The Disappeared Storyville

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

Can you imagine being a little boy

and watching men and women come and take your mother

and going and talking to people and asking them where she was?

Begging for her to come back?

The children lived in fear, the family was broken up,

and they couldn't find their mother.

And they went on and on, looking for their mother over the decades.

Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten,

was killed and secretly buried by the IRA.

She would become known as one of the Disappeared.

Others disposed of in the same way remain missing.

They are thought to be buried in bogs somewhere in Ireland.

I lay waiting between turf-face and demesne wall.

Between heathery levels and glass-toothed stone.

My body was Braille for the creeping influences.

Dawn suns groped over my head and cooled at my feet.

Through my fabrics and skins, the seeps of winter digested me.

The illiterate routes

pondered and died in the cavings of stomach and socket.

I lay waiting on the gravel bottom, my brain darkening...

If there was a hierarchy of victims of the Troubles,

the Disappeared were at the bottom.

The invisible dead.

Killing them wasn't punishment enough.

I want to know why they were killed

and their bodies hidden from their families.

And who was responsible?

And, above all, I want to put these questions to the republican movement

and it's leader Gerry Adams,

seen here in 1970 as a young IRA volunteer

and, for the last 30 years, the president of Sinn Fein.

I have learnt from a top republican source

that you were in fact the Belfast brigade commander

when Jean McConville was taken and executed

and that you in fact were ultimately responsible for her fate.

That's not true, Darragh.

Do you bear any responsibility for what happened to these people?

All of us bear a responsibility,

those of us who are in leadership, and I have never shirked that.

The explosion of violence from 1969

forced thousands out of their homes.

Housing became rigidly segregated,

areas dominated by one religion or the other.

A Protestant, Jean McConville, made the mistake

of marrying a Catholic and raising their children in his faith,

but in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

There was ten of us, all in the one bedroom.

Like ten wee rats, so we were!

At that point of life, we hadn't got much, but we had each other.

But in these unreasonable times, mob culture prevailed

and the family wasn't safe.

Protestant people came to the house and, first of all,

they put my father out, so they did, and four weeks later,

then they told us to get out.

The McConvilles were forced to move

from Protestant East Belfast to the Catholic West.

They set up home in the newly built Divis Flats.

But the McConvilles were people apart here too.

Most of their neighbours had lived in this area, the Lower Falls,

for generations, with dense family networks.

The McConvilles were strangers in a strange place.

If there was an epicentre for the conflict, it was here.

This was a war zone.

GUNFIRE

Children, mothers, families,

were caught between the British Army and the IRA.

GUNFIRE

You've shot a child, you pigs, ye!

Ah, she's not shot, she's all right.

'They made all the Divis Flats and all Catholic places all no-go areas.

'There was gun battles going on.

'And bombing.

'A shooting was nothing.'

It was just part of growing up, what I thought, when I was a kid,

just growing up in these times, this is the way life was.

'At that point of life all I was interested was in pigeons.

'Although all the bad things was happening around the Divis Flats,'

I think we were still happy then.

1972 was just days old when Michael's father died of cancer.

Mother Jean was left to raise the ten children alone.

Later that year, behind the closed doors of her home,

Jean McConville suffered a nervous breakdown.

Outside, the war intensified,

and alongside it, an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia.

Few would even make eye contact with soldiers.

What are you lifting me for?

Complete loyalty was demanded by the IRA.

It was given freely by most.

MUSIC: "Coz I Love You" by Slade

There were odd contradictions in the early days.

The army ran discos in nearby bases.

You're both Catholic girls

who've come for a night out with British soldiers.

Isn't that a dangerous thing to do in your circumstances?

It is, yes.

But, erm, we still take the risk, we think it's worth it.

Catholic girls knew they could pay a big price for a good night out.

Tarring and feathering.

These were wartime rules, with the IRA exerting strict social control.

Jean McConville's children

say their mother came to the attention of the IRA

because she helped an injured British soldier.

GUNFIRE

My mother put a cushion under his head.

My mother would have helped anybody,

that's just the type of person she was.

That's where it all started to go wrong for us.

The McConvilles believe their mother was in the IRA's sights

from that night.

Six and two, 62!

Soon after, Jean was at the local bingo and got called out.

She was told that one of her children had been injured

and a car was waiting to take her to the hospital.

It was a trap.

The IRA took her away and interrogated her.

In the early hours of the morning, she was found wandering the streets,

beaten and disorientated.

Her daughter Agnes remembers her coming home.

'There was a lot of blood on her.

'Her face was all swollen and everything, black and blue.'

And all she could say was... When we got her settled,

got her a cup of tea and gave her cigarettes.

And must have smoked the cigarettes one after another and drank the tea,

and she started to get sick, so she did, with her nerves.

Later that day, the IRA came back for Jean.

Around tea time, a rap came to the door.

She was in the bathroom getting washed,

and the next thing they were shouting,

"Where is she, where is she?"

All the people just barged into the house.

There were some of these people had a mask on,

some of them hadn't got a mask on.

She was squealing, squealing her head off,

she was shouting, "Help me, help me."

All of us were just wrapped round her.

All crying and squealing.

I remember one of the girls talking, so I do,

which I knew, cos she hadn't got a mask on,

but she used to be a neighbour of ours.

Her and her sister was there.

They kept trying to calm us down cos they knew us,

and they knew us by name.

Michael's older brother Archie followed their mother outside

until the IRA put a gun to his head and ordered him away.

We could hear her squealing, still squealing,

and we looked over the banister in Divis Flats,

and there she was getting thrown into the back of a van.

And that was the last time...I actually seen her.

