NO BAFTA FOR KINCORA FILM - Garda still to release Mountbatten Classiebawn Files
Phoenix, Dublin, May 15, 2025 - Affairs of the Nation
The BBC has just secured a prestigious Bafta (British Academy Film and Television Arts) award for Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure made by Alleycats of Derry and directed by Des Henderson. The series dwells on the culture of the Caribbean and also its history of slave sugar production.
What the BBC is not telling anyone is that the political commissars at its Northern Ireland division sabotaged an Alleycats documentary film four years ago – one that struck closer in time and to home at the heart of the British establishment.
In 2020, the corporation commissioned The Lost Boys: Belfast’s Missing Children, also from Alleycats. It examined the abduction and murder of a group of working-class schoolboys in Belfast in the late 1960s and early ’70s. With one exception, their bodies were ‘disappeared’, never to be found. Unlike Captain Robert Nairac, a British army undercover operative, and other ‘disappeared’, no one was bothered about the boys.
Alleycats committed the sin of unearthing fresh evidence that the abductions were linked to the paedophile gang that swirled around Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast.
The Kincora scandal remains one with multiple open wounds, including the collection by MI5 of kompromat about leading unionist politicians such as James Molyneaux MP, leader of the dominant Unionist Party, 1979-1995, and the blackmail of loyalists who were involved in collusive murder with the state.
The BBC broadcast a number of trailers for The Lost Boys – which was scheduled for transmission on Sunday May 9, 2021, at 10.30 pm – before it was pulled. BBC NI relied on an unprecedented Orwellian justification for this act: the new evidence contradicted the official narrative. The state sponsored ‘truth’ was instead to be found in the 2017 Hart Report. Judge Hart had not implicated MI5 and the RUC in the scandal, and his findings were now elevated to the last word on the affair.
The fact that Hart’s lamentable report contained a litany of mistakes, defamed an array of citizens and even managed to contradict itself over facts had no bearing on the thought police at the BBC.
Judge Hart’s trumped-up fabrications were only marginally less egregious than those produced by Sir George Terry of the Sussex police. It was Terry who laid the foundation stone for the Kincora cover-up back in 1982, when he determined that the RUC had not uncovered the scandal for over a decade because the victims were “homosexuals”, who were themselves responsible for the cover-up.
Terry wrote: “In homosexual offences, however, the victim is usually embarrassed and frequently feels some personal guilt or shame. As a consequence victims of homosexual acts are considerably less likely to make a formal complaint and even less inclined to tell others what had occurred.”
In The Lost Boys, Alleycats implicated Alan Campbell in the disappearance of the children. Campbell was the chief suspect of the RUC in the brutal murder of 10-year-old Brian McDermott on September 2, 1973. Part of McDermott’s dismembered and burned body was found in a sack in the River Lagan.
The film was never shown by BBC NI but it opened the 2023 Irish Film Institute Documentary Festival in Dublin in September 2023 to widespread acclaim.
After its release, it emerged that Joseph Mains, the warden of Kincora, had once threatened Richard Kerr, a victim of the gang, that he would be cut up with a rotating saw in a shed at the back of Kincora if he complained about the abuse he was suffering. Mains added that this was where the boy with “the red hair” (ie McDermott) had been dismembered.
Lord Mountbatten is also implicated in the scandal. An Garda Síochána has refused to release the visitor logs to his castle in Sligo, which would confirm – or refute – visits in 1977 by Mains with Kerr and a boy called Stephen Warren. The excuse is as Kafkaesque as anything conjured up by BBC censors – gardaí claim that the logs are part of an open inquiry into the murder of Mountbatten in 1979. Yet, the trafficking of the boys took place two years earlier.
Despite the impressive win at the Baftas, it is unlikely the hidden forces who really control the BBC will ever allow it to broadcast The Lost Boys.
