Debate on NI's constitutional future in loyalist enclave
Garrett Hargan, Belfast Telegraph, March 29th, 2025
ORGANISER SAYS HE EXPECTS CRITICISM, BUT HE'S CONFIDENT HE CAN SELL UNION
A debate on the constitutional future of the island of Ireland will take place in the Fountain estate in Londonderry with a unionist organiser saying they are “confident of selling Northern Ireland”.
The Fountain estate is the last remaining unionist community in the west bank of Derry following an exodus to the east bank during the Troubles.
The event has been organised by the Peace Impact Programme through the North West Cultural Partnership (NWCP) at New Gate Arts and Culture Centre.
Envisioning the Future will see united Ireland advocate Professor Colin Harvey and pro-Union representative Professor Peter Shirlow share their opposing views to an audience invited to represent a cross-section of the north west community.
Former SDLP leader Mark Durkan and Professor Colin Coulter from Maynooth University are also panellists.
This is the latest in a series of conferences which started out in 2021 by gauging the views of the Protestant, Unionist and Loyalist (PUL) community.
Derek Moore of NWCP said today's event is a “progression” of work that has already been undertaken and a widening of the conversation.
He “expects criticism” for taking this step but says the group is focused on “solutions” and suggested if someone has a better idea then he wants to hear it. But, he added, “it's not good enough to turn around and say, 'we're not engaging because we shouldn't'.”
An opportunity for people to say their piece
Mr Moore explained: “It is an opportunity to offer Ireland's Future and people who don't see (the same future as us) a chance to say their piece.
“It's about saying, we can sell what we have and we don't feel threatened by what they're saying. Because there is no alternative vision being presented, we feel that we can't ignore it.”
Mr Moore referred to someone who turned down an invitation by saying: “I have what I want in the Union.”
However, he pointed to changes that have occurred, saying that at one time a pro-Union figure was “head of the country”.
In terms of Union flags and images of the royal family in public buildings, which made some workers uncomfortable, Mr Moore said that was “ignored” but changes were implemented regardless.
As a bandsman, he also mentioned parades, and believes the Orange Order “ignored signs” when “maybe politically motivated” resident groups were making their case to the Parades Commission. A decision was made that “we have what we want so we aren't engaging”, he said, and that moment bypassed them.
“We ignored the signs that Northern Ireland would be in an awkward position in a Brexit situation and that's the way it went,” Mr Moore said.
“While in an ideal world, even we might not want to be speaking about this constitutional issue, the fact that it's there means it must be dealt with. We must listen to people's concerns and offer them the opportunity to sell their vision as well.
“We're just expanding on what we've done at the start. We want a Northern Ireland that is good for everyone, that works for everyone, because I'm more comfortable at a pensionable age living in a country where 66 million contribute to the pot.”
The first Envisioning the Future event took place in Ballymena in October 2021 with participants from pro-Union communities voicing their views on a “positive future for all in Northern Ireland”.
Keynote speaker at that time, Peter Shirlow, from the University of Liverpool, used statistics to highlight all the benefits he believed Northern Ireland gains from being part of the UK.
A poll was conducted among attendees at the conference, asking how they would respond if a referendum resulted in support for a united Ireland.
Of those expressing an opinion, 17% said they'd accept the result, 11% would move somewhere else, 26% would protest peacefully, 23% would support civil unrest and 23% voted for “none of the above”.
Subsequent events looked at the importance of culture, education, NI's role in shaping its own future and strategies.
Declassified Kew files: Too many documents pose too many questions
Sam McBride, Northern Ireland, Editor, Belfast Telegraph, March 29th, 2025
IT IS BEYOND CREDIBLE DENIAL THAT THE SECURITY FORCES HAD VAST INTELLIGENCE ON THE IRA. YET BY 2001, SENIOR OFFICIALS WERE PRODUCING ACRES OF PAPER GUESSING WHAT THE PROVOS WERE UP TO. THIS DOESN'T IMMEDIATELY ADD UP COMMENT
When Government files are declassified, journalists and historians scour them for what is new. But sometimes what they don't say is itself revelatory.
By the early 2000s, the very top of Government was producing vast volumes of paperwork on Northern Ireland, much of it highly confidential.
In 10 Downing Street alone, for years prior to and after the Good Friday Agreement there was intense focus on Northern Ireland. Far from these Conservative and Labour administrations not caring about Northern Ireland — as nationalists (often) and unionists (sometimes) believe — this demonstrates immense focus at the heart of the Government machine.
