Belfast boys’ school scandal

Press, 14 January 1982, Page 13

Belfast boys’ school scandal

From

SELWYN PARKER

in Dublin

The Kincora boys’ hoi scandal is the biggest to have come out of strait-laced Belfast in many years. Jailed last month tor a total of 15 years on various charges of homosexual offences, including buggery, were three senior social workers charged with running the home for distressed teenagers. a civil servant architect who was also a scout commissioner in north Belfast, and an Anglican lay monk who had taken vows of chastity. In addition to those sentences. handed down by a disturbed Lord Chief Justice. Sir Robert Lowry, the case has apparently opened a Pandora’s Box of indecent sexual activity that may involve senior politicians in Northern Ireland. After the Chief Justice’s disclosure that the homosexuality at the imposinglooking,’ two-storeyed home had been going on unchecked for nearly 2(1 years despite several half-hearted "investigations." there will now be an urgent inquiry by the

Eastern Health and Social Services board which was supposed to supervise the home. One of the North's most respected politicians. Gerry Fitt. a Catholic. has promised to inform the investigation of the names of senior politicians who had over the years been told of the goings-on. but done nothing about it. The clear implication is that some of the North’s top names were implicated.

The authoritative “Irish Times" quoted a person “who had known of the scandal for years" as saying: “You mark my words, there are lots of very important people in this town who breathed a big sigh of relief when McGrath (the 64-year-old ‘housefather’) and company pleaded guilty and decided not to spill the beans."

As it was, the facts of the case were strong stuff in a province where certain councils even ban swimming inmunicipal pools on Sundays and insist on covering up nudes in local art exhibitions.

When complaints about Kincora got to such a pitch that the authorities could not ignore them any longer, the Royal Ulster Constabulary scoured Northern Ireland and England, interviewing 180 former inmates over nine months. They came back with details of wnat Lord Lowry at the trial described as “loathsome and perverted behaviour."

Set up in a former doctor’s residence in a red-brick Belfast suburb, Kincora was designed from its establishment in 1959 to take boys between the ages ol 13 and 18 from difficult backgrounds and prepare them for a happier adulthood.

The warden, 61-year-old Joseph Mains, who was jailed for six years, was employed from the start. So was Raymond Semple, his 59-year-old asistant who received a five-year sen-

tence. The other central figure. 64-year-old William McGrath. who became "housefather" in the 19705, was jailed for four years. Three others received minor sentences.

According to the sordid litany of police evidence, the offences with the young and vulnerable inmates started almost immediately. Most took place in Mains’s flat which was attached to the home. Yet both men survived a first inquiry in 1961 which cleared them of homosexual allegations. When McGrath applied for the job 10 years later, he was coming from a Belfast religious training college and was already tainted bv complaints' — one of them to the police — of homosexual inclinations. He still got the housefather’s position.

It was a small and intimate home. At no time were there ever more than 10 boys

there, and after a time Mains took in nine and ten-year-olds. According to sources cited by newspapers, senior Unionist politicians knew of the Kincora boys’ home depravity for years, and so did •* some churchmen. Certainly, the R.U.C. had been told repeatedly over the years, and the British Army also knew. Yet nothing happened for 20 years. The persistent Gerry Fitt, who first raised the sleazy story in British Parliament in a final attempt to have it investigated, worries about the "air of mystery surrounding previous allegations.” In the past week the vicechairman of the Eastern Health Board’s investigating committee, Mr Malachy McGrady, has been receiving "an avalanche of new information," he says. The committee will get down to business straight away. The findings, which promise to be considerably more disturbing than those revealed by the trial, will be made public.