ANALYSIS:Billy Wright's father disagreed with Lord MacLean's verdict, writes GERRY MORIARTY
BILLY WRIGHT was a leader of the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) which, in the main, murdered Catholics because they were Catholics and which was heavily involved in criminality, including drug dealing. He was a sectarian killer and proud of it.
But he was a mother’s son and, more particularly in the case of the long-running inquiry into his murder by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), a father’s son. When he was murdered on December 27th, 1997, Wright was an inmate in the Maze prison and, therefore, in the care of the British state.
The 700-page report by Lord MacLean and his tribunal colleagues Prof Andrew Coyle and Rev John Oliver found there was no official collusion in Wright’s killing – that is, no collusion in the sense of a deliberate British state conspiracy to kill the LVF leader because he opposed the peace process, which was to see fruition less than four months later on April 10th, 1998 – Good Friday.
But Lord MacLean made clear there was a great need for radical change in the prison service, such are its continuing failings.
David Wright, the murdered LVF leader’s father, who made a short but dignified and telling statement to the press in the Stormont Hotel in Belfast yesterday, and who continually pressed for the inquiry, disagreed with Lord MacLean’s main verdict. “It looks like collusion, it sounds like collusion, and in my mind amounts to firm and final proof of collusion by state agencies,” he said yesterday.
Reading the report, one tended to agree with Lord MacLean that there was no evidence of an official conspiracy, but no one could disagree with Mr Wright’s judgment that “the inquiry’s report is a scathing indictment of several state agencies”.
Those agencies included the Northern Ireland Prison Service, some prison officers, the Northern Ireland Office, the RUC, its special branch and MI5. If even basic rigour and attention to duty had been applied by some or all of these groups, INLA prisoners Christopher “Crip” McWilliams, John Kennaway and John Glennon would not have been able to kill Wright in the prison.
LVF prisoners were housed in the same block, H Block 6, as INLA prisoners, although separately, in different wings. The killers were able to make their way from their wing through a concealed hole in a fence, cut two days earlier, climb on to the roof of the block, jump on to a forecourt, and shoot Wright dead in a prison van. Wright was about to be driven to another part of the Maze for a visit with his girlfriend.
A litany of appalling failings is made clear in the report. To mention a few: McWilliams and Kennaway were “top risk” prisoners because they held a prison officer hostage at gunpoint in April 1997, yet they weren’t closely supervised; roof defences weren’t strengthened; exercise yards at H Block 6 weren’t secured and checked; INLA prisoners weren’t locked in their cells at night and were therefore in a position to cut the fence to facilitate the attack on Wright; a month before the murder the Red Cross found H Block 6 a “powder keg”, yet this was not properly considered by the prison service.
Moreover, there were failures by MI5 and the police to pass on intelligence about INLA threats to Wright; there were failures by the prison service to grasp that there was a serious risk to Wright.
The late governor Martin Mogg came in for heavy criticism, as did Alan Shannon, the then chief executive of the prison service – now a senior civil servant in the Northern Executive.
It was always on the cards that Wright, who had fallen foul of his former UVF comrades, would die violently. As former RUC chief constable Sir Hugh Annesley is quoted as saying – a comment he didn’t remember, but didn’t deny: “It’s just a question of who gets to the bastard first, us, the IRA or the UVF. You can take your pick.”
The RUC got to him first by getting him into the Maze, but of course he wasn’t safe there. And the terrible failings in the prison didn’t just result in Wright’s murder. For months afterwards, the LVF murdered Catholics in reprisal.
There was a terrible price for terrible negligence. Now, there is continuing concern that, despite the fact the Maze is closed, the prison service is still unreformed.