SAOIRSE32

Top Sinn Fein man is surprised to get a £35,000 award for a planned murder he knew nothing of

Malachi O’Doherty
The Observer
Sunday October 26 2008

A senior member of Sinn Fein in Belfast has been paid tens of thousands of pounds in compensation for an attack planned against him which never happened.

Alex Maskey MLA is the Sinn Fein spokesperson for policing and justice and was a key target of loyalist paramilitaries throughout the Troubles. He was once shot and wounded in his home, and a workman who was there was killed.

But for a separate attempt to kill him - which failed and which Maskey knew nothing about until years later - he was awarded a five-figure sum, believed to be about £35,000, in criminal injuries compensation earlier this year.

The award arises out of an incident in July 1988 involving an army agent and an Ulster Defence Association hitman. The agent inside the UDA had spotted Maskey having Sunday lunch in the Chester Park Hotel in Belfast and tried to organise an assassination bid against him.

That involved making contact with UDA units in West Belfast and trying to mobilise them on a Sunday afternoon, when they had never been at their most alert. The agent was Brian Nelson, who was later exposed, convicted of organising murders and has since died. Described by his sister as being ‘like a secret squirrel’, Nelson appears to have been particularly keen to kill Maskey.

The Sinn Fein councillor was then a high-profile city councillor in Belfast. This was at a time when council meetings were often shouting matches across party benches. One Unionist councillor famously tried to spray Maskey with disinfectant to sanitise the chamber.

But Maskey was of particular interest to the loyalists and the security forces. The police stalked him closely even then.

After seeing Maskey at the hotel, Brian Nelson made two separate attempts to put together a team that would go there to shoot him. This team would have had to include a gunman, a getaway driver and someone to receive the gun and dispose of it. His first effort produced enough men for the operation, but they had no immediate access to weapons.

The hitman whom Nelson eventually sent to the hotel was Ken Barrett. He is famous in paramilitary lore as the man who killed Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane a year later. Barrett told BBC journalist John Ware that he had gone to the Chester Park Hotel and had missed Maskey by ‘20 seconds’.

In Ware’s investigation for the BBC in 2002, it emerged that Nelson had told his army handlers that he had intended to kill Maskey and that he would try again the following week.

But Sinn Fein members and IRA activists were used to staggering their routines to avoid patterns of behaviour that would enable loyalists to predict their movements. And Alex Maskey knew that loyalists would certainly kill him if they got a chance. In that respect, that day was no different from any other.

Maskey has said privately that the compensation payment came to him ‘out of the blue’. He had forgotten that his solicitor was seeking compensation for the failed attack and he even seemed a little embarrassed by it, conscious that others deserved more help than he did.

He put the money towards a move, away from the home in Andersonstown in which he had faced another attack. That attack had killed a workman in the house and led to Maskey surviving gunshots to the stomach.

He claimed then that the security forces had been active in setting up that ambush, basing this on the pattern of movement of army vehicles in the area, though he would not have known then about Brian Nelson’s efforts to kill him.

After that attack, Maskey, like many others in Sinn Fein, had armoured his home. His windows had seven layers of glass in each frame.

But the question now is whether all those who have been targeted by paramilitaries over the years - even without knowing it, or suffering no actual attack - are entitled to similar compensation.

More recently than the attempt by a British agent to set up Alex Maskey for assassination, agents inside the republican movement have gathered intelligence on prison officers and police personnel. Denis Donaldson, later revealed as an informer and shot dead at a cottage in Donegal, was found to have stolen the names and addresses of hundreds of prison officers and police personnel from the Northern Ireland Office. Many of them were then rehoused for their own safety.

Last night the Alliance party leader, David Ford, described the award to Alex Maskey as ‘bizarre’.

He said: ‘It is a bit difficult to believe that somebody in his position was traumatised by something that didn’t happen. He must have been aware that he was under threat.

‘And it is difficult to understand why he was paid so much, when you see the poor levels of compensation paid to the relatives of those killed in the early years of the Troubles.’

Daily Mail
26 Oct 2008

By the time I’d reached my mid-20s, I thought I knew all there was to know about growing up in Northern Ireland. I’d heard the sound of roof tiles falling into burning houses after their fleeing owners set fire to them rather than see someone of a different religion move in.

I’d played football with my friends in our street, with plumes of smoke appearing all over the city as 20 IRA bombs went off within an hour. And I’ll never forget five soldiers leaping over the hedge into our back garden and frogmarching me as a ten-year-old to their Saracen armoured car to check my identity.

Belfast boy: Eamonn was already learning to be streetwise aged eight

But nothing prepares you for having a gun pressed into your temple in the dead of night. I’d just pulled up outside my parents’ house after a night out with my fiancee. It was 1am and everything should have been a perfectly normal occurrence – except that this was Belfast.