'I was raped by Mountbatten in Kincora at 11; he wasn't a lord… to me he was king of the paedophiles'
JOURNALIST CHRIS MOORE INTERVIEWED THREE VICTIMS OF THE TOP ROYAL KILLED BY THE IRA IN 1979 FOR HIS NEW BOOK ON 'THE MOST ENDURING CHILD SEX SCANDAL IN THE HISTORY OF THE UK'. HE TELLS SUZANNE BREEN WHY STORY WON'T GO AWAY DESPITE HUGE COVER-UP
Suzanne Breen, Belfast Telegraph, May 16th, 2025
A man who claims Lord Mountbatten raped him as a child says he learned the identity of his attacker from watching news reports of his murder by the IRA.
Arthur Smyth was 11 years old when he says the senior royal twice sexually abused him in the infamous Kincora Boys' Home in east Belfast.
Details of the allegations are outlined in a new book by journalist Chris Moore, who travelled to Australia, where Smyth now lives, to interview him.
Moore also spoke to two other boys who claim they were raped by Lord Mountbatten.
A father figure and mentor to King Charles, he was the late Queen's second cousin.
Moore claims MI5 and the British political establishment have for decades tried to cover up his involvement in a paedophile ring.
The journalist also reveals how a detective, contacted by concerned social workers, secretly photographed VIPs visiting Kincora and logged their car registrations.
The visitors included NIO officials who worked for MI5, lay magistrates, police officers and businessmen.
The detective put in a request for a larger team of officers to investigate the home but was instructed to leave the matter by his superiors.
Moore says it's possible MI5 planted Kincora housemaster William McGrath in the children's home as part of an intelligence-gathering operation.
He describes Kincora as “the most enduring child sex scandal in the history of the UK. It's the story I've dedicated my career to revealing since I was a young journalist”.
It is “the stuff of a John le Carre novel” with “a complicated web of cover-ups, obfuscation and denial on the part of the British authorities in which MI5 plays a starring role”, he says.
Arthur Smyth was split from his siblings and placed in Kincora after his parents' marriage broke up in 1977.
Initially, he loved the big house in east Belfast. He thought he'd “landed in heaven” and enjoyed sliding up and down the bannister.
However, he was soon raped by McGrath, who told him he wouldn't see his sisters again if he didn't comply.
The Kincora housemaster then allegedly brought “his friend Dickie” to the premises. Arthur claims he was taken to a room with a big desk and a shower. He found it strange that there was a bathroom inside an office.
Moore says Arthur was asked to “look after (Dickie) in the same way he looked after McGrath”.
After Lord Mountbatten raped him, the 11-year-old was instructed to have a shower. He told Moore: “I felt sick, and I was crying in the shower. I just wanted it all to stop.”
Repeated rapes
However, a few days later the royal returned to the home “and there was a repeat of what had happened at their first meeting”.
Arthur said he had no idea who 'Dickie' was until watching the television news two years later. Reports included photographs and footage of Mountbatten, who had been killed after the IRA placed a bomb on his boat in Mullaghmore, Co Sligo, in 1979.
Arthur, who was now in another children's home, told Moore: “I went up to my bedroom. I started crying. I felt sick. That somebody in high stature like this could do such a thing, because we all think that a paedophile is a bloke that you don't know, that he's weird looking or he doesn't look right, but he fooled everybody.
“He charmed everybody. To me, he was king of the paedophiles. That's what he was. He was not a lord. He was a paedophile and people need to know him for what he was... not for what they're portraying him to be.”
The two other alleged victims of Mountbatten interviewed by Moore are a man who now lives in the Republic and Richard Kerr, who was sent to Kincora as a 14-year-old.
Kerr said that he and his friend Stephen Waring were driven by Kincora warden Joe Mains to the car park of the Manor House Country Hotel outside Enniskillen in August 1977.
Classiebawn
Two of Mountbatten's security men then allegedly arrived in separate black Ford Cortinas to ferry the boys to Mullaghmore, 45 miles away.
The teenagers were dropped off separately at Classiebawn Castle “before being taken individually from a guest reception room to the green boathouse where they were sexually assaulted and then returned to the Manor House to meet Mains for the journey home”.
Kerr said Mountbatten's security men witnessed nothing. He claimed his friend Stephen — who apparently took his own life months later — stole a ring as a “memento” of his encounter with Mountbatten. He said the royal reported it missing and the RUC found it near Stephen's bed in Kincora.
He alleged that police “made it clear to the pair of us that we were never to talk to anyone about this incident ever again”.
