The DUP skeletons in Theresa May’s closet

6 2

July-August 2018

INTERNATIONAL

The DUP

skeletons

in Theresa

May’s

closet

INTRODUCTION

Last month

Village

described how Eric Witchell, the

paedophile who ran Williamson House for orphans

and neglected children in Belfast, was a key ﬁgure

in the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring. There is as yet no indi-

cation that he will be questioned by the Independent

Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse despite the fact he

is one of the most important living witnesses to the

existence of a vice ring which supplied children to

VIPs abusers. They included Enoch Powell MP and

a mysterious ‘reﬁned’ Englishman who was a visitor

to Northern Ireland (NI). The victim of the ‘reﬁned’

Englishman is certain he was Sir Anthony Blunt, the

infamous MI5 traitor, paedophile and Keeper of the

Queen’s Pictures. Blunt was also a regular visitor to

Ireland and active, albeit at a low level, in NI politics.

He had an extensive circle of friends in Ireland, many

of whom were also paedophiles.

In Part 1 of this article we will look at aspects of

Blunt’s background and some of his more sinister

connections to Ireland before turning to the intrigu-

ing allegation that he was the ‘refined’

Englishman.

In Part 2 we will describe the existence of a group

of children who were deﬁled and broken by Witchell

at Williamson House with the result they became

sexually compliant playthings before they were sent

to Kincora Boys Home where they became fodder in

an MI5 blackmail operation. According to one of the

victims, the operation revolved around a series of

hotels including the Park Avenue and the Europa in

Belfast, and one in Bangor. Independent contempo

raneous notes from a British Army psychological

operations (PSYOPs) ofﬁcer conﬁrm the existence

of a “prostitution ring supplying boys to hotels in

Belfast and Bangor” at the time. The targets of the

operation included working-class Loyalists from the

UDA, UVF and DUP. We will refer to one of the DUP

targets as “The Wife Beater”. He was a man with

connections to paramilitaries and was despised by

his party leader, Ian Paisley.

In Part 3 we will tell the story of ‘Charles’, another

of Witchell’s Williamson House victims. In 2017 the

Hart Inquiry rejected the notion that a paedophile

network had operated in NI in the 1970s with ofﬁcial

connivance. The Hart Report is littered with factual

inaccuracies and has been shredded by commenta-

tors. Charles’ account – told here for the ﬁrst time

- undermines it even further.

A WORLD OF PAIN

Many of the boys who were sent to the hotels to sat-

isfy the venal appetites of the strangers who preyed

upon them in rooms booked for the night; or some-

times at their homes; and those who were abused

inside the walls of Williamson House and/or Kincora

by familiar staff members, were consigned to a life

of depression, ill health, drug and alcohol abuse,

isolation and – in a number of cases – suicide. Very

few of the victims went on to form stable and lasting

relationships or have families. It is now too late for

one of them, Clint Massey, who lived a lonely and

isolated existence. Towards the end of his life, he

grew into a courageous Kincora campaigner. Sadly,

he succumbed to cancer earlier this year without

ever achieving justice. It was Massey who recalled

a lot of “suits” arriving at Kincora, often in the even-

ing. “In those days, there were loads of people over

from London. I have always assumed they were

senior ﬁgures from Whitehall. I certainly heard Eng-

lish accents”, he once revealed.

None of the puppet masters in MI5, MI6, the

Home Ofﬁce, the Northern Ireland Ofﬁce, the For-

eign Ofﬁce or Whitehall, who were responsible for

this world of pain, have ever been made to answer

for their egregious crimes.

THERESA MAY, A PM WHO CAN

SEE NO EVIL

Theresa May must shoulder the responsibility for

the ongoing cover-up of this far-reaching scandal.

When she was Home Secretary, she assigned the

Kincora Boys Home probe to the Hart Inquiry which

was not given the power to compel witnesses.

Instead, she should have let the Independent

Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse in London, which had

such a power, deal with it.

MI5 then proceeded to withhold the full truth

about its penetration of the DUP from Hart and much

more besides.

A number of declassiﬁed ﬁles which were fur-

nished to Hart reveal that the NIO (i.e. MI5) had

informers inside the DUP. However, they raise more

questions than answers. In particular, how many of

MI5’s DUP informers were blackmail victims, i.e.

men who were lured to the Park Avenue and the

By Joseph de Búrca

July-August 2018

6 3

other hotels by Joe Mains, the Warden of Kincora, or

his friend and fellow MI5 agent, John McKeague, to

deﬁle boys? See

Village

December 2017 and Febru-

ary 2018 for details about John McKeague’s links to

MI5.