A blue Ford Cortina drew level with me as I parked. Four men inside, all burly and wearing coats, looked towards me. That’s when your heart races. That’s when you realised that a street with no lights wasn’t such a good place to be.

My heart beat loudly, my mouth went dry. Thankfully, though, they moved on, ten, 20, 30 yards. Not far enough for me to breathe a sigh of relief yet. Not far enough for me to be able to leave the car, get up the garden path and get my key into the front door before any of them could reach me.

I stayed put. Suddenly the Cortina went into reverse and simultaneously so did I. A surreal, synchronised car ballet followed with turns and twists that would have scored ten out of ten in competition. And competitions didn’t get any more serious than this – because this was a competition for my life.

I can’t explain how much of an out-of-body experience it was, circling a roundabout while looking across at my pursuers. Rubber burned, acrid smoke filled the air. I desperately tried to calculate my escape options.

Would I head to the nearest police station? No chance. It had a barrier manned by soldiers in pill boxes. Even if I reached it, they’d probably shoot me, thinking I was about to ram the gate. Could I outrun these guys. No, probably not. Could I lose them? Yes. If, on the assumption they were a Loyalist murder gang, I could get to the nearest Republican ghetto area.

Down the Cliftonville Road I headed, desperately trying to reach the nearby New Lodge Road. They wouldn’t dare follow me there. All around it was like a ghost town. No lights, no people. But on a straight road, they outran me, forced me up on to the pavement and into the wall of a church. More than at any other time in
my life in Belfast, I thought this was the end. As I slumped over the steering wheel, one of the four wrenched open my door, pulled me out by the scruff of the neck and threw me across the bonnet of my Fiat Strada.

‘Who the **** are you? Who the **** are you?’ he screamed. As I tried to answer, I began to realise that there was something even odder to this already odd scenario. He was English. And although he was now pressing a gun into the side of my head with some force, I began to think this mightn’t be as bad as it looked. It’s one of the very few times in my life that I have tried to use my television profile to get me anything.

‘I’m on TV, I’m on TV . . . I present the teatime news,’ I shouted. ‘Look, here’s my NUJ card.’

‘What were you doing outside a police officer’s house?’ he yelled.
Only now did the truth begin to emerge. It turned out that my parents’ then neighbour had joined the police – and that this was an undercover Army patrol assigned to protect him. Like many, I had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time – but at least I lived to tell the tale.

It is now 40 years since what became known as The Troubles began with the civil rights marches through Londonderry – or Derry, if you prefer; I wouldn’t want to reignite any rows. Three-and-a-half thousand people were killed, including civilians, police, Army, paramilitaries and innocent bystanders. Thousands more were injured and maimed and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of family members affected.

Happy days: Eamonn aged four on his father’s knee in a family photo. But the scourge of violence would bring a dark cloud to his teenage years

But I don’t think you can quantify the damage in numbers alone. Everyone who lived through it, myself included, has their own damage – memories, experiences, fear and often loathing. Few people want to talk about it these days because they now live in a new Northern Ireland – and thank God they do.

I recently went back to film The Troubles I’ve Seen, a documentary for ITV1 which takes the approach of talking to well-known people who, like me, grew up with The Troubles.
None of us tells all we know, all we’ve seen. You can take that as read. All of us, though, feel a pressure even-handedly to represent the people back home, who can be very sensitive to how the outside world sees them. But we all have our memories and surely it’s better to talk about them, so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

Some who lost relatives during The Troubles may be comforted that the comedian Patrick Kielty suffered the same pain as they may have experienced. Patrick has a bigger right than most to tell his story and say how he feels. His father was murdered by Loyalist paramilitaries. The men who fired the shots are today free under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

Patrick is as much a casualty of the conflict as his dad. He can never be free like the terrorists who pulled the trigger. He must forever live with the pain of his loss. I don’t think anyone could deny him talking about it.

Actor Charlie Lawson – Jim McDonald from Coronation Street – talks openly about his infatuation with Loyalist paramilitaries and how to this day Republican emblems and slogans send a shiver up his spine. A young Gloria Hunniford experienced the aftermath of a Belfast bombing atrocity and another actor, James Nesbitt, tells childhood tales of how influenced he was by the Orange Order – a perfectly normal inspiration in his world, anathema for lads born into Catholic, Nationalist or Republican traditions.

I tell my stories from the streets where I grew up, in the complicated patchwork of different religions thatis North Belfast. My father, Leonard, was a carpet fitter. So much went on around us – not all of it good. But, like many, we learned to insulate ourselves as best we could from the violence.