I think it was about five days later,

an IRA man came to the door and rapped the door,

and, eh, handed...

my mother's purse...

and her wedding rings.

We asked where my mother was

and they just says, "Look, I was just told to bring these rings to you.

"I know nothing about it."

And that was it. Walked away.

I knew she wasn't going to come back.

I knew straightaway.

And when the purse and all came through, I said, no return.

Michael says he then got a direct threat from the IRA -

"Say nothing, or else."

He says a gang of boys from the IRA's youth wing, Na Fianna, abducted him.

They pulled a hood over my head.

It was the sleeve of a jumper,

a woolly jumper, cos I could see through the mask.

They took me down out of the Divis Flats into a house.

They tied me to the chair.

They were hitting me with sticks.

They were putting a gun to my head

and they says they were going to shoot me.

I'd looked out the side of my eye and there was a man

and he was telling the younger ones what to do with me.

So they had me for, I would say, for about three hours

and they says they were going to shoot me.

If I told anything about any member of the IRA,

they would shoot me or shoot some more family members.

They fired a gun -

a cap gun -

and of them stuck a penknife into my leg.

They took me over to the Divis Flats and let me go at the stairs.

I hobbled up the stairs into the house.

I had just turned 11 at the time.

The children waited for news of their mother.

It was coming up to Christmas,

and that Christmas, I realised there was no Santa Claus.

The Christmas came and went.

It was fully six weeks after Jean's disappearance

that newspapers caught up with the story.

It was front page across Ireland - TV cameras followed.

Agnes, eh, you were in the night your mummy disappeared,

can you tell me what happened?

My mummy was over at my granny's

and she just came over

and four young girls came in into the hall,

she was only coming into the kitchen, and they came in,

they ordered all the kids up the stairs

and they just walked in and they took my mummy.

Do you know why your mummy went away? Why she was taken away?

No. She never done anything, so she never.

She'd never done anything anybody...

She was with us in the house, at nights she just went to bingo.

When do you think you'll see your mummy again?

Don't know.

We keep our fingers crossed and pray hard for her coming back.

Can you remember what she was wearing that night?

I can remember her wearing red shoes.

And a tweedy coat, so I can.

And the head scarf.

She put on her coat and her scarf,

she had on her red slippers and blue trousers,

an orange check coat and a brown and white jumper.

Even in the madness of the times, this was a sensational story,

and might have run for weeks.

But Republicans concocted a lie.

And a message was sent out - Jean McConville wasn't being held captive,

just in hiding because of publicity.

She had been murdered weeks earlier,

but the lie worked.

The headlines were amended. The public had been conned.

And the McConvilles had been wronged - again.

The children were hearing a different story on the streets.

Children growing up round Divis Flats would hear

what their parents were saying -

"Your mummy's a tout and your mummy's this and your mummy's that,

"and your mummy will never be back," and all this here, you know.

She's gone with a British soldier.

This wasn't coming from the adults, this was coming from the children.

The McConvilles were now outcasts.

They had no-one to fall back on.

And within months, the children were scattered into care homes

across Northern Ireland.

These welfare notes of one of the children

have just been released to the family.

They confirm in official documentation

just exactly how isolated they were.

The first note goes to the 13th of December '72.

Days after their mum has been taken away.

An official with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children

phones to say that this family have been apparently

looking after themselves for the past four or five days -

a group of children aged between 16 and six -

since their mother "has apparently been abducted by an organisation."

Now, isn't that astonishing?

Within DAYS...the word was out.

This is on official documentation.

A note is made here that the "neighbours, etc,"

are "unsympathetic" towards her.

That's the mother, Jean. Although less so towards the children.

We have reports of the parish priest in the run up to Christmas

saying he's aware of the circumstance

but being described here as being "very unsympathetic towards the family and their plight."

The parish priest apparently says he would call but didn't think he would help.

We're seven days out of Christmas.

Jean McConville was not the only person

disappeared by the IRA in 1972.

The IRA took and buried three of their own men that same year.

Joe Lynskey,

Seamus Wright,

and the youngest of them all -

17-year-old Kevin McKee.

# If you hate the British Army, clap your hands

# If you hate the British Army, hate the British Army,

# Hate the British Army, clap your hands! #

Kevin McKee, like many of his age,

had progressed from stone throwing into more serious violence.

He was a member of the IRA's youth wing, Na Fianna, in Ballymurphy, West Belfast.

This was Republican base camp.

The home place of Gerry Adams - where kids fell into line.

Kevin's sister Marie saw it all.

To me, he was just like all the other teenagers.

He didn't do nothing different to what everyone else was doing.

Throwing stones, breaking things up

they used to put Union Jacks up a lot,

and they'd scale up to the very top,

and take the Union Jack down

and set fire to it and then everyone clapped.

Kevin was, no matter what they say he done, he was a child.

He was 17 years of age.

Maybe there was other things going on that I wasn't aware of,

because I was too young,

but to me Kevin was doing what everybody else done.

When Kevin joined the IRA's Belfast 2nd Battalion,

Richard O'Rawe joined with him.

I knew Kevin very well, very well.

Kevin was a lovely lad, if the truth be told.

I lived just on the next street,

we were very, very close in terms of our friendship.

Kevin was the first person that I ever had a drink with

and I wasn't allowed to drink.

My father allowed me to join the IRA but he wouldn't allow me

to have a bottle of beer.

What was in your head though, when you went out there and signed up?

I was an Irish patriot.

You saw yourself as a freedom fighter?

Nothing else.

As far as I was concerned, this was about freeing Ireland from Britain.

Things went awfully wrong for Kevin McKee shortly afterwards.

He and another IRA man, Seamus Wright,

were recruited by British Army intelligence.

