The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

Other incidents, like the disgraceful saga of Kincora, the boys’ home in east Belfast which MI5 used as a source of male prostitution, are at least partly known. Colin Wallace was one of the first to allege that MI5 and the army were not only fully conversant with what was happening there but encouraged it.109 He says that his complaints were ignored because Kincora was in fact an MI5 blackmail operation, designed to give the agency a hold over certain prominent people.110 Kincora was run by William McGrath, a member of Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church, who also ran the Loyalist paramilitary group Tara, a specifically anti-Catholic, as opposed to merely anti-Republican, organisation. Several of Tara’s members were also in the UVF, one of the more deadly of the Loyalist paramilitary groupings. Apart from abusing the boys himself, McGrath hired them out to stag clubs. This may have been the cause of his undoing. My understanding is that two of the boys, whom he had sent to a stag club in Scotland, made a pact that they would commit suicide. While one subsequently drowned himself, the other did not, but his information set in train an RUC investigation which was aborted by British intelligence. Eventually, as a result of public disquiet, largely fuelled by some first-class investigative journalism by the Irish Times and the Irish Independent, yet another police inquiry was held, under the aegis of a British policeman, Sir George Terry, formerly Chief Constable of Sussex...