By the late 1990s, and for years into the early 2000s, in Downing Street a new file on Northern Ireland — typically running to about 200 pages — was being produced every couple of weeks. On top of that were far larger volumes of paperwork in the Northern Ireland Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and elsewhere.
But after reading through thousands of pages from these files over the last few years, there's an increasingly stark conundrum.
It is now widely accepted that the Provisional IRA was riddled with informers, from top (or almost the top) to bottom. Freddie Scappaticci personifies the success of this operation from Britain's strategic perspective: Here the hated Brits had managed to get a top IRA man to not only give them information, but he was actually slaughtering his own colleagues.
Castlereagh break-in
Setting aside for now the many ethical and legal problems this entailed for the UK, it was utterly calamitous for the IRA. It was far from alone. When the IRA pulled off an audacious break-in at RUC Special Branch's Castlereagh headquarters in 2002, they secured important information.
Various sources say that there was no list of names of informants which was lost, but there was information which might have been used to point to an individual being an informant. Yet in the wake of that vast security compromise, there wasn't a slew of murders or the exiling of multiple republicans.
When BBC Spotlight examined this in 2019, the programme reported that both security and republican sources had told it that the Castlereagh break-in exposed so many agents that it “posed an impossible question: How could they kill them all?”
Essentially, the theory goes, if a terrorist organisation finds out that it has one or two informers, that's good for it and it can eliminate them. If it finds out that 30% or 40% of its members are informants, it's disastrous for the organisation.
Rather than a spat of killings or expulsions, the embarrassment was avoided by keeping those people in place and watching them or quietly removing them over time.
There is considerable evidence to substantiate the idea that the IRA was heavily infiltrated, and that evidence comes from republicans who saw from their side how many operations were going wrong, as well as from intelligence officers on the other side, who were handling — if not fully controlling — those valuable assets. But in that context, what's missing from the multitude of paperwork declassified is evidence of this.
The names of informers would obviously never be made public in these files, nor would detailed intelligence assessments which the Government believes could be used to identify informants. That absence of that information is not at all surprising.
What is surprising is firstly how little of this information has been — at least officially — removed from these files. Where material is censored — sometimes a single word, sometimes many pages at a time — archivists insert dummy pages to make this clear, something which allows them to later reinsert those pages when they are finally declassified, even if that is half a century away.
At the very heart of government, in the Prime Minister's office, there are a relatively small number of these pages being removed. In many cases, it's obvious that these involve intelligence.
There are intelligence reports marked in the index of files which have been withheld. There are documents from Stephen Lander, the head of MI5, which have been withheld, along with a considerable number of documents copied to him which have not been withheld.
There would also have been oral briefings for the Prime Minister on sensitive intelligence matters. But Government works by written records; even highly sensitive material is generally committed to paper. Ministers and officials' trust in the integrity of the classification system is well-founded — it is rare that information classified Secret is leaked and exceedingly rare that Top Secret material emerges inappropriately.
There are those who will cynically say that this material was simply torn out of files by intelligence operatives or shredded in a process of careful vetting.
I have no doubt that some of that goes on. I've spoken to some former civil servants who have told me of their personal experience of it.
Problems purging official records
But I'm sceptical about the idea that this is a mass purging of the record. Government involves material being copied to multiple departments; that means the same document being held in multiple files in different buildings. Government is also an agglomeration of competing factions; what suits one lot to cover up might suit another lot to release because by incriminating one group it exonerates another.
That admittedly involves speculation on my part. But even if there is a sophisticated cleanup operation, these files contain material which doesn't sit easily with what we think we know about the IRA's infiltration.
It's not just the absence of references to high grade intelligence which stands out, but the extent to which most of the top figures in the Government system state to each other that they don't know what the IRA is thinking or what it might do next. Senior officials create acres of paperwork trying to work out what on earth the IRA is up to.
These key figures steering the peace process numbered only about a dozen at any one point. They were closely knit, largely seemed to trust each other and collaborated meaningfully, working together on a shared problem where every scrap of information was being fed into the system and analysed.
Yet much of this analysis reads like the sort you'd get from a sharp academic or well-informed journalist. It's often impressive, but lots of it is based on logically-driven speculation, rather than certainty or even really strong confidence about the IRA's intentions.
There is far more open source intelligence such as newspaper reports or low-level snippets of information gleaned from third parties such as clerics or politicians than there are Security Service or Special Branch pages removed from these files.