But the IRA found out about them and the two men confessed.

Well, it was bad business.

He went from being an IRA volunteer

to being actively involved in anti-IRA activities for the enemy.

No matter what way you look at it, he was a traitor.

You look back and you say...what was it all about?

Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright revealed to the IRA

details about a covert British Army operation,

in which a mobile laundry van called the Four Square

was used to spy on the IRA.

The IRA then ambushed the van, killing a British soldier.

It was a propaganda coup for the Republicans.

Kevin may have thought his role

in exposing the army spying operation had saved him,

but the IRA came knocking anyway.

I had said to him, "The IRA's been looking for you."

He says, "I've done nothing wrong."

I says, "Well, they're definitely looking for you

"and I'm just warning you off."

And it was then I took a photograph of him and that was it.

And that was the day that the IRA said he was under arrest.

I never seen him again.

That was the last.

The family said nothing to the police because they were afraid

and because of rumours - thought to have been spread by the IRA -

that Kevin was staying away of his own accord.

Those rumours suited the IRA.

All you heard was, "Oh, we seen Kevin."

If you went to ask anybody - "Oh, we seen him."

You know, he was in art school or something like that.

And then somebody said they seen him in England.

It was too much for Kevin's mother Mary -

she suffered a nervous breakdown.

My sister didn't want to accept it.

Didn't want to accept that there was something wrong, so...

I think she built it all up inside her,

hoping that he was coming back every day.

She imagined him places.

She stopped cars. Asked to check the boots.

And she was running everywhere looking for him,

and getting us to come and getting the kids out of the house,

getting their coats on at night -

"He might be here and he might be there."

And the kids were running about in the cold in the winter.

So you were trying to deal with losing your brother

and then you were trying to deal with your mother losing her mind

over losing her son.

The IRA held the men for weeks.

Then one Friday, a surprise call to Mary McKee from her son

gave her hope.

He was calling from a town just across the border

in the Irish Republic.

My sister got a phone call - he was down in Monaghan

and ringing from a priest's house,

and he asked his mother if she'd come up.

And that was on a Friday, and she's says,

"You'll have to wait till Monday",

because she didn't have a clue what was going on -

she was in and out of the mental hospital.

She didn't tell us till the Monday.

When the family eventually set off to Monaghan, three days later,

they expected to be reunited with Kevin.

Me and my sister went down and my husband Jim along with Mary,

brought him down clothes, and when we went to the door

the man said, "He's not here.

"He has just left and yous can take your clothes back with yous."

I've discovered that house where Kevin McKee,

possibly with Seamus Wright, was staying in.

A terraced house in Monaghan Town.

It was the home of Fergal O'Hanlon,

a legendary IRA figure from the 1950s.

The McKees say that it was his father that answered the door to them after Kevin phoned.

I don't think Kevin knew that he was going to his death.

I don't think so.

Cos he wouldn't have asked for his clothes if he had've.

Four decades later, Kevin's aunt and his sister Phil

are going back to Monaghan, to the house that Kevin called them to.

They're hoping for information that might help them find his remains.

Ohhh.. Just a bit of a feeling coming over me, you know.

Whenever you know you are coming to the spot that he was.

The last spot that we know where he was.

A sister of Fergal O'Hanlon's lives in the house now.

She had nothing to do with what happened to Kevin,

but the McKees have written to her requesting a meeting.

How did you feel in there?

I was actually crying. I says, "To think that Kevin was here."

She said, "Are you sure it was my father?"

I said, "Yes, he addressed himself as Mr O'Hanlon."

But she had no notion that her house was where Kevin was last heard of?

No, she said, "Definitely, it's the first she's heard of it."

He's missed by everybody

and we just want to get his body back

so that we can put his name on the grave

and we can pray and just go up and tell him how sorry we are

that we weren't there that Friday.

So terrible me not going up that Friday.

I feel awful Mary didn't tell us, you know, the Friday.

SHE SIGHS HEAVILY

The McKee's never heard from Kevin again.

Seamus Wright also vanished.

The practice of disappearing inconvenient bodies in the Irish countryside

goes back to the 1920s and the Irish War of Independence.

The practice was resurrected by the IRA in 1972.

Traditionally alleged informers were shot dead -

bodies displayed on roadsides - as examples to all.

The rules for informants are the same the world over.

Veteran Republican Billy McKee knows those rules.

He helped set up the Provisional IRA in 1969.

I was OC Belfast Brigade.

You were the boss man? Mm.

Did you have many people working with you?

Were there many in the IRA at the time?

The IRA was never as strong since 1920,

as it was when I was in charge.

From your perspective - people knew the rules?

Yes, you were warned about it when you joined the IRA.

You were told all...what could happen to you, you could be arrested,

imprisoned, beaten, taken away, shot dead somewhere...

But you were warned not to inform.

And you were told what the penalty was.

At the time of the 1972 disappearances,

Billy McKee was in jail and no longer in charge.

Looking back, what was the point of disappearing people?

I couldn't tell you. I wasn't in command.

I'd no say in the matter.

I wasn't approached about it.

It was up to the people that were in charge

to do what they thought was right.

They thought they were doing right. Well, it's up to them.

Billy McKee was from an older generation of IRA activists.

Gerry Adams was part of the next generation -

though he's always denied being a member.

Gerry Adams says he wasn't in the IRA.

Gerry Adams's speaking for himself.

Was Gerry Adams in the IRA?

Ask him will he come up and say that to me face to face.

I understand that Gerry Adams joined the IRA around 1966.

He rose up the ranks quickly.

Here he is accompanied by senior IRA men

at the funeral of a volunteer in 1970.

Interned in Long Kesh prison camp -

in June, 1972, the 23-year-old was released to represent the IRA

in talks with the British government.

