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Sinn
Féin has tried to use the recent discovery
of human remains in County Louth as an opportunity
to divert attention from the abduction and murder
of South Armagh man, Gareth O’Connor, which occurred
in May. The party rushed to capitalise on the find,
stating that it provided “closure” to the
family of Jean McConville but Sinn Féin’s
optimism is by no means altruistic. Jean McConville
was murdered in December 1972 and since then her family
have endured torture and loss. Given that the McConvilles
have had to suffer for 31 years, the public will doubt
whether there can ever be any “closure”
for the family.
The
publicity stunt backfired for Sinn Féin when
the Victim’s Commission initially stated that,
contrary to a claim by the Provisionals, it has not
received any new information about the whereabouts
of the rest of “the disappeared”. This embarrassed
the party so much that it then refused to send any
representatives to talk about the matter to BBC Newsline.
This year marks the anniversary of a similar outrage,
which was also followed by denial and lies by the
republican leadership, but one that became a huge
embarrassment for them and a moral victory for the
people of Derry.
Thirty
years ago the IRA also abducted and shot dead a Derry
man and then tried to hide his body. But this murder
and “disappearance” didn’t take as
long to embarrass the Provisionals as Jean McConville’s
did. When Patrick Duffy, from Rathlin Drive in Creggan,
was abducted from a pub in Buncrana on the 9th of
August, 1973, and then shot dead, the leadership of
the IRA in Derry City decided that his body should
be hidden. The 37 year-old father of seven was secretly
buried in a bog outside Buncrana.
During
the fortnight after Patrick Duffy’s murder there
was uproar in Derry. Opposition to this disappearance
was voiced by the public, by local supporters and
members of the republican movement in the city, and
by Derry internees in Long Kesh. What outraged the
internees about the disappearance was the fact that
the IRA had committed a gross human rights abuse by
denying the Duffy family’s right to habeas
corpus. The internees were disgusted by this because
the Special Powers Act allowed the prison authorities
to keep and bury the bodies of any prisoners who died
or were killed inside the jails.
Despite
these calls for the return of Patrick Duffy’s
body the IRA refused to release the remains and on
August 17th placed a notice in a local newspaper stating
that Duffy had been shot dead for being a police informer.
They kept his body hidden until August 24th, when
popular resentment forced them to capitulate. That
night Patrick Duffy’s body was left in a coffin
placed inside a car on the Buncrana Road. Under immense
pressure from the people of Derry, the leadership
of the IRA was eventually forced to surrender the
remains and their attempt to enforce the policy of
“disappearing” on the people of Derry failed.
Hiding
bodies, or “disappearing” is carried out
by governments and paramilitaries alike in order to
terrify populations but the policy also indicates
that those who conceal bodies have something themselves
to hide. Often there is a wider degree of complicity
in the crime that the murdered person has been accused
of (usually informing, in the case of Ireland’s
disappeared), and it is hoped that, in the absence
of a body, total blame will be attached to the victim
so that attention will be diverted from ongoing infiltration
by other police agents. Or, as with the recent case
of Gareth O’Connor, who was abducted and murdered
along the South Armagh border, the Provisionals and
their mouthpieces simply believe that by making a
person vanish they will erase all memory of the crime.
The
widespread disgust that was expressed at Patrick Duffy’s
disappearance is proof that the truth cannot be spirited
away as easily as someone’s remains. This was
one occasion when the republican movement and the
people of Derry defied an IRA leadership that came
up with the idea of hiding bodies. People have only
to consider the contrast with the murder and disappearance
of Gareth O’Connor to see how that movement has
changed and how cowed much of the wider community
has become.
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