsman Al Hutchinson.
Baggott’s response that several other reports had reached other conclusions has caused consternation among relatives of the 15 victims of the atrocity. More worrying, however, is the perception that the Chief Constable of what is supposed to be a new beginning to policing appears to be treading the same cover-up path as his predecessors in the old RUC.
Sufficient evidence has emerged in recent and not so recent years to indicate that the main preoccupation of senior police officers has been to cover up collusion between state agencies, including the police, and unionist paramilitaries in murder.
The most striking example among many was the role of the RUC Chief Constable in the Stalker affair and the failure of the British Government to publish the findings of the Stephens reports.
There should be no room for ambiguity in the pronouncements of a man who reputedly earns more than the British Prime Minister. Either the RUC failed to investigate the bombing of McGurk’s bar and misled the public to cover up the truth of the atrocity or they did not. Did they, as some photos taken at the time seem to suggest, stand with their arms the one length while civilians clawed frantically at the wreckage?
Were the RUC, with their British Army counterparts, part of the briefing team reporting to the then Stormont Minister of Home Affairs, John Taylor, that the IRA were wholly responsible for the bombing?
It was left to Robert McClenaghan, whose 73-year-old grandfather was killed by the bomb, to ask the questions that Matt Baggott, Al Hutchinson and the Historical Enquiries Team have failed to ask let alone answer: was it possible that the British Army press corps knew in advance what the unionist paramilitaries intended to do or were British Army Intelligence services controlling the entire operation?
Neither Baggott nor Hutchinson have acquitted themselves well in respect of the atrocity that was the McGurk’s Bar bombing. At least the Ombudsman’s revised report was a bit of a mea culpa in respect of his previous findings, which created enormous pain and anger among relatives and was a public relations disaster for the Ombudsman. That Hutchinson was forced to go back to the drawing board was due to the tenacity of these relatives who, for 30 years, had to live not only with the pain of loss but with the deceit and lies of the British Army and the RUC, whose ‘own goal’ story, was good copy for the blinkered Fleet Street media – Fleet Street, where disinformation took precedence over truth and objective investigative journalism.