Later that same year - the bloodiest of the conflict -

he was promoted to the post of OC - Officer Commanding -

the top rank in the Belfast Brigade of the IRA.

Former IRA members from that era that I have spoken to,

say that he was in charge there

when Jean McConville was taken in December that year.

Today Gerry Adams leads Sinn Fein

and can claim to be the head of Irish Republicanism.

Over the course of The Troubles at least 16 people were disappeared,

15 of them by the IRA, who finally stopped the practice in 1981.

The IRA's governing army council is said to have ordered an end to it.

As for those disappeared -

they were swallowed up in the silence of their unmarked graves.

I knew winter cold Like the nuzzle of fjords At my thighs -

The soaked fledge, the heavy Swaddle of hides.

My skull hibernated In the wet nest of my hair.

It was the IRA ceasefire of 1994 that changed everything.

With the guns silent,

the families of the disappeared could finally be heard.

A campaign to recover the disappeared began -

and it had powerful allies.

Today there are families that have still not had the chance to grieve in peace,

to visit the graves of their loved ones,

to reunite after years of separation.

It is time to allow families to be whole again.

You first spoke about this back in 1995, and Gerry Adams was in the audience that day.

Were you aware of it as an issue as far back then?

I was,

but I have to say that it was different and more personal to me

once I actually met a real, live flesh-and-blood mother

who was looking for her boy.

That woman was Margaret McKinney

whose son Brian was disappeared in 1978.

She had succeeded in getting the ear and the support

of the most powerful politician in the world.

We were sitting outside the Oval Office

and when the door opened, President Clinton and his wife was just there.

I couldn't believe it.

And he said to me that day, he says,

I promise you, I'll help you find your son.

She was a very impressive woman, I thought.

Just in her simple... love for her son,

she was willing to go on with her life, but she wanted her baby back,

so she could bury him properly.

And he did, you know. He did help me.

I will never forget President Clinton -

he will always be my President.

Margaret's son Brian and his friend John McClory

had been accused of taking IRA weapons

and using them in a robbery.

The money had been paid back, but it made no difference.

He was the one child you had to be very protective of,

and his friends were very protective of him, too,

for he was very childish.

A great singer.

His favourite was Engelbert Humperdinck -

Please Release Me, Let Me Go.

I know in my heart, too, he would have been crying out for me.

Oh, God love him.

President Clinton spoke to Gerry Adams who promised to help.

It was around this time that a special IRA team

was told to find the remains of the disappeared -

and report back.

Fr Alec Reid, Adams's long-time friend and confidante,

agreed to be an intermediary.

The IRA leadership decided to help the families

and these people who had disappeared.

They spent one year looking for the IRA people who had dug the graves

for these people, then they hoped they'd be able

to lead people like me to where these bodies were.

Fr Reid went on an odyssey of bog and death, and farce, too.

I was taken to a country road - a remote country road -

and told to wait there.

And after a few minutes these two men in balaclavas came out of a wood.

Then they brought me to a field.

A place the IRA uses as a shooting range, you know,

for practising shooting.

They brought us into this tent

and they cooked sausages and rashers and fried eggs for us all

in the middle of the night.

Why were you taken there?

Because some of the bodies were there, you see.

Then they brought me to a field,

and they said there are two bodies here.

Look for a tree that's about 20 years old,

and if you find one the bodies should be there.

And then there was another one

and the body had been buried in the front garden of the house.

When the IRA decided they had found out as much as they could,

nine families were contacted individually.

Among them, the family of Columba McVeigh.

19-year old Columba from Tyrone had disappeared in 1975.

The IRA told his brother they'd killed and buried him.

My immediate thoughts went back, how am I going to tell my mother this?

It's probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life -

and I mean that, with any shadow of a doubt -

was to go and break that news.

Not, you know, that he was dead,

but that this horrible thing that he'd been shot...

..and buried like a dog.

And I'll never forget the first words she said to me.

You know, she says, "The bastards hadn't the balls to tell me herself."

And I remember thinking, you know what - that's correct.

Afterwards the IRA issued a statement

in which they admitted killing and disappearing nine people -

Jean McConville, Columba McVeigh,

over here wee Brian McKinney -

and as far as they were concerned

there weren't any others that they were responsible for.

That wasn't to prove to be the case.

But it did acknowledge that they'd caused incalculable pain and distress

and they said here that they felt they'd established

the burial sites of these people

and that they hoped for a speedy retrieval of the bodies.

Gerry Adams, almost completely recast as a statesman-in-waiting.

was clearly committed to achieving this dramatic turnabout

of IRA policy.

The organisation had moved from burying people

to helping to find them.

These folks were killed,

secretly buried,

and their families didn't have a grave to go to.

And I think that's, you know, a grave injustice to them.

I think it is something which Republicans have acknowledged,

certainly the IRA, for its part, has apologised.

So it's very much an issue that Republicans have a responsibility,

in my opinion, to rectify - in so far as that's possible

and something which I have been trying to do for some time.

Behind the scenes, in May 1999, a deal was done with

the Irish and British governments to find the disappeared.

IRA members could give information about the killings

and burials without fear of prosecution.

A matter of hours after the deal was formalised,

the body of alleged IRA informant Eamon Molloy was recovered

in a brand-new coffin at the ancient churchyard of Faughart

on the southern side of the border.

What was it like that day when you came here?

It was an unusual and eerie scene, certainly one

we'd never see before or never since either.

About where we are now, when you look down, you could see a brand-new

clean coffin sitting in the trees down there.

That's the Blessed Tree and there's a Blessed Well at the back of it.