Kerr also knew 16-year-old 'Amal', who was allegedly taken four times that summer from Belfast to Mullaghmore to have sex with Mountbatten. It is claimed the royal told Amal he liked “dark-skinned people, especially those from Sri Lanka”.
Moore interviewed Mountbatten's biographer Andrew Lownie, who said there was a “wider Anglo-Irish vice ring which stretched across country houses in Northern Ireland”.
Kincora residents were groomed by the home's staff. In interviews with the journalist they recall being brought to hotels, private homes and castles across Northern Ireland to have sex with men.
Kincora opened in 1958 with Mains as its warden. Raymond Semple was appointed as his deputy six years later. Both men were paedophiles.
‘Homely, caring environment for deprived teenagers’
The large detached villa on the Upper Newtownards Road was meant to provide “a homely, caring environment for deprived teenagers”.
Councillors, social workers and health officials were served tea and sandwiches by Kincora's young residents at its official opening.
A third paedophile — prominent Orangeman and evangelical Christian McGrath — was appointed housemaster in 1971.
Police frequently visited the premises in the 1960s and 1970s to investigate the teenagers' complaints of being sexually abused. The boys watched with disappointment as officers left without taking action.
It was routinely alleged that the boys were lying about staff in revenge for some perceived admonishments.
While Mains and Semple were more “subtle” in their approach — generally leaving alone children who strongly resisted them — Moore says McGrath used brute force.
The journalist believes the prominent Orangeman worked as an agent informer for MI5 in the 1970s. He asks if it is possible that he was planted in the home by the intelligence service.
“What of a Kincora-based paedophile ring, which operated on both sides of the Irish border to supply boys for sex with a client list of rich and powerful individuals?
“Such intelligence might have given MI5 leverage over rich and powerful individuals anxious to avoid their paedophilic habits becoming public knowledge. The organisation was known to exploit such human weaknesses,” he says.
“MI5 has denied that McGrath worked for them, but I have two police sources who know that he did.”
Moore reveals that in 1995 he asked former RUC Chief Constable, the late Sir John Hermon, if McGrath was an MI5 agent involved in an operation at Kincora.
“He told me that this could not be true because he had not been made aware of any such operation, and he would have been told about it,” the journalist says.
Hermon apologised
“Then, in 1996, I saw him again at a Kincora-related event where he took me aside to quietly apologise for what he'd said at our lunch, which he described at misleading. He said he had subsequently learned that MI5 did indeed have an operation linked to Kincora and that McGrath was working for them.”
Moore says he has secret MI5 documents which confirm Hermon and RUC Special Branch were “kept in the dark about MI5's assets” in Kincora.
The truth began to emerge about the boys' home in 1980 after two social workers contacted the Irish Independent.
McGrath, Mains and Semple were jailed the following year for abusing 11 boys.
However, Moore says the abuse of multiple boys could have been stopped years earlier.
“In 1980 I found a police officer whose investigations into a child sex abuse case in 1975 had led him to Kincora. 'David' had photographed a range of people visiting the home who had no legitimate business going into the premises.
“He wanted to extend his investigation but wasn't allowed,” the journalist says.
Moore, who worked for the BBC at the time, alleged that one of his superiors in the corporation had named his source 'David' to an RUC assistant chief constable.
“That betrayal shocked me,” he says. “It was completely unethical. Nobody in journalism should ever give away the name of a source. 'David' found out about it, and understandably severed all communication with me. I lost my source.”
The BBC was contacted but declined to comment.
Moore says the abuse in Kincora could also have been prevented when Army intelligence captain Brian Gemmell submitted reports in 1975 to a senior MI5 officer in Northern Ireland, Ian Cameron, but Gemmell was told to back off.
The journalist says that Detective Chief Inspector George Caskey, who later led an investigation into the abuse, told him that MI5 had “obstructed” his work, which Caskey described as a “criminal act”.
Moore says: “In this book, I have pulled together all the small pieces of evidence that the British government and MI5 were trying to conceal.
“Secret documents, including MI5 memos, have been given to me. They show that, in 1983, MI5 legal adviser Bernard Sheldon made Margaret Thatcher's government do a U-turn on its promise of holding a judicial inquiry into Kincora.