THE DUP DOG THAT WAGS MAY’S

TAIL

Some DUP informers who were recruited while they

were in their twenties are now in their sixties and

early seventies and may still be active in the DUP. It

would be a scandal if a single informer – recruited

as a result of underage sexual blackmail – remains

in the party that is now the tail that wags the British

Government dog.

More than any other political ﬁgure in the UK, The-

resa May, ﬁrst as Home Secretary and now Prime

Minister, has had the right to ask and be told how

far MI5 managed to penetrate the fabric of the DUP,

whether by surveillance or agent recruitment. MI5’s

array of agents were undoubtedly recruited in the

normal way, i.e. through the exploitation of internal

party rivalries; bribery; and blackmail involving

sexual, political and ﬁnancial corruption. As with

Sinn Féin, the penetration of the DUP was carried

out during the Troubles against a background where

the party had multiple links to Loyalist paramilitary

groups including the UDA and the Red Hand Com-

mando. The “Wife Beater”, for example, had

connections to the Red Hand Commando led by John

McKeague. Another DUP agent was a lover of Wil-

liam McGrath, the House father at Kincora, and

leader of a paramilitary group known as Tara. See

Village

December 2017.

In more recent times, an audit must have been

conducted by MI5 and the Cabinet Ofﬁce to ascer-

tain what leverage the British Government might

exercise over the DUP

after

Brexit; the same ﬁles

must have been dusted down in the run-up to the

conclusion of the conﬁdence and supply arrange

ment between the DUP and the Tories in 2017.

What, if anything, was May told about the use of

sexual blackmail involving children during MI5’s

penetration of the DUP? Was she told anything

about blackmail targets such as the “Wife Beater”?

Is it possible she knows less about the “Wife

Beater’s” dark side than the Garda? On one occa-

sion ofﬁcers serving with Garda Special Branch

were told about the domestic abuse he meted out

to his wife by their RUC counterparts; and the

number of callouts the RUC was obliged to make to

his house to deal with his rages.

MAKING THE WHITEHALL

PIRATES WALK THE PLANK

If May was worthy of the trust placed in her by the

British public, and is the Christian she professes to

be, she would come clean on what MI5 has revealed

to her about the DUP members who were subjected

to blackmail, whether sexual or otherwise. If MI5

has disclosed nothing to her, and she has not asked

it about the issue, she should do so now; make a full

and comprehensive statement in the Commons, and

ﬁre those who have participated in the cover-up of

this scandal.

May, of course, will do nothing of the sort because

she is gullible and in thrall to the most devious ele-

ments inside Whitehall who pull her strings and

really call the shots. Her predecessor David Cam-

eron was also their minion when it came to

intelligence matters. Cameron told the family of Pat-

rick Finucane (the Belfast solicitor who had been

assassinated by British agents in NI) that he could

not order a public inquiry into the scandal. When

Finucane’s brother Martin asked him why, he turned

to Mrs Finucane and said: “Look, the last adminis-

tration couldn’t deliver an inquiry in your husband’s

case and neither can we”. According to Cameron this

was because “there are people all around this place,

[10 Downing Street], who won’t let it happen”. As he

was saying this, he raised a ﬁnger and made a cir-

cular motion in the air.

Jeremy Corbyn, however, has the appearance of

a man with sufﬁcient integrity and independence of

mind to force the Whitehall, MI5 and MI6 pirates to

walk the plank from Britain’s Ship of State. Corbyn’s

deputy leader, Tom Watson, is one of the few politi-

cians in Britain with proven grit: he has pursued the

VIP vice ring scandal with courage and vigour for

years. He is also a deft political operator.

PART 1: ANTHONY BLUNT,

WILLIAMSON HOUSE AND THE

ANGLO-IRISH VICE RING

THE PUPPET-MASTERS

By the 1970s, the puppet-masters who were over-

seeing the machinations of the paedophiles in the

Anglo-Irish Vice Ring were not the aristocrats, nor

the Unionist politicians who had been running it and

preying on orphanages and care homes since the

1940s but rather MI5 and MI6, two organisations

with an expertise in the black art of sexual black-

mail. Ian Cameron led MI5 operations in NI including

the exploitation of the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring, in the

mid-1970s. It is not even remotely conceivable that

Cameron’s superior, Director-General, Sir Michael

Hanley, who was based in London, was unaware of

what he was doing in Ireland.

