Did he get away with murder?

The first and youngest to die was eight-year-old Kathryn Eakin, who was washing the windows of the family’s grocery shop when a Morris Minor Traveller blew up, sending a hail of shrapnel along Main Street. A small fragment struck her behind one ear, the fatal wound at first concealed by her curtain of blonde hair. Her parents, Billy and Merle – both of whom narrowly escaped death, together with her brother, Mark – are convinced that the bombers must have noticed Kathryn as they prepared to activate their deadly cargoes.

The loss all but destroyed the Eakin family, who eventually could no longer bear to live in their home village. “We got a cheque for £58 in compensation,” Billy recalls with undiminished bitterness. “One official told us, ‘Well, you won’t need to be spending money on Kathryn when she grows up.’ I wish to God now that I hadn’t cashed it, and had instead framed it for everyone to see how the bereaved families were treated.”

Although the death toll was almost evenly spread between the Catholic and Protestant communities, there was never any serious doubt that the Provisional IRA was responsible. The bombing occurred just hours after British troops had launched Operation Motorman to retake the “no-go” republican strongholds in Derry. Police and army intelligence concluded that the IRA’s south Derry brigade had carried it out in an attempt to take the military pressure off their besieged comrades with a propaganda “spectacular” that went disastrously wrong.

But there has never been any claim of responsibility for what remains one of Northern Ireland’s worst terrorist attacks, and nobody has been charged. For the families of those killed or maimed (about 30 people were hospitalised), the failure after so many years to secure justice remains an open wound. “A fortune has been spent on the Bloody Sunday inquiry and now there’s finally someone standing trial for the Omagh bombing,” says Merle Eakin. “Yet we never seem to get anywhere pursuing the truth about what happened in Claudy. It’s become the forgotten atrocity.” Not for much longer: after a lengthy investigation, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland is about to publish an independent report on the handling of the Claudy case by the former Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). The Sunday Times Magazine understands that the report will expose a conspiracy between the British government and the Irish Catholic Church, aided by the RUC, to obstruct the course of justice by moving the terrorist mastermind behind the bombing beyond the reach of Britain’s legal jurisdiction. Although the ombudsman, Nuala O’Loan, has steadfastly refused to comment on her inquiry, she is known as a tenacious operator who is totally committed to serving the truth.

At the time of the Claudy attack, I was a member of The Sunday Times’ Insight team, which had recently completed a lengthy investigation into the events of Bloody Sunday. This brought us into contact with sources including senior police and army officers concerned with intelligence-gathering. From them, I learnt that investigators had strong grounds for suspecting that a Catholic priest was directly involved in planning and carrying out the bombing.

I was told that, for operational reasons, he could not be identified at that stage, but it was made clear to me that the investigation was entering a potentially controversial phase that could have far-reaching consequences. RUC sources in Derry also confided that senior officers at the force’s headquarters were closely monitoring every aspect of the Claudy investigation, suggesting that there was a powerful political undercurrent to the case.

My informants also maintained that the security forces had been aware of the priest’s links to the IRA before Claudy was targeted and were perplexed that no action had been taken against him. He was believed to be the head of the rural south Derry brigade, widely regarded as more extreme than the Derry city unit – by then under the command of Martin McGuinness. Soon after the bombing, McGuinness issued a statement denying that his volunteers were in any way implicated, though insiders believe he must have known who was responsible.

It was not long before a name was put to the “Provo priest”: Father James Chesney from the tiny parish of Cullion, just a few miles from Claudy. Mary Hamilton’s husband, Ernie, heard it from a Catholic who had been a regular at their hotel bar. “We were having a drink in the living room among the bomb damage when your man told me that Father Chesney had been in on the attack. He said he wanted this passed on to the police. I did that, but I don’t know what use they ever made of the information.”

Ivan Cooper was another who became aware of the Chesney link. A Protestant much respected among Catholics for his campaigning for their civil rights, Cooper was then the MP for the constituency in which Claudy was located.

“A few days after the attack, I was working late in one of my constituency offices when I spotted a fellow hanging about outside like some frightened rabbit,” he recalled over coffee in his favourite Derry cafe. “He told me enough to convince me beyond a shadow of doubt that the IRA’s south Derry brigade did the bombing, though it remains my opinion that they hadn’t intended to cause so many casualties. I was given no names and I didn’t ask for any because, believe me, it was dangerous to know too much.”

It would be months before Cooper first heard Father Chesney’s name mentioned, but the new information left him in no doubt that the priest had played a pivotal role.
“I know he arrived in the car that was the first to blow up, outside McElhinney’s pub on Main Street. My source described the attack as a ‘maverick’ operation, carried out by ultra-hardliners without the knowledge of the Derry city brigade. I assumed that the police were hearing the same thing.”