I suppose my first realisation that The Troubles wasn’t just name-calling or stone-throwing came when I was about 11 sometime in 1970 – and making my way home from my usual Friday night game of football. I heard a sound in the air I’d never heard before and don’t ever want to hear again.

The loud noise was roof tiles cracking in the heat of burning houses. Protestant neighbours were so frightened of their Catholic neighbours that they were moving out. But they didn’t want to leave the house behind, in case a Catholic family moved in. So they burned down their own homes.

Such was the fear, such was the panic spreading around the whole neighbourhood that people started to put up barricades, put cars across the road. A Chinese restaurant now stands on the site of a filling station where I remember watching people run to fill milk bottles full of petrol and put rags into the top – making crates and crates of petrol bombs to defend themselves. I’m sure they didn’t know what they were to defend themselves from but they were going to be ready. Like many families that night, we fled Belfast for a couple of weeks. Like thousands of other people, we became evacuees.

I particularly remember a day called Bloody Friday – July 21, 1972 – when I was playing in the street outside our house. Every few minutes we’d see a plume of smoke going up – Oxford Street bus station, the Cave Hill Road shops. Each time we paused, picked up the ball and said: ‘Wow! What’s that?’ Then we played on. It was only later that news filtered through that somebody knew somebody who had been killed or injured.

My school, St Malachy’s College, was a Catholic grammar. My Protestant friends had their own schools but our problems were the same. It was so difficult to get to class. The area all around – New Lodge, Lower Shankill, Crumlin Road, Ardoyne, Old Park – was collectively known as the Murder Triangle. Almost every week there was some sort of problem – your bus being hijacked, a barricade being built, a riot or demonstration, power cuts or strikes. But once you were inside, school was a place of learning, a place of peace. Thankfully, it was an oasis in a sea of turmoil.

Making the programme, I was often asked: ‘Why are you bringing all this up again?’ As a Belfast boy, I totally understand the question and the reason it was asked. There’s a fear connected to it. So many of us, myself included, really can’t believe that all this has actually come to an end.

Few, if any, of us thought there would be a cessation of the hatred, the division, the destruction and the murderous routine in our lifetime. We had got used to it, we learned to cope with it and the sad, perverted truth was there was an acceptable level of violence and casualties both for us as a people and the Westminster Government. Gradually, though, things are improving. The odd soldier and doctor apart, I can’t remember seeing too many non-white faces in the Belfast of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. That’s now changed and I have no doubt it’s been instrumental in making Northern Ireland a much more open, healthy and happy society. Seeing Chinese, African, Asian and Eastern European faces with Ulster accents tickles me pink.

The experience of living through a war stays, however. Many bottle it up, as I’ve mentioned. But as time passes, more and more of us now sound like our parents and grandparents, who used to regale us with stories of the Second World War and the Blitz.

I can bore the backside off my incredulous teenagers with tales of near-death experiences, being searched going into shops, of how you could tell if a car was carrying a bomb by how low it was on its wheels. Of checkpoints and car chases.
‘Yeah Dad . . . whatever,’ are the normal responses. But then their Belfast is a very different one to mine – and very like Leeds, Glasgow, Cardiff or Liverpool.

I didn’t so much live through The Troubles as survive them. I used to look with envy at American high-school films, knowing that my teenage years had been robbed. Sectarian murders, gang rule and curfews meant staying indoors if you wanted to stay out of trouble.

New motor: Eamonn, at 19, poses proudly in Belfast with his first car

We’re a politically aware people in Ireland. We love our labels – UDR, UDA, PIRA, INLA, RUC, PSNI, DUP, SDLP. Outsiders marvel at our spooky ability to know a person’s religion from their name or hair colouring – but that’s how insular we were.
It also led to a fascination in watching the news, in having the political situation explained to me, in wanting an answer to questions such as: Why do these people do what they do? And: Is any cause worth dying for?

All of that led to being a reporter and eventually to what I do today, knowing that however intense conflicts and causes are around the world, and whatever lengths journalists go to to bring the story, most people worry more about their health, their job, their families and what time The X Factor is on the telly.

There are lots of things I’m not sure of in life – but of this I am. I am a child of The Troubles. They, to a large degree, make me who I am today. They’ve made me have nightmares, made me streetwise, given me a desire to live today because tomorrow mightn’t be there. They’ve given me an identity, a sense of community, an opposition to bullying, injustice, social inequality, mob rule and the legitimacy of terrorism.
Amazingly, they’ve also made me very proud to be a Belfast man, with a desire to speak up for little Northern Ireland whenever I can.

When you watch the programme, you will only see The Troubles that we have known. It doesn’t make our stories any better or worse than anyone else’s stories. It just makes them our stories.

* ‘The Troubles I’ve Seen’, ITV1, Tuesday, October 28, 10.40pm.