Peter Wright of MI5 was Hanley’s right-hand man

at MI5’s HQ in London. Wright developed an exten-

sive knowledge of the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring. His

research most likely inspired the idea of exploiting

the boys already ensnared by the ring for blackmail

purposes if he did not instigate the sordid operation

himself. The blackmail operation began while Loyal-

ist opposition to the interests of the British State

was at its height in the 1970s. The information in

Wright’s ﬁles also provided potent ammunition for

destabilisation purposes. In his books Wright

blithely described how MI5 used prostitutes and

engaged in sexual blackmail, albeit he did not go as

far as to acknowledge that children had been

exploited in these operations. He did, however,

withhold his darkest secrets from publication and

threatened to release them if MI5 did anything unto-

ward against him during his marathon battle in

Australia to get his ﬁrst book,

Spycatcher

, pub-

lished. Wright, more than most, knew full well that

the British State was capable of murdering him.

Clint Massey on the right, a brave man and

former resident at Kincora Boys Home. He

died from cancer earlier this year after a life

of misery, isolation and ill health. He never

saw justice. Also in the picture, Richard Kerr

and Gary Hoy, two other courageous Kincora

campaigners.

Arlene Foster, Leader of the DUP; and

Theresa may

According to David Cameron

there would be no inquiry

into the Pat Finucane murder

because ‘there are people all

around this place, [10 Downing

Street], who won’t let it happen’

An audit must have been

conducted by MI5 and the

Cabinet Ofﬁce to ascertain what

leverage the British Government

might exercise over the DUP

after Brexit

6 4

July-August 2018

Emphatically, many of these secrets concerned MI5

wrongdoing in Ireland. “I spent a lot of time in Ire-

land”, he has written, “and it was not pleasant. We

also did a lot of things there which I am never going

to talk about, because it would just cause more trou-

ble”. See

Village

July 2017. Malcolm Turnbull, who

acted as Wright’s lawyer, might know about the

secret dossier. He is now Prime Minister of

Australia

A PACT WITH THE DEVIL

Peter Wright debriefed Blunt after he confessed in

1964 that he had worked for the KGB while serving

inside MI5. The debrieﬁng lasted seven years during

which Wright and his colleagues in MI5 poured over

the lives of the Oxbridge graduates of the 1930s, and

anyone else of possible interest known to Blunt,

many of whom, like him, were paedophiles. “Often

we drank, he gin and I Scotch; always we talked,

about the 1930s, about the KGB, about espionage

and friendship, love and betrayal. They remain for

me among the most vivid encounters of my life”,

Wright wrote in

Spycatcher

Wright also wrote about how “Blunt, too, loved to

discuss the scandalous side of Cambridge life in the

1930s… I soon realised that the Ring of Five [Cam-

bridge-educated spies and traitors] stood at the

centre of a series of other connecting rings, each

pledged to silence, each anxious to protect its

secrets from outsiders. There was the secret ring of

homosexuals, where loyalty to their kind overrode

all other obligations; there was the secret world of

the Apostles, where ties to fellow Apostles remained

strong throughout life; and then there was the ring

of those friends of Blunt and Burgess who were not

themselves spies, but who knew or guessed what

was going on. Each ring supported the others, and

made the task of identifying the inner core that much

more difﬁcult”.

In return for betraying some – but apparently not

all – of his friends, former left-wing comrades and

other miscellaneous associates, Blunt was not pros-

ecuted for his treachery, nor for his sexual activities,

all of which were concealed from public view until

1979 when Robin Bryans, an Irish writer and friend-

turned-enemy, outed him with the help of

Private

Eye

magazine.

‘MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL, HE

KNEW WHO WAS SLEEPING WITH

WHOM’

Wright personally interviewed and re-interviewed

more than 100 people over a period of seven years.

By his own admission, the most ‘important’ infor-

mation was about ‘who was sleeping with whom’ in

the Guy Burgess and Blunt circle. Both Blunt and

Burgess were paedophiles.

Spycatcher

Wright revealed that one of his

interviewees, Arthur Marshall, “knew practically

everyone in Cambridge in the 1930s, particularly the

secret network of homosexuals at King’s and Trin-

ity. Artie had a prodigious memory for gossip,

intrigue and scandal, and most importantly of all,

he knew who was sleeping with whom in the [Guy]

Burgess and Blunt circles”.