Cooper had previously met Chesney at the home of the priest’s wealthy uncle and aunt, Willie and Betty Noon, renowned for their taste for the high life. “They had supported my first election campaign in 1970, and I would be summoned to Betty’s soirees, which she presided over from what she called her boudoir, waving a long cigarette holder. There were usually a few priests, though as far as the Noons were concerned, Jim Chesney was always the star of the show.”

Tall, well-built and darkly handsome, Chesney could often be found speeding along country roads in a sports car the Noons were said to have paid for. Some of his parishioners considered him a bit flash, yet nobody could deny that he was a grand fundraiser, nicknamed “the dance-hall emperor” for organising popular hops, ceilidhs and bingo nights.

But not all the money raised made it into the church coffers – Chesney’s events were robbed with such frequency that police became convinced he was secretly financing the IRA. Ivan Cooper didn’t give much credence to that at first, but then a dance-hall owner who had lost his takings at gunpoint told him: “It was f***ing Chesney’s doing, and that’s a fact.”

Cooper eventually decided that he was duty-bound to inform the local Catholic hierarchy of what he knew, and spoke at length to Father Edward Daly, a Derry priest whose courageous conduct on Bloody Sunday had been much admired. As Cooper tells it, Daly was appalled, urging him to get in touch immediately with Cardinal William Conway, Archbishop of Armagh and head of the Irish Catholic Church.

“By now it was getting late, but the cardinal asked me to come straight over, so I drove to Armagh half-asleep. His staff had gone to bed, but he insisted on cooking me a big fry-up while I told him about Father Chesney. He was silent for a moment, then he asked if I would say nothing about this business publicly until he had made more inquiries. I thought that was fair enough.”

Father Daly and the then bishop of Derry, Neil Farren, were subsequently instructed to grill Chesney about the attack on Claudy. According to Daly, Chesney vehemently rejected the investigation, suggesting that there was a powerful political undercurrent to the case.

My informants also maintained that the security forces had been aware of the priest’s links to the IRA before Claudy was targeted and were perplexed that no action had been taken against him. He was believed to be the head of the rural south Derry brigade, widely regarded as more extreme than the Derry city unit – by then under the command of Martin McGuinness. Soon after the bombing, McGuinness issued a statement denying that his volunteers were in any way implicated, though insiders believe he must have known who was responsible.

It was not long before a name was put to the “Provo priest”: Father James Chesney from the tiny parish of Cullion, just a few miles from Claudy. Mary Hamilton’s husband, Ernie, heard it from a Catholic who had been a regular at their hotel bar. “We were having a drink in the living room among the bomb damage when your man told me that Father Chesney had been in on the attack. He said he wanted this passed on to the police. I did that, but I don’t know what use they ever made of the information.”

Ivan Cooper was another who became aware of the Chesney link. A Protestant much respected among Catholics for his campaigning for their civil rights, Cooper was then the MP for the constituency in which Claudy was located.

“A few days after the attack, I was working late in one of my constituency offices when I spotted a fellow hanging about outside like some frightened rabbit,” he recalled over coffee in his favourite Derry cafe. “He told me enough to convince me beyond a shadow of doubt that the IRA’s south Derry brigade did the bombing, though it remains my opinion that they hadn’t intended to cause so many casualties. I was given no names and I didn’t ask for any because, believe me, it was dangerous to know too much.”

It would be months before Cooper first heard Father Chesney’s name mentioned, but the new information left him in no doubt that the priest had played a pivotal role.
“I know he arrived in the car that was the first to blow up, outside McElhinney’s pub on Main Street. My source described the attack as a ‘maverick’ operation, carried out by ultra-hardliners without the knowledge of the Derry city brigade. I assumed that the police were hearing the same thing.”

Cooper had previously met Chesney at the home of the priest’s wealthy uncle and aunt, Willie and Betty Noon, renowned for their taste for the high life. “They had supported my first election campaign in 1970, and I would be summoned to Betty’s soirees, which she presided over from what she called her boudoir, waving a long cigarette holder. There were usually a few priests, though as far as the Noons were concerned, Jim Chesney was always the star of the show.”

Tall, well-built and darkly handsome, Chesney could often be found speeding along country roads in a sports car the Noons were said to have paid for. Some of his parishioners considered him a bit flash, yet nobody could deny that he was a grand fundraiser, nicknamed “the dance-hall emperor” for organising popular hops, ceilidhs and bingo nights.

But not all the money raised made it into the church coffers – Chesney’s events were robbed with such frequency that police became convinced he was secretly financing the IRA. Ivan Cooper didn’t give much credence to that at first, but then a dance-hall owner who had lost his takings at gunpoint told him: “It was f***ing Chesney’s doing, and that’s a fact.”