There clearly is intelligence entering the system, and some of it appears to come from a high level in the IRA. Jonathan Stephens, for instance, said in an August 2001 memo marked 'confidential and personal' to a handful of colleagues that “we know independently that the PAC [Provisional Army Council] had agreed in principle to the sealing of some dumps” and that “in the run-up to August 12 IRA members were briefed to expect a move on decommissioning that would be characterised by others as decommissioning but that would not amount to decommissioning as the IRA defined it”.
Sinn Fein and PIRA were one political animal
Yet that memo from Stephens was entitled 'What were Sinn Féin about?'. It followed the strong belief from the British and Irish Governments that the IRA was going to decommission, yet it didn't, leaving them angry and confused.
Stephens — who would go on to become NIO permanent secretary — said his memo was aimed at “kicking off a collective effort to work out what we thought Sinn Féin thought they were doing in the run-up to August 12, and its implications”.
This is on one level the standard civil service way of analysing an issue. But this problem was unique in that it involved a terrorist organisation which the security services had heavily penetrated.
He said: “As ever, we must remind ourselves that we are not dealing with a single rational individual: we are dealing with a small, but nonetheless collective, leadership in which there may well be a mix of motives, objections and tactical preferences among the various players”.
He dismissed the idea that the IRA and Sinn Féin were truly very different, even though the Taoiseach had suggested the problem was with the IRA rather than Sinn Féin. Stephens said: “I don't believe it myself. The leadership is too integrated and does not actually reflect the simple distinction suggested by the Taoiseach.”
This apparent contradiction may be explained by several factors. Firstly, many informers are not permanent. Stakeknife, for instance, had his cover blown in the early 1990s, and so by this stage was useless to MI5. Willie Carlin, an agent who'd been close to Martin McGuinness, fled in 1985 — in his case after Stakeknife tipped off his handlers that he was to be abducted.
Secondly, as Professor Richard English, one of the leading scholars of terrorism, observed in his 2024 book Does Counter-Terrorism Work?, “not everything done by someone working as an informer is directed or controlled by the state operatives who are episodically receiving information from them”.
If Britain had an informer on the Army Council, it couldn't force that person to tell it anything beyond what they were prepared to divulge.
But thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, there is a difference between tactical and strategic intelligence. It is beyond any credible denial that the security forces had enormous tactical awareness of IRA operations, enabling them to repeatedly be thwarted.
But the sort of person who knows where arms are hidden or knows the target of a bomb is not necessarily the sort of person who knows about an era-defining decision such as decommissioning.
There are other possibilities, including that the loss of key intelligence personnel in the 1994 Chinook crash hampered top grade intelligence from the IRA or that there was a source so high up in the IRA that their intelligence went only to the PM to protect their cover. It's also possible that political considerations meant surveillance on those in both Sinn Féin and the IRA became impossible.
What's clear is that by this point the IRA is relatively small — and the number at the top is smaller still.
In a January 2001 phone call, Blair told US President Bill Clinton that even as Sinn Féin was negotiating to support the police, “the IRA themselves were still procuring weapons and targeting opponents, which was a further complication”. The following month, the new American leader asked Blair how big the IRA was. The PM told him that “there were maybe 500-600 active members, but that was more than enough for planting bombs.”
Referring to a British request to ban the Real IRA in the US, where it had been raising money, Bush said “he was surprised that Americans were giving money for terrorism. Did they not know or were they just naïve…”
Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, said “it was a bit of each.”
Another note marked 'confidential and personal — not to be copied further' recorded a highly sensitive political stocktake meeting in Hillsborough Castle in April 2001.
The meeting involved Secretary of State John Reid, Blair's fixer, Lord Falconer, along with Powell, the NIO's top official Bill Jeffrey, and several other senior officials.
The note said that “Adams and McGuinness were undoubtedly the dominant figures within the Provisional leadership” but “they could not simply direct the movement and were not prepared to split the IRA”.
The note said that decommissioning was “the holy grail” which would “take the poison out of the situation”. That decommissioning would eventually start in October 2001.
The heavy infiltration of the IRA had been a key reasons why the number of Troubles deaths dropped drastically over the course of the three decades of carnage.
What these documents might — and much here remains opaque — point to is that as the focus shifted to politics, hitherto fruitful sources became far less useful.
Unionists call for probe over claims 'blind eye turned to IRA murders'
Abdullah Sabri, Belfast Telegraph, March 29th, 2025
A former UUP leader has led calls for an investigation into claims contained in declassified files that Tony Blair's government turned “a blind eye” to IRA crimes, including murder.
The former Labour government's Secretary of State, John Reid, was recorded by a Northern Ireland Office (NIO) civil servant as making the comment to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness in Hillsborough Castle in 2001.