By the end of his investigation Wright could

boast: “I had seen into the secret heart of the pre-

sent Establishment at a time when they had been

young and careless. I knew their scandals and their

intrigues. I knew too much, and they knew it”.

MAPPING OUT A CONCEALED

LAYER OF BLUNT’S EXISTENCE

These inquiries must have enabled Wright to

uncover and map out a concealed layer of Blunt’s

existence: a paedophile netherworld that spanned

both sides of the Irish Sea. Blunt was a regular visi-

tor to Northern Ireland and a veteran member of the

Anglo-Irish Vice Ring. Two of his closest friends in

Ireland were paedophiles: Captain Peter Montgom-

ery and Knox Cunningham, MP.

Peter Montgomery was the Deputy Lord Lieuten-

ant of Tyrone, and a member of Ulster’s landed

aristocracy. His family owned an estate at Fivemile-

town, Co Tyrone. During WWII he served with British

military intelligence. His second cousin was

“Monty”, the famous WWII general. Peter Montgom-

ery became Blunt’s ﬁrst boyfriend and thereafter his

most enduring friend. Blunt always kept a room for

him at his London residence while Blunt often came

to Ireland to visit him at Fivemiletown. They also

enjoyed trips around Ireland to other paedophiles

on the “country house” circuit.

Sir Knox Cunningham was an Ulster Unionist MP

and QC. As an MP he had attended Cabinet meet-

ings in Downing Street as the private secretary to

British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

Somewhere along the line Blunt had become a

desensitised and callous abuser of young males

despite his lofty pretension to care for the working

class. He was particularly fond of ‘cottaging’ around

seedy toilets in London for urchins, and no doubt did

the same during his regular visits to Belfast.

All of MI5 ﬁles concerning Blunt and his associ-

ates should be handed over to the Independent

Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse.

A WORLD OF VIOLENCE AND

CRUELTY

The world Blunt was hurled into as a child was bar-

baric, even by the standards of that time. He

attended Marlborough College in the 1920s when it

was a brutal and sadistic institution. Blunt’s great

friend, the Irish poet Louis MacNeice, described in

his autobiography how the school bullies would

“seize a boy, tear his clothes off and cover him with

house paint. Then put him in a wastepaper bag ﬁlled

with rubbish and push him round the hall… The

masters considered this a ﬁne tradition”.

Another Old Malburian, Sir Peter Tennant, remem-

bered that “Marlborough was ridden with

homosexuality. I suppose all public schools are full

of buggery. Masters were deeply involved in it. I

won’t name names but as far as I can make out they

were practising homosexuals and did it with some

boys… I remember the headmaster, George Turner,

giving a speech, saying, we will have no more

INTERNATIONAL

Tom Watson and Jeremy Corbyn; Theresa May, the daughter of a vicar. While she professes to be a devout Christian she has in fact shown no real

interest in helping the victims of child abuse. Instead she has placed her faith in many of the darker elements which inhabit Whitehall.

Sir Anthony Blunt

July-August 2018

6 5

buggery”.

John Betjeman, a future poet laureate and British

cultural attaché to the British Embassy in Dublin

during the 1940s, was haunted throughout his adult

life by the memory of a child at the school peering

out through the slats of a large basket like a terriﬁed

animal as the bullies hoist him in the air.

Then there was “hot-potting”, where the Malbur-

ian bullies stripped the trousers off their victims and

made them wear two pottery tooth-mugs ﬁlled with

ﬂaming paper on their buttocks.

Another ritual, known as “bum shaving” was

administered by prefects. This involved stripping

two small boys naked and forcing them to bend over,

backsides touching as one of the prefect’s whips

came down between their buttocks. The trick

according to Blunt’s older brother Wilfred, was to

relax at the last minute and let the other boy take the

full brunt of the lash.

BLUNT’S DEPRAVED CIRCLE OF

IRISH FRIENDS

Blunt emerged from Marlborough homosexual and

went on to Cambridge. It was there that he

befriended Peter Montgomery. At Cambridge Blunt

also fell in with Guy Burgess, another future MI5 and

MI6 traitor, and an occasional visitor to Ireland. (See

Village

May 2017.) The pair frequently trawled gay

pubs and lavatories in London for working-class

boys. In 1938 Burgess was arrested and charged

with improperly soliciting a man in a public

lavatory.