Cooper eventually decided that he was duty-bound to inform the local Catholic hierarchy of what he knew, and spoke at length to Father Edward Daly, a Derry priest whose courageous conduct on Bloody Sunday had been much admired. As Cooper tells it, Daly was appalled, urging him to get in touch immediately with Cardinal William Conway, Archbishop of Armagh and head of the Irish Catholic Church.

“By now it was getting late, but the cardinal asked me to come straight over, so I drove to Armagh half-asleep. His staff had gone to bed, but he insisted on cooking me a big fry-up while I told him about Father Chesney. He was silent for a moment, then he asked if I would say nothing about this business publicly until he had made more inquiries. I thought that was fair enough.”

Father Daly and the then bishop of Derry, Neil Farren, were subsequently instructed to grill Chesney about the attack on Claudy. According to Daly, Chesney vehemently rejected the allegations. On a later occasion, Daly, by now Bishop of Derry, and another senior cleric again questioned Chesney. “While admitting strong republican sympathies, [he] denied the allegations unequivocally.”

Early in December 1972, a meeting was arranged between Conway and William Whitelaw, then the Northern Ireland secretary, to discuss Chesney’s activities. Three weeks earlier, Whitelaw had held secret talks with IRA leaders (including McGuinness and Gerry Adams) at a mansion in London’s Cheyne Walk. The aim was to secure a ceasefire leading to a permanent end to the violence, but the talks soon collapsed. With communal tensions near breaking point, Whitelaw and Conway understood all too well that if reports that a Catholic priest was an IRA member with blood on his hands became public knowledge, there could be terrible repercussions throughout Northern Ireland.

The day after their meeting, December 6, 1972, a briefing note prepared by Whitelaw’s private office for the police described how he had forcefully expressed his disgust at Chesney’s conduct – which suggests he was already aware of the intelligence reports. It added that the indications were, “the cardinal [already] knew the priest was behaving improperly”. According to a retired police officer familiar with the note’s contents, Conway had mentioned the possibility of moving him to Donegal in the Irish Republic.

At the time of the attack on Claudy, the Irish Republic’s extradition laws provided an exemption for those whose alleged crimes were classified as “political”, a clause that had been invoked in previous cases involving IRA men wanted by the police. The Northern Ireland Office considered that any attempt to extradite Chesney would almost certainly have led to this defence being invoked.

Whitelaw’s memoirs make no mention of the meeting with Conway or the renegade priest. Official papers in the National Archives that cover Northern Ireland at the period
in question contain no record of the meeting, nor of the subsequent briefing note sent to the police. Some of the files record that material had been “weeded”, though there is no information as to what the papers that had been removed contained, and no reason is provided for excluding them from public view. The Sunday Times Magazine’s request under the Freedom of Information Act to the Northern Ireland Office and the Police Service of Northern Ireland, successor to the RUC, for access to the Claudy case papers was refused on the grounds that it was not in the public interest. So, despite the passage of more than 30 years, the public has been denied information that could demonstrate how the investigation into one of the worst terrorist incidents during the Troubles had been contaminated by secret deals between the principal players.

In January 1973, police intelligence reported that Father Chesney appeared to have left the south Derry area, and it was later established that he had been appointed to a new parish in Donegal. Since Whitelaw and Conway are now dead, whatever they agreed may never become known. But the inescapable conclusion must be that they privately conspired to place the prime suspect in the Claudy bombing beyond the reach of justice.

One intriguing theory about what took place between Whitelaw and Conway appeared in a book published almost 25 years later by Martin Dillon, an expert on security matters in Northern Ireland. He claimed that a deal had been reached by which Whitelaw would not go public on the Chesney affair, provided that Conway keep quiet about a highly sensitive British intelligence operation. According to Dillon, in the early 1970s confessional boxes in Catholic churches and at least one parochial house had been bugged by the security forces.

At the time, Dillon noted, many Catholic priests privately believed the IRA was fighting a just war – though few would have granted absolution for confessions of murder. While some insiders, including Ivan Cooper, are unconvinced by Dillon’s account, had the alleged bugging become public knowledge the political fallout would have been catastrophic.

In an interview with The Sunday Times Magazine, the present Bishop of Derry, Seamus Hegarty, alluded to the possibility that Chesney had been moved because of fears that Protestant extremists might assassinate him. “It was an open secret that he had strong republican sympathies,” Bishop Hegarty added, “but the church would require incontrovertible evidence before accepting that he was transferred to cover up his involvement in terrorist activities.”

According to a report in Belfast’s Sunday Life newspaper four years ago, there was indeed a plot to murder Chesney. A former member of the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association claimed that a killer known as “the Sheriff” was enlisted. The plan was to ambush Chesney – whose car registration had already been publicised by a paramilitary magazine, together with information about his regular visits to his mother – as he left a function. The hit was scheduled to take place about six weeks before the Claudy bombing, but was aborted after a British Army patrol appeared in the vicinity.