The files, which have now been declassified at The National Archive in Kew, have sparked unionist calls for an explanation from the Government.
DUP MLA Doug Beattie slammed the Government which has “delayed and denied justice”.
The Ulster Unionist justice spokesperson is now demanding the former Secretary of State to take accountability for his party's actions.
He said: “Turning a blind eye to criminality, robbery, smuggling, overseas ventures aimed at securing funding from the drugs trade for the Provisional IRA are just a few of the revelations contained in newly released papers.
“From the government supplied letters of comfort, which have delayed and denied justice, to turning a blind eye to criminality up to murder it is clear that the UK Government have questions to answer.
“These questions must be asked and the answers must be given. This is not about national security, this is about accountability and those at the top of government and the republican movement must now be held to account.”
The Upper Bann MLA added: “It is time the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland took action in regards to what his party did when they were in government in the years leading up to and after the Belfast Agreement.”
A spokesman for the NIO refused to discuss the issue, saying: “We do not comment on National Archives releases, or releases relating to previous governments.”
‘Gut Punch’ to Victims
DUP MLA Diane Forsythe branded the publication of the government papers as a “gut punch” to the innocent victims of violence.
She said the findings exposed “a chilling reality” and has written to the current Secretary of State and Chief Constable requesting the opening of an investigation.
“As reported in the Belfast Telegraph, Tony Blair's Cabinet admitted to 'turning a blind eye' to IRA,” the South Down MLA said.
“This is a gut punch to victims of republican violence and their families.
“For decades, these victims have sought truth and justice. Instead, of justice, they've been handed betrayal, dressed up as political expediency.
“Today's news reopens old wounds and demands new answers. The innocent victims of the IRA deserve more than platitudes. They deserve accountability for the atrocities committed against them.”
Former MP Tony Blair's press office and Lord John Reid were contacted but had made no comment at the time of going to press. At the point of Reid's comment, the IRA was under pressure to decommission as the recent September 11 attacks in the US just a month prior enflamed anti-terrorist sentiment.
Reid went on to tell Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness that the British and Irish governments had effectively been covering up the IRA's responsibility for the most serious crimes. He explained that the IRA “could not expect HMG (Her Majesty's Government) and the UUP to publicly admit this but in practice we could seek to shift the focus away from decommissioning,
“The quid pro quo was that other paramilitary activities — smuggling, beatings, robberies and murders — would come under closer scrutiny.
“We had turned a blind eye to these activities in the belief that the IRA was involved in a process of transition.”
Trail cold again after grim twist in search for 1972 murder victim
Catherine Fegan, Belfast Telegraph and Irish Independent, March 29th, 2025
Before dawn on a cold Tuesday last November, the Comiskey family grave was opened. An exhumation of the remains in the plot, where the parents and siblings of former bishop of Ferns Brendan Comiskey were buried, was under way.
As one family was taken from their final resting place, another - the Lynskeys - waited in the hope that their Joe would at last be found, buried among them.
Joe Lynskey, from west Belfast, is one of the Disappeared - 17 people who were abducted, murdered and secretly buried during the Troubles.
On Monday, the Lynskeys' painful 53- year wait to find Joe's body continued when it emerged that the unidentified remains discovered in the Comiskey plot were not his.
"It's been extremely disappointing for the Lynskey family,” said Jon Hill, lead investigator with the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains (ICLVR).
The commission was set up to find the Disappeared.
"There was never definitive information saying this is where Joe Lynskey was buried.
"They [the Lynskey family] have been disappointed before,” he added in relation to a search for the remains in 2018. "It is just so cruel that it is the same family that this event has happened to now on two occasions.
"It is especially cruel, but I don't know what more we can do about that. We can only undertake what we believe to be right.”
Something unusual had allegedly been spotted at the Comiskey family plot in 1972, the year Clare Comiskey, the former bishop's mother, was buried.
Information about the activity, described as "suspicious”, was passed to the ICLVR a number of years ago. In the past 18 months, that information was deemed significant.
"The significance of that is that we considered it could relate to Joe Lynskey,” Mr Hill said.
Last November 26, as the remains of Clare and Patrick Comiskey and three of their children were exhumed from the plot in Annyalla cemetery in Co Monaghan, forensic experts got to work.
The couple's three children, Sean, Edmund and Maurice, were buried alongside their parents and all were accounted for in subsequent DNA testing.
However, while the remains of someone not connected to the family were also discovered in the grave, tests showed those remains did not belong to Joe Lynskey.
"Everything was taken from the grave and then the identification process started,” Mr Hill said.