One of Blunt’s biographers, Miranda Carter, has

provided a glimpse of the lifestyle of Blunt and

Montgomery. She described how “Hugh Massing-

berd, Peter Montgomery’s great-nephew,

remembered meeting Blunt, very much “off duty”,

with his uncle in 1965. “It was a very hot day, and

Blunt came in wearing virtually a G-string and a light

sleeveless T-shirt, and said, ‘Peter’s overdressed

and I’m underdressed. How do you do?’ It was a bit

stagey”. His uncle also once took him to a party at

Blunt’s old stomping ground, Palace Court. “There

seemed to be a lot of oriental youths around, and

Blunt and my uncle, one felt, had dropped their

guards. It was full of opera queens and an odd mix-

ture of seedy old faggots and oriental boys. It was

very much a gay party”. (384)

Montgomery was a key ﬁgure in the Anglo-Irish

Vice Ring and procured boys for its members from

Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh.

Lord Louis Mountbatten was one of those who

enjoyed sex with pupils from Portora during his

visits to Ireland.

Montgomery was also a friend of the British artist

Derek Hill who lived in Ireland. Bruce Arnold’s biog-

raphy of Hill provides a further glimpse of

Montgomery’s lifestyle. Arnold describes a visit

Montgomery made to a friend of Hill’s in Paris, a

man called Geoffrey Gilmour. “Geoffrey Gilmour’s

supposedly rather

louche

behaviour was not all fan-

tasy. A friend of Derek’s – Peter Montgomery, who

was gay – visited Geoffrey in Paris. He was taken to

visit Diana Mosley at Orsay and entertained well.

Geoffrey wanted to take Peter out clubbing in the

city. He made him strip to his underpants and unbur-

den himself of all possible valuables, including

watch, ring, everything. Only then was it safe to go

out and face gay club life in Paris. It seems it was not

a lot different from the same kind of entertainment

in New York and elsewhere”. (Arnold 293)

WAS BLUNT THE REFINED

ENGLISHMAN WHO CALLED

HIMSELF ‘ANDREW’?

Village

The Belfast Telegraph

and

Channel 4 News

have all reported extensively about the stolen life of

Richard Kerr, a victim of sexual abuse at Williamson

House and Kincora. See, for example, ‘Kincora Sur-

vivor’ in

Village

, November 2017; and ‘Suffer Little

Children’,

Village

May 2018. The

Channel 4 News

broadcast is available on YouTube.

In the summer of either 1973 or 1974, when Rich-

ard Kerr was 12 or 13 and a resident at Williamson

House, he was abused by a man who identiﬁed him-

self as “Andrew”. Kerr is adamant that the man was

Blunt. If he is correct, Blunt would have been about

65 or 66 years of age. The man Kerr recalls was

‘about 62 to 65’. Whether he was indeed Blunt or

someone who shared his distinctive appearance

and build, the fact that a young boy in care in Belfast

was supplied to an Englishman for sex is in itself a

scandal.

Kerr’s journey to meet ‘Andrew’ began at William-

son House where he was picked up by two men in a

car. En route, they stopped off at the Culloden Hotel

on the Bangor Road opposite what Kerr recalls as

the ‘Old Folk Museum’ which is clearly a reference

to the ‘Ulster Folk and Transport Museum’. The adult

front seat passenger went inside the Culloden, prob-

ably to make a telephone call and receive

instructions. After he came out, they proceed on to

Bangor and reached a hotel which Kerr recalls was

called the ‘King or Queen’s Arms, something like

that’. This was undoubtedly the Queen’s Court

Hotel. Kerr recalls the hotel was on the seafront; had

an old fashioned lift and a few ﬂoors, just as the

Queen’s Court had.

Signiﬁcantly, it also had a large function room at

its rear and was a popular venue for dance bands

and discos in the 1970s, a factor which, in addition

to its seafront location, made it ideal for a paedo-

phile group because it was perfectly normal for

young people to be on the premises and for adults

who were total strangers to book rooms at it for

short stays.

The Girton Lodge and Park Avenue hotels on the

Newtownards Road were also used by the ring

because young people were often present

unescorted.

Kerr was taken inside and left to wait for a while

in the lounge area. He got the feeling that a man pre-

sent in the lounge was involved in what was taking

place. A while later Kerr was brought upstairs by the

adult passenger from the car and introduced to the

man who would abuse him, a man who called

Queen Elizabeth and Sir Anthony Blunt

Axis of evil: Sir Michael Hanley and Peter Wright of MI5 who, together with Ian Cameron, gathered

intelligence about, and exploited, the paedophile network which preyed on children in care at

Williamson House, Kincora and elsewhere

Witchell, if he chooses to tell

the truth, will be able to provide

the Inquiry with details about

the trafﬁcking of Richard Kerr

to Enoch Powell MP, something

that is deﬁnitely within her remit

6 6

July-August 2018

himself ‘Andrew’. Kerr would spend about three

hours with him upstairs. ‘Andrew’ was tall, wore a

three-piece suit and came over as a ‘very unique

type of’ person; someone who ‘presented himself

very well and did a lot of talking’ in a reﬁned English

accent. Kerr was struck by his penchant for secrecy.