“Instead, at MI5's insistence, we got a very watered down inquiry with inadequate scope.”
In 2017, Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry chairman Sir Anthony Hart found that the abuse at Kincora was limited to the actions of Mains, Semple and McGrath, and didn't take place with state or intelligence services collusion.
Moore is scathing of Hart's conclusion. “The NIO has confirmed that files compiled on Kincora created between 1981-83 were destroyed shortly before the HIA sat,” he says.
“Other Kincora files have been locked away by the Government to 2065 and 2085. Kincora has become the shame of the British establishment. No matter how hard they try to ignore it, it won't go away.”
Kincora: Britain's Shame, Mountbatten, MI5, the Belfast Boys' Home Sex Abuse Scandal and the British Cover-Up by Chris Moore, is published by Merrion Press, RRP £17
Royal murdered by IRA ‘abused children trafficked to his estate’
Connla Young, Crime and Security Correspondent, Irish News, March 16th, 2025
LORD Mountbatten abused children at his Mullaghmore estate, a new book reports.
Fresh claims have been made that the British royal murdered by the IRA was involved in an MI5-linked paedophile ring involving children trafficked from Kincora Boys’ Home.
The details are contained in ‘Kincora, Britain’s Shame’ by Belfast-based investigative journalist Chris Moore.
He presents fresh information about the sexual depravities carried out by a nest of paedophile predators with links to organisations including loyalist paramilitary groups, the Orange Order, MI5, MI6 and the royal family.
The book alleges that Mountbatten was involved in sexual abuse of five children.
Three of his alleged victims have spoken to Mr Moore about their horrific experiences, including rape, alleged to have been carried out by Mountbatten at his former residence at Classiebawn in Co Sligo. Two of the child victims were resident at Kincora Boys’ Home in east Belfast.
The claims were dismissed by a Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry between 2014 and 2016.
The former Royal Navy officer was a great uncle of the current British monarch, King Charles. The pair were said to be close.
Mountbatten and three other people were killed, including two children, by an IRA bomb that exploded on a boat at Mullaghmore in August 1979.
‘Low Standards’ in high places
In the years since his death, allegations about his alleged sexual deviancy have been reported. It has previously emerged that the FBI held files on the royal which include a report from American writer Elizabeth de la Poer Beresford. Also known as Baroness Decies, who was close to the late Queen Elizabeth and her grandmother Queen Mary, she told the FBI that in those circles Mountbatten and his wife Edwina were ‘considered persons of extremely low morals’. She also told US authorities that Mountbatten ‘was known to be a homosexual with a perversion for young boys’.
In the past several witnesses have come forward to say they were sexually abused by Mountbatten at his Mullaghmore residence.
The new book suggests some victims were trafficked from Kincora to a hotel in Co Fermanagh before being collected by members of Mountbatten’s security team and taken on to Mullaghmore where they were abused.
One senior Kincora staff member is said to have taken pictures of naked boys which were then shown to potential “clients”.
In 2022 a former resident of Kincora Boys Home, Arthur Smyth, launched legal action over claims he was abused by Mountbatten.
Speaking to the Irish News, Mr Moore questioned the role of British intelligence agencies in the Mountbatten affair.
“If you were to look up the beginnings of the British secret services, it was in 1909, and one of their principle aims when they were established at that time was to protect the monarchy and the family of the monarch.”
And he asked: “Does that still apply today when they are looking at the royal family?
“Are the Mountbatten allegations of five boys, are they known to MI5 and are they protecting a member of the royal family?”
22% of NI children growing up in poverty
Jonathan McCambridge, Irish News and Belfast Telegraph, May 16th, 2025
NORTHERN Ireland’s first ever antipoverty strategy could probably “go further”, First Minister Michelle O’Neill has said.
First ever anti-poverty strategy could go further admits O’Neill
Jonathan McCambridge, Irish News and Belfast Telegraph, May 16th, 2025
NORTHERN Ireland’s first ever antipoverty strategy could probably “go further”, First Minister Michelle O’Neill has said.
But Communities Minister Gordon Lyons insisted that it was a “good day for Northern Ireland” after the draft strategy was agreed by executive ministers, almost 19 years after it was committed to.