"Analysis by forensic anthropologists and DNA profiling, combined with what became apparent during the exhumation, plus the information we had, formed a picture of what we needed to keep and what could go back in [to the grave].
Not one of the ‘Disappeared’
"On December 29, a number of the remains were re-interred into that grave. All of those not relevant to our inquiry were reinterred into the grave with the support of the family.”
The DNA from the remains not connected to the Comiskey family was compared with samples taken from the Lynskey family and no match was found.
The ICLVR also eliminated the possibility that the remains could have been any of the three remaining Disappeared - Columba McVeigh, Robert Nairac and Seamus Maguire.
"Together with Joe Lynskey, they are the only four remaining at the moment within the remit of the commission, and as far as we know, they are the only ones,” Mr Hill said.
An Garda Síochána notified the local coroner and said attempts had begun to find out who the remains belonged to.
It has not been made known publicly if full or partial remains were recovered, what gender or age profile is connected to the remains, or if any other significant information was discovered during the exhumation.
It is understood the DNA profile that was generated was cross-checked against the missing persons database, with no matches returned.
Gerry Kealy, a retired garda detective, was involved in more than 30 unidentified remains cases. He said that, generally, the next step would be to gather all the information and feed it into the Interpol "black list”, which holds details of unidentified people across the world.
"It will be dealt with like any other discovery of unidentified remains until it becomes something else,” Mr Kealy said.
"Running the samples against some of the bigger DNA databases would be the next logical step, and then there are open-source references that you can maybe go against as well.
"However, if you are dealing with a very old set of remains, where a sample from a family member is not on any of these databases, you will obviously not get a match.”
The remains are in the custody of the local coroner, and the DNA profile generated is held by Forensic Science Ireland.
While information given to the ICLVR cannot be used in any legal proceedings and cannot be shared with other agencies, Mr Hill said there might be scope to help gardaí with their inquiries relating to the unidentified remains.
"We cannot share information passed to us,” he said. "However, if it gets to the position where we feel it's more appropriate that information is shared with the guards, then we would check back with the person and say, are you prepared to share that with the guards?
"They would enter into a conversation if they are. I would think the vast majority who provided information on this case would co-operate with the guards.”
Mr Hill confirmed this was the first time the commission had been left with a set of unidentified remains after an exhumation or dig.
‘Very unusual’
"This is very unusual,” he said. "These were unique circumstances where we were undertaking an exhumation. Most of our searches are on open ground, and if we find remains, invariably they are what we have been expecting to find.
"If we have gone there in the first place, what we have found is mostly what we expect to find. Here, we were doing an exhumation in a graveyard, where you would expect to find remains.
"We then have to identify if there are any there that don't belong, and that is far more difficult. Over the years, coffins collapse, remains intermingle and things are far more complex and difficult to deal with.”
One of First Disappeared
Mr Lynskey, the first of the Disappeared, was a former Cistercian monk who became an IRA intelligence officer. He was killed and buried by the IRA in 1972 after becoming involved in an affair with the wife of another IRA man, who he ordered to have shot, without it being sanctioned by the organisation.
The plight of the Disappeared has been highlighted in recent months following the release of the Disney+ series Say Nothing. The drama focuses on events during the Troubles, including the disappearance of Jean McConville - a mother of 10 - as well as the cases of Kevin McKee, Seamus Wright and Mr Lynskey.
Mr Hill said the commission received information in the past claiming some of the Disappeared had been buried in legitimate graves.
Only once before had it carried out an exhumation, and on that occasion the information proved incorrect.
Graveyards could be seen as convenient locations to bury victims because, unlike farms, woods or bogs, the possibility that a body or skeleton might be uncovered in a cemetery would not arouse suspicion.
"It's an account that is often given to us, but I actually have no evidence to suggest this has happened,” Mr Hill said of the theory that the Disappeared were buried in legitimate graves.
"I think it's just one of these urban myths that circulate, and because of the passage of time it becomes very hard to just discount it. So we have to examine each one and either eliminate it or conduct an exhumation.
"That has been the case in almost every one, where we have been able to eliminate it or we have got to the stage where it requires an exhumation to eliminate it.”
As the quest to find Mr Lynskey's remains continues, mystery deepens over the unidentified remains uncovered in the Comiskey grave.
"We don't know the end of the story yet,” Mr Hill said. "Once we get to the end of the story there may be explanations that might not be sinister, but I don't know.”