The coffin had been left under the Sacred Tree of St Bridget,

the patron saint of lost children.

Eamon Molloy's family then discovered that before he'd been shot

Eamon was given the last rites by a priest.

The priest, now dead, told the family that Eamon wanted them

to know that he wasn't an informer.

Searches began for the others.

Did you guys think that, you know,

"This was very easy, all the other finds will be just as simple"?

Well, we knew that a number of digs were

about to commence and, I suppose, the fact that this body was left

here to be collected and taken away would lead one to believe that

a number of bodies would be recovered in the short term.

The victims' group WAVE, which continues to support

the families today, helped them get their message out

from the start.

We don't want anybody prosecuted.

We don't want anything other than to know the whereabouts of the bodies.

Six weeks later, Margaret McKinney, who had

taken her campaign to President Clinton, got her son back.

In the first few shovelfuls was

Brian's wee shoes

and his wee mouth organ.

He loved playing the mouth organ.

God, how could they do that to him?

And he is always with me, anyway, he's always with me.

Brian was found in a double grave with

his friend John McClory in County Monaghan just across the border.

The deal with the IRA meant that no evidence could be

collected at the burial sites for use in prosecution

but the actual cause of death was recorded.

You were involved quite a few of the cases of the disappeared.

What's common?

Those of us that worked on these cases

were of the opinion that a vehicle had been used,

that the person who was abducted and going to be murdered

was brought to the location accompanied by probably two,

three others.

The person was bound.

They were walked a short distance, probably to a grave that had

been partially dug or was to be dug there and then, and the bodies

were dumped and concealed in a shallow grave.

In general, a single shot, probably a small calibre at the base of

the skull, corresponding with the stem of the brain

which would result in instantaneous death.

In one or two instances, large stones had been placed on top of the body.

Why was that? This may have been because in some of

the summers of the past, which were very good, the bog shrinks

and so your body may rise.

When the digs began, that summer of 1999, the expectation

among the families was that the disappeared would be found in days.

Jean McConville's daughter Agnes dreamt about her mother,

imagining her by a beach on Dundalk Bay.

I had a dream one night,

I heard this cry,

and I see my mother with a headscarf on her...

..and all I could hear was her saying, "I'm out on the beach,

"please find me, I'm out on the beach, please find me."

I went out to the beach to see out of curiosity,

would there be any sign of her?

And the following week

I heard they were starting to dig out in Templetown.

Agnes's dreams had led her

right to where the IRA said they had buried her mother -

Templetown beach on Dundalk Bay, where a search began.

Six and a half weeks was a long, long time for

anybody to be sitting, lying, waiting

on their mother's remains.

There wasn't a day went past I never brought flowers.

The days seemed longer and longer.

She wasn't there.

We all said to ourselves, "We're never going to get her now"

because they'd dug the whole beach up.

And the worst thing was when we got the news

that the dig was stopping.

We were sure, 100% sure, that she was here, so we were.

We were just heartbroken leaving this beach.

The information was wrong.

Just three of the victims identified by the IRA were recovered

that first year.

Four more years passed before Jean McConville's body was found

by a local man out walking on another beach nearby.

And this was just plain, just sand.

Just this spot where the bank and everything had fallen down

and I just seen the piece of cloth.

I pulled it up, and kept pulling, I could see, like, a pattern

coming in the...

In the fabric? In the fabric, yeah.

And I put my hand down and I knew it was a bone.

The first thing that came into my head was Jean McConville.

I went over to the car and I got a little bottle of holy water.

And I blessed...

..and said a little prayer.

I knew there was a body that had been laying there

for a long time on their own. I just...

I Just felt like I had to do it.

31 years after she had been taken,

Jean McConville's children were now able to grieve.

BELL TOLLS

Her funeral took her past Divis for the last time.

By the standards of Republican west Belfast, it was a small affair.

But her nine surviving children,

long ago farmed out to various orphanages,

came together to lay their mother to rest.

Always wondering what was going

through my mother's head.

Knowing the steps what I'm taking there myself,

that was the last steps of my mother's life

which she was taking, coming down here to her death.

I just can't get my head round it -

how another human being can do this to another human being.

We were going to be orphans when they done this here to us.

When they killed our mother, they knew we'd be orphans,

they knew there was nobody else to look after us.

They knew what they were doing,

and they knew what they were leaving behind...

so they do.

I just can't get my head round that, so I can't.

The same nightmares are there all the time, seeing them coming in.

It never goes away, so it doesn't.

And the hurt's always there, too, so it is.

The majority of those on the IRA's list were still missing.

The promised cooperation was coming up short.

Maybe because some involved in the burials were dead, or the terrain

had changed and also because some of the IRA just didn't want to help.

But there were others who weren't even on the IRA list,

like two men disappeared by the organisation

in the borderlands of South Armagh.

More than 150 members of the British security forces were killed

in the countryside around the town of Crossmaglen.

Here the IRA's South Armagh Brigade,

waged a ruthless war by their own particular rules.

If you fell foul of them everyone knew the consequences.

Gerry Evans, 24, from Crossmaglen, was disappeared in 1979.

He wasn't on the list

because the IRA never admitted taking him.

We did report him missing.

They said maybe he'd turn up in a field somewhere, you know,

in years to come.

So that wasn't very nice.

And you were afraid to ask anyone.

But there was no-one coming forward with any information.

There was a silence.

And then Charlie was in the group out looking for him too -

that's Charlie Armstrong.

Gerry's neighbour, Charlie Armstrong, was himself taken

and disappeared two years later.

His name wasn't on the IRA list either.

I remember him making things.

I remember the smell of sawdust, that would be

the big thing with me.