The draft strategy will be presented to the Northern Ireland Assembly next week by Mr Lyons before it goes for public consultation and then returns to the Executive ahead of any implementation.
Figures from the Department for Communities have suggested that 22% of children in Northern Ireland are growing up in poverty.
A court ruling in March said Stormont’s Executive Committee was in breach of its legal obligations by not adopting a strategy to tackle poverty, deprivation and social exclusion.
Announcing the draft strategy yesterday following a meeting of executive ministers, Mr Lyons said it would be built around the three pillars of reducing the risk of people falling into poverty, minimising the impacts of poverty and helping people to exit poverty.
Mr Lyons said: “Today is a good day for Northern Ireland. Nineteen years after it was first promised we now have a draft anti-poverty strategy.
“ This strategy is not just a document, it is a commitment from us to do all that we can to transform lives here. It is not a sticking plaster, it is not a shortterm fix, but a long-term plan to tackle the root causes of poverty
“Today ministers have come together in a coordinated and joined-up way to tackle poverty.
“This strategy is not just a document, it is a commitment from us to do all that we can to transform lives here.
“It is not a sticking plaster, it is not a short-term fix, but a long-term plan to tackle the root causes of poverty.
The DUP minister added: “We will listen to the feedback that we receive and I will then present a final version to the executive for approval.
“Delivery will be dependant on all of us working together, departments, business, communities and individuals.
“We now have plans that are realistic, sustainable and importantly, they are deliverable.”
Tensions between DUP and Sinn Fein
Ms O’Neill was asked about tensions between Sinn Féin and the DUP over the strategy.
It is understood the document differs in some areas from what the previous communities minister, Sinn Féin’s Deirdre Hargey, was working on.
The first minister said: “I think over the course of the consultation period there is lots of space for everybody to have their view and their say.
“This is a consultation period, ears are very much open to listening and trying to shape it where we can, improve it if that is what is required.
She added: “I am proud of the work that Deirdre Hargey started a number of years ago. I am proud of the fact it really engaged the cohort of people that are out there.
“I think it has been advanced to this stage, it is now out for public consultation, I think that’s a good thing.
“Let everybody have their view.”
Mr Lyons, who succeeded Ms Hargey in the ministry when Stormont was restored last year, said his draft document has “drawn heavily on the work that has already been carried out”.
He said: “I certainly reject any notion that we have not gone forward with many of the suggestions that were in the previous document.
“We have all been working together to get something that works.”
Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly insisted the strategy would “address the real life impacts of poverty”.
She said: “It will ensure that we can prioritise actions and funding in the right way at the right time, to the right people to help those who need it most.
“We know there is more work to be done and we are confident this strategy will help reduce the impacts of poverty felt by so many.”
‘Children being failed’
Peter Bryson, head of Save the Children in Northern Ireland, said it “can’t be a strategy for strategy’s sake”.
He added: “During the 18-year wait for this day, child poverty has accelerated, and record numbers of children are being failed.
“We need to see a strategy that is ambitious and delivers meaningful change for children.”
SDLP councillor Paul Doherty said the strategy must deliver for communities in need of help.
He said: “Nearly two decades on from the agreement of the need for an anti-poverty strategy for the north and after years of legal wrangling we finally have a draft strategy agreed.
“In the interim, poverty has only got worse for communities here, with families finding it harder and harder to keep their heads above water.
“While this progress is welcome, a draft strategy without the measures needed to tackle poverty or the funding to do so will be meaningless.
“People struggling to put food on the table, keep the electric and heat switched on and afford basic necessities need assurances it will deal with the issues they are facing.”
The Sinn Féin chair of the Communities Committee at Stormont, Colm Gildernew, has said organisations involved in tackling poverty must be heard and listened to during the consultation.
He said: “Organisations working every day to tackle poverty have consistently called for a meaningful strategy. Their voice and input is essential in shaping this strategy.
“Deirdre Hargey as communities minister worked closely with the sector and Minister Lyons should now do the same.”
Unionists are becoming more sceptical about Windsor Framework says report
Jonathan McCambridge, Belfast Telegraph and Irish News, May 16th, 2025
UNIONIST voters have become more sceptical about the Windsor Framework since the Safeguarding the Union deal, a new report has suggested.
