Sinn Fein's silence on IRA killing

Harry Feeney was standing in the doorway of his house on Quarry Road in the Brandywell in Derry on November 14th, 1973.

A whistle blasted out three times and the kids playing on the street scattered quickly. The whistle-blasts were a pre-arranged signal, suggesting that the kids were being used as cover by the two IRA gunmen who were planning to fire on a British Army patrol.

But Harry Feeney's 14-year-old daughter. Kathleen. either didn't hear the whistle or didn't understand the meaning of the signal. She stayed where she was and the IRA fired anyway. Harry Feeney saw his precious girl being hit in the head by a bullet.

He was part of the crowd that gathered around her as a member of the British Army patrol tried, without success, to resuscitate her.

The IRA in Derry at the time was led by Martin McGuinness, now Sinn Féin's chief negotiator. After the murder of Kathleen Feeney it issued a public statement that traded directly on the IRA's reputation for telling the truth about its own activities: "The people of Derry are aware that we have admitted responsibility for our actions even at times when mistakes were made by us and civilians injured. We say categorically that the shooting of young Kathleen Feeney was the work of the British army and not of the republican movement." It later announced that it had murdered a British soldier in direct retaliation for the army's alleged shooting of Kathleen Feeney.

These lies were part of a cynical cover-up aimed at protecting the IRA's self-image as the protector of the Catholic people. That cover-up was made necessary by the obvious fact that the IRA was now in the business of killing Catholic children. The day before Kathleen Feeney was shot, the IRA in Belfast had kidnapped two Catholic twin boys. One, Bernard Teggart, who was 15 but had a mental age of eight, was shot dead. His body was dumped in Bellevue Zoo with the word "Tout" pinned to his chest. The IRA issued no statement of responsibility for his death until last October. It continued to lie about Kathleen Feeney until last week, when it issued a curt acknowledgment of guilt and a terse apology for her death.

If the IRA could establish 32 years later that one of their own members killed Kathleen Feeney, it is almost inconceivable that Martin McGuinness did not know this at the time.

There is no great mystery about the reasons for the cover-up, however.

The murder of Bernard Teggart the day before had prompted a statement from three prominent Catholic priests, Denis Faul, Alex Reid and Aodh Bennett. They asked the questions that have echoed down the decades: "What kind of organisation would feel threatened by a boy with a mental age of eight? What kind of justice did this boy receive, who was ill-treated and murdered without trial?" Martin McGuinness's comrades in the IRA could not and would not answer those questions so they chose to lie. And they still won't answer them. At a time when the Taoiseach is telling us that the IRA should become a "commemorative organisation", there is still a complete reluctance to remember what the IRA was and did.

Sinn Féin has repeatedly and at times eloquently demanded that there should not be a "hierarchy of victims" of the Troubles, yet it continues to operate in a blatantly hierarchical manner. While laconic, anonymous statements following secretive investigations are good enough for the IRA's victims, nothing short of full accountability is good enough for the victims of the British state and loyalist paramilitaries. Just days before the IRA's statement on the Feeney murder, the Sinn Féin MP Conor Murphy gave the oration at the party's Bodenstown commemoration. In it, he called for "a full independent public inquiry" into the murder of Sinn Féin councillor Eddie Fullerton in Buncrana in 1991. Then, in almost the same breath, he condemned the "vilification of freedom fighters" - meaning, of course, the demand that the IRA account for its murders. The double standard may have been blatant but it has become so commonplace that no one bothered to comment on it.

Aside from the Bloody Sunday inquiry, Sinn Féin demands public inquiries into at least nine murders stretching back to 1969: those of Eddie Fullerton, Pat Finucane, Rosemary Nelson, Robert Hamill, Pearse Jordan, Sam Devenny, Patrick Rooney, Nora McCabe and Padraig Kelly.

In these cases, its justice spokesman, Gerry Kelly, says that "For true accountability, we need to know what happened and why. And once the wall of silence has been knocked down, only true accountability will ensure that wall can never be rebuilt."

Sinn Féin also complains that politicians who knew about collusion between the British state and loyalist paramilitaries "have never been called to account for their actions or for their culpability in the murder of citizens". Yet for almost 32 years, senior leaders of Sinn Féin knew that the IRA was lying about the murder of Kathleen Feeney.

They knew what happened and why. And they kept their mouths shut.