Fr Chesney and the Claudy bombing: answers, please
Posted on Wednesday 25 August, 2010
Filed Under Ireland
UNLIKE the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, at least the police ombudsman’s report into the Claudy bombing did not cost anything like £195m. And it only took it eight years rather than 12 to establish for the record what everybody knew already anyway, which is positively speedy by comparison.
Briefly put, Al Hutchinson found that parish priest James Chesney was an Irish Republican Army quartermaster and in that capacity directly involved in the 1972 terrorist atrocity that claimed nine lives and injured dozens of others.
Tory home secretary Willie Whitelaw discussed the issue with Cardinal Conway, head of the Catholic church in Ireland. The Cardinal conceded that Chesney was ‘a very bad man’, and decided that he should be punished by being transferred to a parish the other side of the border, where he served until his death in 1980. There. That showed him.
To this day, sections of the Irish Catholic hierarchy readily come to their guy’s defence. The former Bishop of Derry is insistent that Chesney could not have been involved with the IRA, because he vehemently denied the accusation twice.
Seasoned IRA cadre, of course, may not be in the habit of casually admitting full-scale involvement over the nibbles at a cheese and wine party. Why, some of them might even be willing to tell their boss fibs on the issue. But for the Bishop, it doesn’t matter any more: ‘He [Chesney] died 30 years ago and I am prepared now to leave him to the Lord, the God of justice.’
Yet not even Sinn Fein is bothering to keep up any elaborate pretences, diverting questions instead with the stock non-apology apology formula that Claudy was ‘wrong and should not have happened’ and that what we need now is an international truth commission. Yes, but what about Chesney? The silence is strikingly instructive.
Hutchinson concludes that the Claudy victims were ‘failed’ by a ‘collusive act’ which ‘compromised’ investigations at the time of the bloodshed. No one was ever arrested, despite obvious full awareness of the identity of the perpetrators.
In the fraught atmosphere of Northern Ireland 38 years ago, it was possible to adduce pragmatic motives for just such a collusive act. And Willie Whitelaw was nothing if not a famously pragmatic politician.
Although the Troubles were a political rather than religious conflict, religious sectarianism was indisputably a complicating factor. Confirmation of priestly complicity could easily have led to Loyalist reprisals, perhaps in the form of attacks on Catholic places of worship.
Right or wrong, the ‘see no evil’ call was an easy one to make.
I write as a British ex-Trot who remains broadly sympathetic to Irish Republicanism, and as a sometime participant in Troops Out marches. I entirely appreciate the political imperatives that prevent leading Republican condemning the actions of their own side during the years of armed struggle.
But the lives of the nine who died at Claudy will have been just as dear to their families as those of the 13 who died on Bloody Sunday. Surely full disclosure in the name of reconciliation is the least the survivors have a right to expect.
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Dave. A teenager out walking with his wife and child circa 1972 was snatched from a street in East Belfast by an IRA hit squad. His body was found days later tortured and shot. His hair had turned white. It was suspected at the time that a priest was involved. He was on the most wanted list by the security forces. He was known to be a brutal bastard. The press and TV were invited by the lads family to take photos and film of what happened to him, they declined. Could this be the same priest. I wonder.
The south Dery provos were a bit maverick, with probable OC Fr. Chesney known for scooting about in his red sports car. He was well known – the UDA abandoned an attempt to kill him just before the Claudy attack. Chesney reportedly drove the first car into the village. It was a particularly grotesque act of carnage – apparently an earlier IRA bomb had damaged the phone exchange in Claudy, which is why the warning didn’t get through – and one survivor recalled “the terrible sight of bodies without limbs and people’s insides lying all over the street.” Someone anonymously claiming to be an English priest wrote a letter to the press in 2002 saying that Chesney had confessed to him before he died.
That case mentioned by Jimmy Glesga sounds horrible. Doesn’t ring a bell, however: any more details? I’m pretty sure it can’t be 1972.
“The Cardinal conceded that Chesney was not ‘a very bad man’,”
No, he conceded that he was a very bad man. It really is hard to see the point of this post since Dave actually supported the Provos and their violence, unlike the Catholic hierarchy, but I guess it has been at least a fortnight since his last Catholic bashing post and he needs to keep up.
Sorry Pharisee. My slip, now corrected.
The Catholic Church in the north of Ireland has had a sweetheart deal with both the Stormont and London governments from the day the state was established. It’s most obvious in education.
Chesney as a militant Republican priest was an aberration. The institution was thoroughly partitionist. The central point about this is that a “strategy” of leaving large, shrapnel laden bombs in town was as wrong and stupid in 1972 as it is in 2010. This detail is lost on the new Republican groups, none of which has analysed the failure of the previous campaign.
Marc Mulholland. It was 1973. I was visiting relatives and watched the funeral cortege.
pharisee. The same old excuse of Catholic bashing. Always a good diversion from the truth. Just let the guilty go free. And Dave how you could ever have given any support to those Republican murderous fascists whether verbal or otherwise beats me. Moreso being a Trot. But we are all a bit daft when young.
