STATEMENT ISSUED BY COLIN WALLACE FOLLOWING THE PUBLICATION OF THE HISTORICAL INSTITUTIONAL ABUSE INQUIRY REPORT ON 20 JANUARY 2017
Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry - Report Chapters
Kincora Material
Although I initially offered to give evidence to the Inquiry, I later decided not to mainly on the grounds that the Government repeatedly refused to give it the same legal powers as the corresponding Inquiry in London. I believe that both the perception and the reality of the Government’s decision is one of unfairness to the victims.
Despite my decision, I did, however, provide the Inquiry with 265 pages of comment and supporting documents, drawing attention to false or misleading information contained in the transcripts of the public hearings. My reason for doing so was to enable the Inquiry to investigate and corroborate the accuracy of my past comments about Kincora and related matters, and to provide the Inquiry with the opportunity to correct the relevant errors in the its published transcripts.
John Colin Wallace is a former British member of the Intelligence Corps in Northern Ireland and a psychological warfare specialist. He was one of the members of the intelligence agency-led 'Clockwork Orange' project, alleged to have been an attempt to smear various individuals including a number of senior British politicians in the early 1970s.
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| Colin Wallace (left) with Field Marshal Lord Alexander of Tunis |
He also attempted to draw public attention to the Kincora Boys' Home sexual abuse scandal several years before the Royal Ulster Constabulary finally intervened.
He was wrongly convicted of manslaughter in 1981, for which he spent six years in gaol, until 1987. The conviction was later quashed in the light of new forensic and other evidence that raised serious questions about the dubious nature of the evidence used to convict Wallace initially.
The journalist Paul Foot, in his book Who framed Colin Wallace?, suggested that Wallace may have been framed for the killing, possibly to discredit the allegations he was making. This view was similarly expressed by Alex Carlile QC (now Lord Carlile), who later speculated that this may have been the motive not just for the alleged frameup, but also for murder. Wikipedia
With thanks to Cathy Fox Blog
and The Needle
Info not made available to Inquiries
None of the information I provided to the Inquiry is new. Although some of it has not previously been in the public domain, it has been in the possession of the Ministry of Defence and other Government agencies for many years and should have been made available by those authorities to the Inquiry. It should also have been made available by the authorities to previous Inquiries and the Government needs to explain why that did not happen.
Info gone missing
Even more worrying, is the acknowledged fact that key Army Intelligence files relating to Tara and William McGrath appear to have gone missing after they were handed over by the Army to MI5 in 1989, prior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s admission to Parliament (30 January 1990) that Ministers had “inadvertently misled” Parliament about my case. There also appears to be no record whatsoever of what became of all the ‘Clockwork Orange’ project files which I handed over to my superiors when I left Army Headquarters in Lisburn in February 1975. Some of those files related to William McGrath. To make matters worse, it is now clear from the Inquiry’s transcripts that a senior MI5 officer, Ian Cameron, falsely accused me of ‘leaking’ information to the press about William McGrath. His claim was that I did so without authority.
The MI5 claim is bizarre because, as my Army superior at the time has confirmed in the press, I was officially instructed by my superiors in Psy Ops, at the behest of Major General Peter Leng, to brief the press about McGrath as early as 1973, in a bid to draw media attention to his activities. I have no doubts whatsoever that because General Leng wanted the press to investigate McGrath, he had very good reasons for doing so and deserves credit for what he did.
MI5 officer refused to testify
It is also significant that MI5 officer who accused me of ‘leaking’ information about McGrath to the press later refused to be interviewed by the Terry Inquiry investigators about why he ordered Army Intelligence officer, Captain Brian Gemmell, to stop investigating William McGrath. Clearly, the Army and MI5 had very different agendas regarding McGrath and his activities.
MI5 lied
The astonishing claim by the authorities, including the Intelligence Services, that they knew nothing about the allegations surrounding McGrath’s sexual activities until 1980 is a total travesty. As my documents clearly show, it is simply not credible that I knew more about McGrath and his activities than the combined Intelligence community did in 1973/74. One must conclude, therefore, that the Intelligence Services did not tell the Inquiry all they knew about McGrath during the 1970s. Indeed, most of the information I possessed about McGrath in 1973/74 came from within the Intelligence community and was quite substantial. Moreover, my 1973 press briefing document clearly contains more information about McGrath than the Intelligence Services have claimed to the Inquiry that they possessed at that time! Finally, to suggest that because I gave the press the exact postal address (including the street number of the property) and telephone number of the Kincora home, but did not actually include the name, ‘Kincora’, somehow invalidates my evidence, is an unacceptable attempt to avoid facing up to what I have been saying over the years. That information also shows that the claim made by the Intelligence Services to the Inquiry that they were not aware until 1980 of where McGrath worked is demonstrably false.
Overall, I believe the Inquiry has been a wasted opportunity to establish the full facts relating to this matter and I feel the victims have been let down yet again, as they were by previous Inquiries.
The Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry
Welcome to the website of the Inquiry into Historical Institutional Abuse in Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1995. The Inquiry was independent from government and had two main components. One was the Acknowledgement Forum, whose members listened to the experiences of those who were children in residential institutions (other than schools) in Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1995.
The other component was the Statutory Inquiry. In its 223 days of public hearings between 13 January 2014 and 8 July 2016 it investigated 22 institutions, as well as the circumstances surrounding the sending of child migrants from Northern Ireland to Australia, and the activities of Fr Brendan Smyth, and issues of finance and governance. We delivered our Report to the First Minister and deputy First Minister on Friday 6 January 2017, and were obliged to deliver the Report to them at least 14 days before the Report could be published. Today we publish the Report in both hard copy form and on the Internet.
Kincora Material
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