In the late 1970s, now suffering from terminal cancer, Chesney was moved to a new parish in Malin Head, the northernmost point of the Irish Republic. He died there in 1980 at the age of 46, never once having been questioned by the police on either side of the border.

Shortly after the 30th anniversary of the Claudy attack, RUC detectives began a “review” of the original police investigation. Then, out of the blue in September 2002, an extraordinary letter arrived at the home of Mary Hamilton, the former hotelier, who was now a Derry councillor and the city’s deputy mayor. Signed by someone calling himself Father Liam, it purported to contain a full account of Chesney’s IRA activities and included his confession to having led the unit responsible for bombing Claudy.

It also claimed that an unnamed senior police officer had aided the priest to escape justice.

According to Liam, who posted a similar letter to the News Letter newspaper in Belfast, he and Chesney had attended the same seminary. He described how, several months after the bombing, they had met up in Donegal, talking over old times. Without warning, Chesney had broken down and described in convincing detail how the Claudy operation had been planned and executed. He had also provided the names of IRA men who took part in that and other attacks. After this, Liam recalled, he had urged Chesney “to make his peace with God”. He left the next morning and never heard from Chesney again. “This horrible affair has been with me now for 30 years… hanging over me like a black cloud,” his letter concluded. “I must talk to somebody in authority before I die. I’m an old man and I must meet my maker with a clear conscience.”

To those who lost relatives and friends, this stirred painful and conflicting emotions. Mary Hamilton has no idea why the letter was sent to her, unless it was because she had herself been injured and was now a local politician. “I could only wonder why this Father Liam had waited so long. Like most people, I’d heard the rumours about Chesney, but the stuff about a police officer helping him was new; it seemed to me that a full investigation was now essential.”

Billy and Merle Eakin allowed themselves to believe that the letter might persuade the authorities to open a new inquiry. “Everyone knew there were more people involved than that despicable priest,” Merle says. “Some of the godfathers of the IRA were still out there, still refusing to accept responsibility. We thought that maybe this letter would finally persuade the police to question Martin McGuinness.”

The reaction of the Catholic Church was to challenge the letter’s credibility, pointing out that its author referred to Chesney as John instead of James, and to deny that it would ever tolerate a priest’s involvement in terrorism. When Ivan Cooper broke his silence to confirm that he had initially been responsible for naming Chesney to Father Daly, there was a furious response: “An aide to Cardinal Conway publicly denounced me for sullying the reputation of a dead priest.”

Yet Cooper shares the doubts of the church and the police about the letter’s authenticity, pointing out that although Father Liam had volunteered to co-operate with the police, nothing more has ever been heard from him. Cooper suspects that the letter was actually the work of somebody intent on keeping the Claudy bombing high on the police agenda. Other sources have told The Sunday Times Magazine that the letter was written by a Protestant man, then resident in Derry, who was familiar with the background to the investigation of the bombing and wanted to “flush out” Father Chesney.

If that was the intention, it succeeded: in December 2002, a senior Northern Ireland police officer, Assistant Chief Constable Sam Kinkaid, met the Claudy families and formally apologised to them for the way the original investigation had been handled. “There were opportunities to arrest and interview suspects that weren’t taken,” Kinkaid acknowledged.

On their way to the meeting, Billy and Merle Eakin had made one of their regular visits to Kathryn’s grave in the cemetery of a Protestant church just outside Claudy. “It was very distressing for all of us to hear what Mr Kinkaid had to say,” Merle recalls. “The families had suffered for such a long time and received so little attention, and now we knew why. It was encouraging that the police were ready to admit their mistakes, and we wanted so much to believe justice was now going to be done.”

It would be another three years before what appeared to be a significant breakthrough in the case came with the arrest, in November 2005, of four people, all Catholics. One was Francie Brolly, a veteran republican activist who was interned without trial as a suspected terrorist during the 1970s and now represents Sinn Fein in the Northern Ireland assembly. His home in Dungiven was raided as part of an operation that police said was the result of the emergence of “new lines of inquiry” in the review of the Claudy case. Within 48 hours, all four, who strongly denied any involvement, were released without charge. Brolly described the arrests as “politically motivated character assassination”, and he also angrily contested the decision by the police to forward a dossier to the public prosecutor.

Is there any realistic prospect of the Claudy bombers being brought to trial? Ivan Cooper thinks it’s unlikely; like the police, he believes that some of those involved are now dead, while at least two others have left Northern Ireland for good (they are believed to be in the US). Ask the Eakins if they are still hopeful and there is a long pause before Merle answers: “It gets harder as time passes. Our only consolation is the thought that if Kathryn’s killers don’t face justice in this world, they will surely face it in the next.” In the meantime, they pray that the ombudsman’s report will be so damning that a full-scale public inquiry into the conspiracy to protect Father Chesney will finally take place.