Whereas if we behaved ourselves we could sit up on the couch

and he'd start making things on the floor, cutting it out,

and I just loved the smell of the sawdust.

He'd make dolls' houses, cribs, chapels, didn't matter what it was.

He was always making something.

He was just an ordinary man,

he liked a wee gamble on the horses.

Now and again.

One Sunday morning, Charlie left on his regular mission

to drive an elderly neighbour to mass.

He was never heard of again.

As with other victims, almost immediately,

rumours began circulating that Charlie was alive and well.

The family blame the IRA -

a cynical ploy to keep them guessing.

People saying he was seen sitting in a bar

chatting two women up in Carrick.

Another man said that he'd seen him getting off a bus in Drogheda.

We checked them all out, there was nothing.

Everybody went looking.

We went round the roads every Sunday...

Nothing.

That went on for 29 years.

The IRA remained silent.

But in 2001 one individual appeared to break ranks

and wrote to Kathleen.

Went up at lunch one day and my mother was in tears

in the kitchen, and she says, "Look at this",

addressed to the Armstrong family, Cullaville Road,

it wasn't a stranger.

And, um, it was just scrawled along,

with the letters stating, "Why now, I don't know.

"Charlie is buried three feet down,

"50m or so off the road,"

and a map roughly drawn.

This first map was inaccurate.

But by this time, a special forensic team had been set up

to find the bodies.

Sent more accurate maps, the team found Charlie in 2010,

buried just across the border.

We weren't sure whether it was him or not,

and they took us out to Dundalk and they had all his...

wee bits and pieces that he had.

And every one of them I knew, they were...

Even his shoes...

..everything.

Even his socks.

It was wonderful in one way...

Another way, it was very sad.

I don't know how I got over it.

But I was glad. Glad to have him back.

Gerry Evans's body was found a few months later.

"Whatever you say, say nothing" is a local mantra,

but there is one man who knows this place and isn't afraid to speak up.

Martin McAllister is a former member

of the IRA's South Armagh Brigade,

with the scars and the prison terms to prove it.

Who carried out these disappearances?

It would have been the local IRA, be in no doubt about that.

Are you sure of that?

Yeah, certainly, and the reason for disappearing him

is a very simple one.

The local community, ordinary decent people in Crossmaglen,

would not have stood for it,

would not have put up with it, would not have supported it.

So, no claim, no blame. Everybody was aware what had happened to them.

The fact that they didn't leave him at the side of the road,

so to speak, maybe saved their own grace a little bit

because they could say, "Well, we didn't do this."

Another thing that would have been done very comprehensively

would have been the rumour mill would have been started.

You know, to try and kill the story off.

Such as they've disappeared here or there or they were spotted in

such a town and such a place in England or whatever.

All absolute nonsense. None of it.

All it did was add more distress to

the families of the people concerned, huge distress to the people.

The IRA has never admitted the murders of Charlie Armstrong

and Gerry Evans, why is that?

Well, there are only two reasons for it.

First of all, the IRA leadership didn't authorise that killing.

The IRA leadership which carried out the investigation would have

uncovered that and said that at the time, so whether the IRA

didn't kill Gerard Evans and Charlie Armstrong, they were killed by

others, which could include other Republicans.

It could even include local Republicans.

But everyone knows they were killed by the IRA.

Well, you know, again, I am not going to speculate.

You asked me the question, I'm giving you...

I know, but you know they were killed by the IRA. No, I don't.

Gerry Adams says he can't be sure that the IRA was responsible.

Well, there's lots of things in your life that you can't be certain of.

I can't be certain the sun's going to come up in the morning but I

could put money on it, you know. It's as simple as that.

I think Gerry Adams, perhaps... He chooses, maybe, to come up with

that answer as opposed to facing the reality that he himself has

been told lies by them here locally and perhaps he wants to believe it.

A local IRA source told me that Charlie Armstrong

was not an informer but often dallied about the town square

and someone decided he might have seen something

that he shouldn't have.

He was very close to you all of those years, too, wasn't he?

Yes, three miles as the crow flies.

You'd be here in a few minutes.

How was your father killed?

The half of his head was missing, half a skull.

The hands and his feet were tied to the front, which meant that he was

killed and then tied up and dropped off.

The IRA have never admitted killing your dad, have they?

No, he wasn't mentioned at all.

I believe I know the people who done it and I'll always know them.

And even the day of my father's funeral I had to thank

those people.

I felt it was something I had to do.

I had to get up and thank whoever gave us that information.

So would your mum ever come here, come here to see this?

No, no, she would prefer to go to the grave than think

of him lying out here.

Where he should never have been.

He never should have been out here.

Charlie, help me down the steps.

Thank you, Charlie, for helping me down the steps.

Thank you, Charlie.

Charlie, are you listening?

That's right, you are. God bless you and take care.

Recovering the dead has been a protracted

and often disappointing process.

This summer the only active search was for Columba McVeigh.

In 1999, his brother was told that his burial site had been identified.

14 years on, his remains are still to be found.

He's supposed to be buried at Braggan bog in Monaghan.

Earlier searches here have failed,

but this time the specialist search team was cautiously optimistic.

Columba's sister Dympna has one keepsake of him -

a present he gave to their mother.

CHIMES OF GALWAY BAY

Galway Bay.

This was in the glass cabinet.

That kept pride of place. Columba bought her that.

Can't hear that song now.

Can't listen to that song now.

The IRA branded him an informer

but to Dympna he will always be a younger brother.

1975, that's Columba in the armchair with his legs crossed.

He looks in total charge of his world there.

Oh, he was always in total charge of everything.

That was his... His front? Yeah.

I've always said he was dead from day one,

when he was missing. I've always said he was dead.

