Kincora: Britain’s Shame – Mountbatten, MI5, the Belfast Boys’ Home Sex Abuse Scandal and the British Cover-Up: Chris Moore

I had to set this book aside for a couple of days after reading the second chapter. The first person accounts of men who were raped when they were teenage boys in Kincora, a boys’ home in Belfast, were so harrowing that it was necessary to take some time to process them. However, it is an important book for anyone who wants to understand how the state works to protect the powerful, silence their victims and, when fragments of the truth do emerge, ensure that it can never be fully known.

Considering how obsessed the British press is with the English royal family, constantly gushing out utter trivia, one might reasonably expect that detailed first hand accounts of how Louis Mountbatten, great-uncle of the current English king, with a relationship so close they referred to each other as “Honorary Grandfather” and “Honorary Grandson”, was a child rapist whose crimes were shielded by MI5 and the RUC, might have merited a few stories. As best I can determine, the standard popular account of his life is told in an episode of The Crown. While living he seems to have been a more prolific abuser than Jimmy Savile, his link to the English monarchy protecting him from the posthumous universal revulsion Savile inspires.

Gay sex between men was only legalised in the north of Ireland in 1982, but self-evidently that doesn’t mean it was not happening. Madame George by Van Morrison is the best known account of the area’s gay scene. Moore, I assume through thoughtlessness rather than intention, tends elide the gay scene of the sixties and seventies with what appear to be extensive paedophile networks involving civil servants, businessmen, lawyers and judges.

William McGrath, a sinister figure in a number of ways, was at the heart of the paedophile supply system. He was a member of the Orange Order with a niche interest in Irish culture as well as a British-Israelite, believing that the British were a lost tribe of Israel and was the ideologue of a terrorist network called Tara.  Active paedophiles were already working in Kincora when he was put in charge of it and the boys confirm that the abuse went into overdrive after his appointment.

Vulnerable boys were raped in the home, they were driven to hotels, castles and houses to be handed over to the men McGrath was supplying. At various points social workers, teachers and police officers raised concerns about sexual abuse. It took years for McGrath and the other child rapists working in Kincora to receive absurdly lenient sentences. Moore is in no doubt that MI5 were aware of what was happening and the identities of the abusers. Mountbatten, who raped children in Kincora, even had a security detail with him when he was travelling in Ireland.

Chris Moore has spent decades trying to uncover as much of the truth as he could about Kincora. He became aware that his former bosses in the BBC were coming under pressure to divert him from the story and some of his sources told him that they had been threatened with losing their jobs and pensions and even imprisonment if they helped him reveal the extent of the state’s complicity in protecting child rapists. At various points MI5 actively sabotaged RUC investigations and are known to have destroyed documents. David Cameron admitted that they had more power in these matters than he did as prime minister.

There are no happy endings in this book. The survivors Moore has interviewed have all lived with a lifetime of trauma, a trauma compounded by the fact that MI5 in particular went out of its way to terrorise them into silence when they had escaped from Kincora. He makes the point that the organisation’s responsibility to “defend the realm”, and in particular the person of the English monarch means that it was and remains willing to facilitate the most hideous abuse against the vulnerable. It is the permanent state.