“Surely full disclosure in the name of reconciliation is the least the survivors have a right to expect.”
Full disclosure by whom? Surely the whole peace process has nothing to do with ‘reconciliation’, but everything to do with the absence of war. (Welcome as that may be.)
Leaders of various factions may well have made their peace in return for a place at the table, but does that represent reconciliation around the political divide, let alone the sectarian divide?
Lobby Ludd. Most sensible Ulster folk know this is just the calm before the next storm. As long as the US are fighting their war of terror along with the British most Republicans will keep their heads down. The so called peace is really down to US pressure.
probably, the state never really went after Chesney because this also could have raised expectations to investigate e.g. Paisley’s involvement into late 1960ies paramilitarism
I don’t quite understand what the issue is here.
At least in the 1970s there were thousands of catholic priests in Ireland and statistically at least a handful had to come from the tribal minority who never stopped fighting the Brits and who formed the bedrock of provo support.
The more fanatical RC priests have never been shy of taking up cudgels, crossbows, muskets or armalites – the falangist clerics sniping from their church towers in the Spanish civil war may have been largely or wholly mythical but Father Murphy of the 1798 certainly wasn’t.
And keeping the murderous activities of this priest quiet actually made good utilitarian sense – killing or even jailing the bastard would have been a big publicity coup for the provos that would have been quickly turned into more dollars, guns, explosives and recruits – sending him off to Craggey Island arguably saved lives on both sides.
And if there is a just God he is being slowly basted over a hot fire somewhere down below along with the Franciscan ustashas and the genocidal Rwandan nuns – and if there isn’t his life was as futile and meaningless as can be – the cynical leaders of his movement and his church having kept him even off of the honour roll of departed Fenian heroes until of all things the Police Ombudsman’s office established his right to belong there.
@ Roger:
not mythical: http://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/leglise-catholique-soutien-du-franquisme/
Entdinglichung. There was only one small loyalist group during the sixties the UVF. Paisley as far as I can recall was consistent from the beginning of the troubles in condemning all paramilitaries using violence. But please surprise us all and give some evidence he was complicit in violence. It would be interesting to know.
The “Third Force” escapade of Paisley ring any bells?
I also remember reading somewhere that one of the UVF gunmen who killed a Catholic bartender in 1966 regretted later that he had ever listened to Paisley. I am sure Paisley knows how to put layers of maximum deniability between himself and people who listen to his sermons about the “antichrist” and “the whore of Rome” and then go out and kill a Catholic. Julius Streicher also tried to claim at Nuremberg that there was no connection between his anti-Semitic outpourings and the death of Jews under the Reich. In his case it didn’t work, as he was hanged.
Mark. A pretty poor excuse for killing someone. You really need to produce hard evidence that Paisley was involved in any way towards killing. Anyone can gossip and make rumour. It is strange that Paisley always had the largest majority in the EU elections. Thousands of Catholice voted for him.
It’s true that Paisley has always maintained, I think with some justification, that his invocations against the Church of Rome are aimed at the Church and not at individual Catholics. It can sometimes be a tenuous distinction, especially in circumstances of communal tension. But those like Dave who maintain that Catholics are not intelligent, consider themselves above the law, and constitute the most significant mass reactionary force on the planet might wish to consider the possible consequences of their inflammatory rhetoric at some stage also.
While I have zero affinity with the Catholic Church, their condemnations of the French Roma expulsions have been very loud. So the truth is never so simple. The French Roma issue is certainly one you would not find discussed here, it sits too uncomfortably among the ‘decent’ community. The purity of secular France would be spoiled, the ‘decents’ would have to face the idea that secularism is maybe not the main motive.
More Catholic bashing more hate , F Chesney is not here , where is the proof , if people knew way back then he would have been murdered by both sides , hate filled people caused the Troubles and we are going right back there the 3 people mentionedare now dead they cannot defend themselves
Eileen Kirwin. I reckon it was hate filled anti British mainly Catholics that started the Troubles. Why would the loyalist people fight against their own country. Hardly adds up does it.
I tend to agree with an earlier commentator who thought they didn’t go after the Chesneys to the extent they might have, because then they might have had to go after the Paisleys too, for balance. I am sure Paisley was cunning enough to put some layers between himself and the “defenders of the Protestant heritage” who actually picked up guns and went and killed Catholics, but Paisley’s “Roman whore” incitement, in a statelet where about 30% were Catholics, did much to foster communalist tensions. If he had been a Muslim cleric inveighing against “infidels”, I doubt that you would be so forgiving. If some Catholics vote for Paisley, so what? There were half-Jews serving in the Wehrmacht in WW2, sometimes out of a pathetic eagerness to prove their German patriotism.