The report from Queen’s University Belfast, based on an opinion poll carried out by LucidTalk, indicated that support for the Windsor Framework deal remains fragile in Northern Ireland.
The framework, agreed between the UK and the EU in 2023, amended the Northern Ireland Protocol and governs post-Brexit trading arrangements in the region.
The Safeguarding the Union deal was reached between the British government and the DUP the following year to further reduce some checks and paperwork on goods moving from the rest of the UK into Northern Ireland.
The deal led to the restoration of the Stormont powersharing arrangements following a two-year boycott by the unionist party in protest at the protocol.
The report said that half of poll respondents view the Windsor Framework as “appropriate” and “overall a good thing”, compared to just over a third (37%) against.
That number against has grown over the past year due to declining support for the Windsor Framework among those identifying as “slightly unionist”. In February 2024, 51% said it was a “good thing”, falling to 26% in April 2025.
The Queen’s report is the 13th in the ‘Testing the Temperature’ series on Northern Ireland voters’ views on Brexit and the Protocol/Windsor Framework.
Two-thirds approve closer EU links
Ahead of a UK-EU summit next week, two-thirds (66%) of respondents said they generally approve of the current government’s policy of pursuing closer relations with the EU.
This includes 66% of “slight unionists”, 88% of “neutrals” and 96% of nationalists. In contrast, 74% of “strong unionists” oppose this policy.
There are also differences between political communities in what they want to see from any UK-EU reset, with unionist respondents who support closer ties prioritising movement of goods between Britain and Northern Ireland and “strong nationalists” wanting to see increased UK-EU trade.
Professor David Phinnemore from the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s, said: “The UK government will no doubt welcome evidence of majority support in Northern Ireland for its pursuit of closer relations with the EU.
“The UK government will no doubt welcome evidence of majority support in Northern Ireland for its pursuit of closer relations with the EU. It cannot ignore, however, the evident drop we are seeing in the limited unionist support that exists for the Windsor Framework
“It cannot ignore, however, the evident drop we are seeing in the limited unionist support that exists for the Windsor Framework.
“If that trend is to be reversed, a closer UK-EU relationship needs to deliver on reducing obstacles to the GB-NI movement of goods.”
Professor Katy Hayward, from the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s, said: “There have been several notable events relating to the Windsor Framework since our last poll, including those in which MLAs took centre stage.
“The effect seems largely to have widened the gap between unionists and nationalists/others in opinion on the topic. And so the Windsor Framework continues to be a political and cultural issue as much as a practical concern.”
Divergence over Brexit persists
The report also found that unionists have differing views to nationalists and others regarding some of the activity of MLAs in the assembly on the Windsor Framework.
Almost half of respondents (47%) disagree that unionist MLAs were right to vote, in December 2024, against democratic consent for the full application of the Windsor Framework.
However, the poll suggested that 92% of TUV, 94% of DUP and 67% of UUP supporters think it was the right decision.
Other findings include: l 58% think the Windsor Framework offers unique economic opportunities for Northern Ireland, down from 68% in June 2024. The drop in support from “slightly unionist” is down to 47% from 73% in June 2024, though still higher than “strong unionists” (10%). l Trust in the UK government has improved, however, it remains the most distrusted (68%) and least trusted (11%) of all actors. Views on the European Commission/EU are almost evenly split, with 44% expressing trust and 42% distrust. l Northern Ireland business representatives remain the most trusted on Windsor Framework issues, with 54% expressing trust and only 16% of respondents distrusting them. l A majority (60%) of respondents believe that the Windsor Framework is being “undersold in terms of the dual market access opportunities” it provides for Northern Ireland producers.
The poll, using a weighted sample of 1,020 respondents from across Northern Ireland, was conducted by LucidTalk for Queen’s University Belfast on April 25-28.
The sample used is weighted to be representative of the adult population of Northern Ireland. All results presented are accurate to a margin of error of plus/minus 2.3%.
The Windsor Framework, agreed between the UK and the EU in 2023, amended the Northern Ireland Protocol and governs post-Brexit trading arrangements