And why did I say he was dead? Because he needed my mum too much.

He could not have stayed away.

You've heard the thing about "attached to apron strings"?

He was tied to mummy's apron strings.

She was living, wasn't she, to see her son home?

God, yeah. But it wasn't to be.

No.

I never done anything to the IRA.

Neither did me mum, so why are they torturing us?

38 years on and they're still torturing us. And that's what it is.

How would you feel if it was your brother?

Have you been to Braggan? Have you been to the bog? No. No.

Refuse to go. Why?

Cos I've got an image in my head.

An image of...Columba?

Hm-mm. The way he was?

No.

I've got an image in my head of Columba standing there, crying...

..looking into a hole.

Nobody got to say goodbye to him.

Braggan, where Columba is thought to have been shot and buried,

is, like most of the burial sites, isolated, miles from anywhere.

Tied up, guns pressed to your side,

your last minutes alive.

It might make a lovely drive on a summer's day

but not this night.

As quiet as rural Ireland gets,

a terrifyingly lonely place being driven to your certain death.

In the absence of fresh information, other searches have been abandoned.

Like that for Kevin McKee and Seamus Wright,

who were said to have been buried in County Meath less than

40 miles from Dublin city centre.

They were the pair who were

accused of informing on the IRA but who had later helped them

ambush the British Army's undercover Four Square Laundry operation.

I've been trying to piece together the crucial events in the last

months of their lives.

The IRA leader who dealt with them in 1972, Brendan Hughes,

said they should never have been killed.

The following explanation from Hughes himself has never been

broadcast before.

You had to understand that McKee and Wright

believed themselves to be... have immunity.

They were given that.

They were taken away across the border.

I mean, they were held for weeks and weeks and weeks, across the border.

Kevin, remember, was just 17 - a kid.

Most his age have a lifetime to make and atone for mistakes.

Brendan Hughes bitterly regretted what happened next.

Actually, McKee, the people who were holding him...

liked him. Good cook, good craic,

and the order was given for them to be put down, right.

I didn't give the order. I felt betrayed to some extent.

Now this is hearsay on my behalf.

The people who were holding them liked them and couldn't execute them

and people were sent from Belfast to do the actual execution.

There was no purpose in it, it was pure revenge, I think.

Brendan Hughes also explained that Gerry Adams was

involved at this time, planning IRA attacks against the army

intelligence teams that Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee had revealed.

Brendan Hughes doesn't accuse him of having any part in their deaths.

But if he is correct, wouldn't Gerry Adams have known about their role?

Did you know Kevin McKee?

Did I know Kevin McKee? Ballymurphy lad.

I know where he's from.

I know his family well.

I can't say I know him, person to person, but I know his family,

I know his...siblings.

Did you know him as a young lad in Ballymurphy?

Not that I can recall, but I may have, but I can't recall that.

Did you know Seamus Wright? I know the Wright family.

Again, I know his siblings - very strong Republican family,

Did you hear what happened to them back then in 1972,

did you hear that they had been involved in the Four Square Laundry?

Yes, there were rumours about, there always are.

There always are rumours when something happens.

But you were a seriously-placed Republican leader in Belfast

in 1972, you have written about the Four Square Laundry operation

in glowing terms, I assume you must have heard about these two men

and their involvement in it back then, did you?

I am assuming you did, but maybe you didn't...

I learnt a long time ago, if you don't ask you can't tell,

and you are also talking about very turbulent times.

Did you not know that Seamus Wright,

whose relatives were well known to you,

did you not know that Seamus Wright had disappeared?

Nobody knows these things, Darragh... But you knew his family.

Hold on a second, what sort of world do you live in?

Kevin McKee's mum was looking for him, the entire

family searching for him.

Please bear with me. Do you not live in the real world?

People go off, people disappear,

people bring back reports of having seen such and such a person.

But what about Jean McConville, the mother of ten

that disappeared in 1972?

After she was found in 2003,

her family persuaded the police ombudsman to inquire into

why there had been no proper police investigation in the first place.

The reason they didn't start an investigation was that

that area was so dangerous that they only investigated

what they called serious crimes and they clearly didn't regard...

..poor Jean McConville's abduction as a serious crime.

As part of her inquiry, Nuala Oloan wanted to

establish the truth about claims that Jean McConville

was an informant.

There were two main allegations - that she had revealed

the whereabouts of a gun or that she had concealed Army transmitters.

Both were false, according to Nuala Oloan.

Why was she disappeared?

I think she was the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She was an East Belfast Protestant, they had moved across

to West Belfast,

and there were suspicions, the laundry vans incident

had occurred where the British Army were collecting information,

and there were suspicions about informants and I think that because

she was not one of them...

they just decided to make an example of her.

She was not an informant.

Murder is sometimes a solitary act.

Not Jean McConville's.

It's thought that up to 20 people

may have been involved in her killing.

A source who believes their life would be at risk

if identified told me that Jean was held

and interrogated close to her home,

never more than three quarters of a miles away.

She was held for up to six days in Belfast - not for interrogation

but to finalise the logistics of disappearing her.

A team to drive her across the border, a team to shoot her,

a team to dig her grave.

For certain, the IRA believed she was an informant

but this doesn't explain why she was disappeared.

Billy McKee, the former IRA Belfast commander, wasn't in charge then,

but he knows what he would have done.

Would you have buried Jean McConville? No.

I'm telling you I wouldn't have buried them.

I would have executed her all right, no problem,

but I would not have buried her.

Sinn Fein have told me that the policy

of disappearing people was a policy

inherited from the old men of the IRA,

the men from the 1940s and the 1950s campaign. Is that true?

That's a goddamn lie.