Investigator Jon Hill described exhumation outcome as 'cruel'
Joe Lynskey’s family: ‘I don’t think I’ll ever get him back’
Irish Times, Seanín Graham, Northern Correspondent, Irish Times, March 29th, 2025
Maria Lynskey had the funeral arrangements in place for her uncle before her family’s hopes of finding his remains were dashed for the second time in a decade
Joe Lynskey’s final moments before his murder more than 50 years ago still haunt his niece.
The body of the former Cistercian monk has never been found and last Friday a phone call was made to Maria Lynskey by a lead investigator searching for him.
It was a call she dreaded.
Remains exhumed from a grave in a rural Co Monaghan cemetery in November were believed to be Joe, the first person “disappeared” by the IRA in 1972.
Information had been received by investigators about suspicious activity during the 1970s at a grave in a cemetery by a church in the village of Annyalla around the time of his disappearance.
Desperate to bring “Uncle Joe” home, Maria had all the funeral arrangements in place; she “really believed it was him”.
Alone in her west Belfast house, the 77-year-old was told over the phone that DNA testing had concluded it “was not Joe”.
“My first reaction was large disappointment ... I’m still trying to get through it,” she says.
In the four months since the exhumation, she discovered that his only request from his abductors was a set of Rosary beads.
“It’s the image of him saying the Rosary before he was executed. I can’t get that out of my head,” she says.
Earliest memories
Visits to Mount Melleray Abbey in Co Waterford, where Joe Lynskey trained to become a monk from the age of 17, are her earliest memories of her uncle.
Family trips to the monastery only took place twice a year due to the length of journey by road from Belfast.
On the eve of his ordination, a telephone call was made to a shop off the Falls Road in Belfast.
It was the early 1950s and the caller, an abbot, asked if he could speak with Joe’s mother.
Charlotte Lynskey was informed that her son wanted to leave his vocation after five years.
At the outbreak of the Troubles, Joe joined the IRA as an intelligence officer in west Belfast.
The night they learned of his departure from the Co Waterford abbey was difficult, says Maria.
“I was a child and we were preparing to go down for the ordination; I remember being in the house the night before,” she says. “There were no phones in people’s homes in those days.”
“The call came through and the abbot said that he didn’t want to go on with it ... My granny was a very religious woman and I think she would have liked her children to be in the clergy. It was a big upset.”
In 2009 the family received another phone call that would lead them to discover that Joe Lynskey was abducted, shot dead and secretly buried by the IRA in August 1972.
He was 40 at the time.
It emerged he was the first of the Disappeared, a group of 17 people murdered and buried in secret locations during the Troubles.
His name was added to an official list used by a body, the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR), established by the Irish and British governments during the peace process to recover the victims’ remains.
It took until 2010 for the IRA to admit that he was court-martialled and killed “for breaches of IRA standing orders”.
Unlike some of the other Disappeared, who were accused of being informers, the IRA claimed Lynskey was having an affair with the wife of another IRA man, who he ordered to have shot without it being sanctioned by the group.
Until that point, the Lynskeys assumed he had fled to the United States.
There was “a silence, a complete silence” among republicans in west Belfast as to why he had vanished, says Maria.
“We all knew he was in the IRA. I’d say when he came out of the monastery he came out for the cause and believed the cause.
“And the cause executed him at the end of the day.”
Joe, the second youngest of six children, moved back into the family home on Harrogate Street in the Lower Falls in Belfast after leaving the monastery and got a job at the former Silk & Rayon factory, facing Clonard Monastery.
Clash
His brother, Jackie – Maria’s father – had served in the British navy, and Joe’s IRA membership was “never spoken about”.
“I think there was a clash between them at one stage because my daddy was in the navy – I had my 21st birthday party on HMS Caroline – and Joe was in the IRA.
“But he would have called to my mummy’s house during the 1960s before the Troubles. When he was in the IRA, I knew the house that he was billeted in [the safe house]. Even though it was quite close to where I lived, I never saw him.
“The woman who owned the house had a big family and treated Joe more like a son.”
Maria was pregnant with her first child when her uncle went missing.
She searched for answers as to his whereabouts, a quest that would continue for decades.
“I knew very many republicans and asked them through the years what happened,” she says. “All I ever got was, ‘Don’t know him, never heard of him’.
“I would say it’s a secret that wouldn’t have been told. I don’t ever think it would have come out only for the Boston tapes,” she adds, referring to the controversial oral history project on the Troubles based at Boston College in the US.
The way he disappeared made him an “enigma” to his family, who talked about him “every so often”.
Lies were spread about sightings of their uncle in the US, according to Maria.
In the late 1970s, her brother travelled to New York following the death of another relative and was told by members of Noraid, the US-based funding committee for republicans, that “Joe had just gave a great speech”.