I touched on Streicher in an earlier post. In his case, the prosecution had trouble finding people who could make a concrete link between Streicher’s journalistic incitement and the actual mass murder of Jews. They could find nobody who baldly said, “Yes, I read ‘Der Stürmer’ regularly and felt incited by it to go out and kill Jews.” Nonetheless, Streicher was convicted and hanged – the idea that Streicher had helped prepare the ground for genocide clearly prevailed with the judges. So you really think no Catholics died as a result of Paisley shouting “Jesus Saves – Rome Enslaves”?
This is from Wikipedia’s article on Paisley, accessed today. It establishes his willingness to at least dip a toe in Loyalist paramilitarism, and at quite an early date.
“From the majority unionist community, Paisley was among those invited in 1956 to a special meeting at the Ulster Unionist Party’s offices in Glengall Street, Belfast. Many Loyalists who were to become major figures in the 1960s and 1970 also attended, and the meeting’s declared purpose was to organise the defence of Protestant areas against anticipated Irish Republican Army (IRA) activity, as the old Ulster Protestant Association had done after partition in the early 1920s.[23] The new body decided to call itself Ulster Protestant Action (UPA), and the first year of its existence was taken up with the discussion of vigilante patrols, street barricades, and drawing up lists of IRA suspects in both Belfast and in rural areas.[24][25] The Ulster Protestant Action remained in being (the UPA was to later become the Protestant Unionist Party in 1966). Factory and workplace branches were formed under the UPA, including one by Paisley in Belfast’s Ravenhill area under his direct control. The concern of the UPA increasingly came to focus on the defence of ‘Bible Protestantism’ and Protestant interests where jobs and housing were concerned. As Paisley came to dominate Ulster Protestant Action, he received his first convictions for public order offences. In June 1959, a major riot occurred on the Shankill Road in Belfast following a rally at which he had spoken.[26]
Paisley, along with Noel Docherty established the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee, which in turn established the paramilitary organisation Ulster Protestant Volunteers on 17 April 1966 at a parade in the Shankill area of Belfast [27] (Boulton 34). Paisley went on to establish another paramilitary group, Third Force, on 1 April 1981.[28][29][30] The paramilitary group Ulster Resistance was established by Paisley in 1981.[31][32"
A poor, sad, deluded person wrote:
“More Catholic bashing more hate , F Chesney is not here , where is the proof , if people knew way back then he would have been murdered by both sides , hate filled people caused the Troubles and we are going right back there the 3 people mentioned are now dead they cannot defend themselves”:
Oh dear: does anyone seriously believe that Chesney *wasn’t* a mass-murderer? Or that the British state, the Tory Government (in the form of Whitelaw) and the Catholic Church, did a deal to protect him?
And yet bourgeois British Catholics *still* play the “victim” card and pretend that they are (or, at least, *were*) somehow “victims” of “British Imperialism” in the 1970′s/80′s. Ordinary working class Six Counties Catholics, of course, *were* victims. Father Chesney’s car bombs killed Catholics as well as Protestants. In fact, the British state colluded with the Roman Catholic Church to protect this killer. It’s as big a scandal as Bloody Sunday.
Not sure what you’re trying to say, James. Are we talking the ‘a little bit unionist’ rout to unionism?
Jim Denham. It is not complicated. The Irish Republicans/Nationalists mainly Catholic wanted an all Ireland State. The loyalist British mainly not Catholic but not all Protestant did not. Then they fought a war of attrition. Still not decided yet! The loyalists are more entrenched than ever before. Maybe the Catholics have a problem!
Lobby: when you ask “are we talking the ‘a little bit unionist’ rout to unionism?”, of me, I can only reply by asking you, in turn:
1/ Was anything in my previous post untrue?
2/ If not, how can a statement of the truth be “a little bit unionist”?
Some retarded idiot said,
“And yet bourgeois British Catholics *still* play the “victim” card and pretend that they are (or, at least, *were*) somehow “victims” of “British Imperialism…………………………..In fact, the British state colluded with the Roman Catholic Church to protect this killer. It’s as big a scandal as Bloody Sunday”
So fuckwit, they were victims of British Imperialism, something that doesn’t need to put in quotations by the way.
Deviation. It was Norman Imperialism followed by the English. The British just inherited Ireland. At least the English got rid of the Irish Clans. The British got rid of the Scottish Clans. Not to bad eh!
“Oh dear: does anyone seriously believe that Chesney *wasn’t* a mass-murderer?”
Well obviously not Sean Matgamna and the people around him, who insisted at precisely this period that support for every last iota of Provisional IRA violence was a litmus test for the British revolutionary left.
pharisee. You have sadly got the mindset of the republicans so wrong. Mass murder is not something they understand. Killing for petty nationalism is what they do. They think it is the right thing to do. The cause is more important than the slaughter of human beings. The fact that human life has existed on the planet for thousands of years even before what is now Ireland broke away from the continent evades them.
Ah, James Glasgow, it was there for all to see. You’re a serious Rangers supporter, along with certain decorative bits of protestantism.
It’s not something I quite understand, really.
Ah Lobby. Rangers not. I do have a photos of HMQ and Churchill. Does that count as proddie decor?