In my time, I never knew anybody to be buried.

Executed, yes, but not to be buried.

They were never disappeared.

Not in the '40s, not in the '50s.

But why are they telling it?

They would near tell you they weren't involved

in the campaign at any time.

That's confounded lies, what they're saying.

Alone of the disappeared, Jean McConville's killing

is a live police investigation.

This is in large part because she was found by a member of the public,

so the special deal with the IRA doesn't apply.

So who ordered her death and disappearance?

Republican sources who don't want to be identified

have told me that a special Belfast IRA intelligence team was in charge.

This unit has been called The Unknowns.

One of its members was Dolours Price.

Once very close to Gerry Adams, she became bitterly critical of him.

She struggled with illness but, before her death earlier this year,

she did a number of interviews in which she admitted driving

Jean McConville across the border.

She also admitted helping to disappear three others in 1972.

Crucially, she said she was acting under the orders of Gerry Adams.

Brendan Hughes - once said to have loved Gerry Adams as a brother -

goes even further. He admitted being involved in the IRA's

investigation of Jean McConville, but says the responsibility

for her death lies with Gerry Adams.

BRENDAN HUGHES:

More than 40 years after her death, the circumstances

of Jean McConville's killing still follow Gerry Adams...

OVERLAPPING

..though he insists he had no knowledge of her then.

I would love to hear you speak the truth about some elements

of your past, Deputy Adams.

Cut out the waffle and have some straight talk.

Perhaps you might someday tell the truth about

the tragedy and about the remorse

and the compassion that should have been shown to Jean McConville.

Maybe you might do that, Deputy Adams. You might do that sometime.

OVERLAPPING

Brendan Hughes has alleged that there was only one man

who gave the order for "that woman", meaning Jean McConville,

to be executed. That man is now the head of Sinn Fein.

That's what Brendan Hughes has said.

Did you give the order for the execution of Jean McConville

as he claims?

No, I had no act or part to play in either the abduction, the killing

or the burial of Jean McConville

or indeed any of these other individuals

and Brendan is telling lies,

and himself and Dolours Price,

opponents of the Sinn Fein leadership,

opponents of our strategy,

from their point of view and obviously I profoundly disagree,

they see us as having sold out, they see us as being traitors

and they also have their own demons to deal with,

so all of this and these allegations have to be set in that context.

Brendan Hughes's recordings were made as part

of an American history project based at Boston College.

I wanted to get insight into the thinking of Brendan Hughes,

his motivation for accusing his once close friend of the killing

and disappearance of Jean McConville.

I think what motivated Brendan Hughes

in coming forward and talking about this sort of thing

was his anger at Gerry Adams's denial of his own past and their shared past

as senior figures in the IRA,

and Brendan Hughes, I think, was very strongly influenced by the fact

that there was Gerry Adams denying

that he had given orders to Brendan Hughes

to do certain things,

when both Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams knew that this has happened.

And I think that denial angered him

and I think angered other people

and, in his case, persuaded him to actually take a big step

and give this interview to Boston College.

Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes are both dead.

In Ireland I established contact

with another former senior IRA figure

whose identity I have agreed to keep secret.

It was stated to me that Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes

were telling the truth.

It's not just people like Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price

that make these allegations about you and Jean McConville.

I have learnt from a top Republican source

that you were in fact the Belfast Brigade commander

when Jean McConville was taken, murdered and executed

and that you in fact were ultimately responsible.

You, as Belfast commander,

as the OC in Belfast of the IRA,

were ultimately responsible for her fate,

because the unit, the intelligence unit,

some people call it The Unknowns,

that took her away, that dealt with her,

answered to one person and that person was you.

Well, that's just a recycling of the same story, that's not true, Darragh.

But I've been told... Come here, you can repeat it ad nauseam,

I'm telling you it's not true.

Do you regret what happened to her? My focus...

Do you regret it from a personal perspective?

Bear with me. My focus is in trying to do what I can

as an individual to bring those remaining bodies to the families

who grieve them and who want a burial place to go to.

Of course I regret. Of course.

One wouldn't be a thinking, living human being

if one didn't have regret.

Do you bear any responsibility for what happened to these people?

All of us bear a responsibility,

those of us who are in leadership

and I have never shirked that.

Gerry Adams and some in the IRA have attempted to atone

for the wrong done to the families of the disappeared.

But certain wrongs can never be undone or made right.

MICKEY McCONVILLE: I can't remember a time

when there wasn't pigeons around the family.

It puts me back to my childhood memories what were happy,

when we were all together.

I will always hope to get the truth.

It's one of things that I am fighting for, is to get the truth,

why they killed my mother.

It was wrong.

They made us suffer all them years not knowing where she was.

I suppose they'll have to answer for it someday.

When I send them away,

they always return home, they always come back to me.

The latest dig for Columba McVeigh has again ended in failure.

Four of the six IRA victims not found

are thought to be buried in bogs

in County Meath in the heart of Ireland,

like here at Orristown.

All the families can do for those still missing

is hope for new and better information.

Just look at the size of it. It's hundreds of acres.

How on earth are you going to find somebody?

And all you're looking of course now is for some bone, dyed turf brown.

Maybe a belt buckle or a shoe.

But in a place this size you could be digging from now until doomsday

and never find somebody.

It's clear that certain people are still holding on to secrets,

but secrets kept die,

secrets told can heal.

One day, maybe the bogs of Ireland will give up their dead,

but before then certainly, there will be time

to contemplate the truths of our historic conflict.

SEAMUS HEANEY: The plait of my hair

a slimy birth-cord of bog, had been cut

and I arose from the dark,

hacked bone, skull-ware,

frayed stitches, tufts,

small gleams on the bank.

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