“We’d a friend over there who was high up in Noraid and one of them said to my brother: ‘You just missed Joe’,” she recalls.
“Some other people said that he bought furniture when he moved to Los Angeles. We’ve many, many stories of him. We wanted to believe all that – but at the same time there was always the doubt. But you kept your mouth shut because you didn’t want to be involved and, in a way, you still keep it back.”
In an interview with the Irish News in 2010, former IRA member Dolours Price claimed she drove Joe Lynskey across the Border to face interrogation – and that she begged to drive him to a port so that he could escape to England.
Price said Lynskey knew his fate and told her she would be punished if she let him go.
Maria says her “biggest mistake in life” was “not getting on the Dublin train and going to Malahide” to speak to Price after she went public.
She still has doubts as to the reason he was murdered: “I’ve been told that Joe owned up to what he did; he didn’t deny it. But really and truly it’s a secret and you’re never going to know what happened.”
Her anger at the trauma experienced by the families of the Disappeared is still raw.
“For almost 40 years we were totally in the dark and didn’t know where he was. I go to bed at night and think: ‘Why would you disappear someone?’ ”
Maria had wanted to bury her uncle from her late father’s home.
She becomes emotional as she speaks about the planning that had gone in to his funeral in recent months.
It is the second time in a decade that the hopes of the Lynskey family have been raised and then dashed.
Unexpected discovery
In 2015, a search on remote land at Coghalstown in Co Meath led to the unexpected discovery of the remains of Kevin McKee (17) and Seamus Wright (25).
The remains of three others “disappeared” during the Troubles – Co Tyrone teenager Columba McVeigh, SAS-trained officer Robert Nairac or Seamus Maguire, a 26-year-old from Co Armagh – have yet to be found.
“I had everything done to bring him home,” says Maria of her plans for her uncle’s funeral.
“My parish priest has been very good to me. I’d seen the undertakers, I’d all the arrangements made with them and I’d even spoken to my son-in-law, who has a restaurant, about catering.
“I really did think this was the time ... Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
“[Republicans] have all said those who killed Joe are dead. Everybody’s not dead, I’m not dead. There’s senior republicans who know where he is.
“But we just have to get on, dust ourselves down, get back to appealing to people for information. But really, I’ve got to feeling that I don’t think I’ll ever get him back.”
If you have any information that may lead to the remains of Joe Lynskey or any of the three remaining Disappeared being recovered, please contact the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains.
Targeting politicians in Social Media - a minority 'sport' that comes at a cost
Gail Walker, Belfast Telegraph, March 29th, 2025
Much to DUP MP Carla Lockhart's credit, she went public this week about the personal abuse she has been suffering on social media, prompting other politicians to reveal how they too have been targeted.
For years parties here have opined how difficult it is to persuade people to run for election, but who would volunteer to expose themselves to the kind of hatred that shreds self-esteem and shatters nerves?
DUP MLA Edwin Poots told BBC's The View how on one website “they were suggesting raping my son”.
Alliance's David Honeyford “had threats and abuse right up to the point of rape”.
Sinn Fein's Cathy Mason had “received numerous sexually explicit photographs on social media”.
The DUP's Joanne Bunting had been “called a w**** and ugly” and told “that I deserve to be shot”.
SF's Sinéad Ennis “had a man threaten to kill me on multiple occasions at my constituency office”.
DUP MLA Keith Buchanan was so unnerved by a man “walking up alongside of my house” he called the police and installed extra security.
SF's Carál Ní Chuilín had received “misogynistic, hateful abuse”, including about her working-class accent.
The UUP's John Stewart and Alliance's Sian Mulholland also got vile personal comments. On family outings politicians risk being verbally abused in front of the kids. Some MLAs are considering quitting politics.
Thirty years after the ceasefires, we might have thought the sectarian toxicity would have been largely rinsed out of political discourse here. Instead, murder bids on politicians by terrorists as a means of silencing them have been replaced by psychological warfare.
Ms Lockhart might have chosen to ignore the morons, not wanting to dignify them with the idea their tactics were hitting home.
She might also have thought that comments focused on her physical appearance were irrelevant, on the one hand, and also designed to be undermining, on the other, and that it would be best not to give the subject any air time at all.
Not acceptable
But as a public representative, it has obviously occurred to her that the type and scale of abuse is not acceptable.
She notes that many of the abusers are clearly from a different political perspective to her, and that the abuse isn't necessarily political in character but rather aggressively misogynistic, threatening in some cases and in all cases cruel.
We have no reason to think that these individuals who spend their time abusing politicians online are acting out sociopathic behaviours in everyday life in their staffrooms, at parent/teacher meetings or at the golf club. Sadly, in everyday life, they will appear just as reasonable and polite as 'we' do.
These late-night attic room snipers fire off the type of vile side-of-the-mouth sneers and jibes they would be very reluctant to give voice to in broad daylight.
The vast majority of people on X are following movie stars, darts players, TV weather presenters and Great British Bake-Off contestants. Those who choose to follow Northern Ireland politicians on social media are a very niche group.
It's a minority “sport”. This isn't to trivialise it, but it is to remind ourselves just how few people it takes really to disturb the peace, whether of individuals or communities.
Though not exclusively, you can put your money on these nasty people being male. And like most men who find no outlet during the day for their bathroom mirror posturing, they act it out secretly online behind improbable superhero avatars, attaching themselves to all kinds of causes, flags, leaders and nations.
In fact, for all their swagger and pomposity and arrogance, they won't even run matters in their own lives. As a comedian said recently, you're going to stand with Ukraine and you don't even have custody of the children?
Not even the worst of us
These people aren't even the worst of us. That category is reserved for those who attack physically, threaten, intimidate, assault and actually harm others. They usually end up in court — alas, we can't say they always go behind bars.
But their enablers — these people who generate a caustic atmosphere, toxic perspectives, revelling in hurtful rhetoric under the guise of the Big Hard Men — most often get no comeback.
This isn't to say — and Carla Lockhart didn't say it — that social media in itself is the problem.
There is no going back now — just as there was no going back from the universal franchise that gave everyone the vote. You cannot try to restrict the access of ordinary people to information and the means of expression which for the first time in history has been handed to them and which for the most part has been a tremendously good addition to human life.
It's not easy now for tyrants and dictators to shut down news and communication in the way they once could simply by turning off the TV stations.
It's also how we hear news that we wouldn't otherwise — such as massacres of churchgoers in Africa.
It's not the medium. It's about finding ways to temper our own communities.
We're never going to get to a point where everyone is doffing their cap to each other.
But the starting point here is that Carla Lockhart is a mother, a wife, a daughter and a very successful politician. She has been open about her life as a woman, for example, talking about the trauma of her miscarriages before having her son.
This is a significant person of real achievement who in the fullness of time will be remembered as an important part of public life here. The securing and retaining of a seat at Westminster is a hugely difficult task.
Beside her these mouthy blokes really are invisible, their opinions exactly as useful as if they were shouting them up the chimney in their own house.
But that doesn't mean they don't cause hurt to the person they're directed at. For all Ms Lockhart's courageous determination in talking about the “vile and relentless” daily comments about her appearance, it will not have been easy to address such a subject.
Political leaders need to state repeatedly, openly, unequivocally and in concert with each other that this type of menace is not wanted.
No party here has as one of their objectives 'to coarsen public debate to such a degree that women in particular will feel hunted down in their own home by something that has been said to them, about them'. That's not on page two of any manifesto.
After Ms Lockhart tagged her in a post about the online abuse she was getting, First Minister Michelle O'Neill called it “disgraceful and unacceptable”. That's a good start. From now on, politicians should make a point of publicly disowning trolls from “their own side” whenever they see offensive comments.
There are painful lessons for elected representatives too, including how the level of political discourse generally tends to lapse into abusive shorthand very quickly. Politicians should make sure they don't prompt a pile-on.
After all, the fall-out from the revelations about former UUP leader Doug Beattie's embarrassing historic tweets saw offenders exposed in every party here.
One point Ms Lockhart made was that some of the accounts targeting her were followed by Sinn Fein representatives. Politicians need to be very careful about who they engage with online.
By definition politics is a rough old game. Anyone in public life needs to develop a thick skin.
But that doesn't mean anyone should be threatened or abused and it is the job of political parties to find ways to knock this on the head.
Practically every version of political view in NI is represented at Stormont. There will be a flavour up there just for you among the MLAs and political parties.
These people are elected to articulate the views of those who voted for them, to deal with each other in ways which are appropriate and productive. This is all being done in due process in the chamber and committee rooms, where it should be.
We do not need anybody else chipping in with their ultra perspectives, their extremist positions, their whipping-up-a-mob mentality. We don't need another quota of hardline viewpoints from ceasefire soldiers holed up in the back bedrooms of Northern Ireland. Our politicians are right to speak up and start draining the tank of this pollution. In our divided part of the world, finally here is a campaign our leaders can unite about.