‘We can keep this to ourselves’ he urged. ‘I am a man

of my word. I will look after you’, he promised, in

return for the boy’s silence.

Kerr found him ‘polite’ and ‘a little more gentle’

than some of his other abusers. Kerr was, as he puts

it himself, ‘abused by sharks and dolphins and I

would rather be with the dolphins.’ ‘Andrew’ was not

violent with him as Enoch Powell MP had been.

‘Andrew’ had a grandfather watch and chain. ‘He

pulled it out and ﬂipped it open and entertained me

with it. He let me hold it’, Kerr recalls. He also gave

him a box of chocolates. ‘A lot of them gave me choc-

olates, Black Magic, Milk Tray and Quality Street.

How did they known I liked chocolates?’

Despite his pretence at kindness, the man was a

perﬁdious and calculating pervert with only one

agenda – to have sex with a child. Once he had put

him at a relative ease, the older man instructed Kerr

to get undressed and

started kissing his

ears. By now this

type of behaviour

had become ‘natural’

for the boy; he had

become, as he puts it

himself, “a boy toy”.

He focussed his mind

on the chocolates

while ‘Andrew’ con-

tinued to talk into his

ears softly; repeat-

edly whispering that he was “safe”. He soon made

his real intention clear: he wanted the boy to pene-

trate him and then give him a massage. Kerr did as

he was bid.

Later, in the car on the way home, one of the men

stressed the importance of not talking about the

man in the hotel. ‘Richie, you must not talk about

this to anyone’, he stressed. It was night by the time

Kerr arrived back at Williamson House after this

ordeal. He was abused on approximately two fur-

ther occasions by ‘Andrew’ who had obviously been

promised access to the boy by the men running the

ring and hence ‘Andrew’ had told him in Bangor that

he ‘would look after’ him. Kerr never stayed with him

overnight as he did with some of his other

abusers.

Kerr recalls another incident which took place in

a house with a ‘library’ with a driveway leading up

to it. On this occasion, ‘Andrew’ gave him alcohol,

either brandy or scotch.

One day Kerr was watching TV when Blunt came

on the screen and he recognised him immediately

as ‘Andrew’. This was undoubtedly the press inter-

view Blunt gave after he had been unmasked as a

traitor on 20 November 1979.

WHAT WAS THE EXTENT OF

BLUNT’S REHABILITATION WITH

MI5?

MI5 and the RUC Special Branch had a clear duty

and interest in maintaining an eye on Blunt’s move-

ments in Ireland for a number of reasons. First, he

was the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, a former

member of MI5, and, like his friend Captain Peter

Montgomery, the Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Tyrone,

a possible IRA assassination target.

Second, as a former Soviet agent, Peter Wright

and others in MI5 would have felt it imperative to

keep an eye on him lest he revert to his treacherous

old ways. At the time they were concerned that the

Soviet Union might be meddling in the affairs of

Northern Ireland.

Third, Blunt remained a potent font of knowledge.

Despite any lingering suspicion MI5 might have har-

boured about his repentance, by the early 1970s,

they would have been quizzing him intently about

what he knew about his political friends including

those in the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) such as

Knox Cunningham and his protégé James Moly-

neaux MP, who rose to become leader of the UUP.

Sufﬁce it to say, they would have had a particularly

keen interest in any of the paedophiles and peder-

asts in his circle who were now inﬂuential in Loyalist

circles.

Bearing the foregoing in mind, and assuming for

the moment that Blunt was indeed ‘Andrew’, it is dif-

ﬁcult to conceive how he could have gained access

to a child from Williamson House without MI5’s

knowledge. While it is possible that Peter Montgom-

ery could have arranged the assignations for him, it

is unlikely that Eric Witchell would have released

Kerr from the home on three occasions to him or

anyone else without permission from his handlers.

The odds are high that Blunt had wormed his way

so deeply back into MI5’s good books they were pre-

pared to let him enjoy this perk as a reward.

BLUNT SCHEMES AGAINST IAN

PAISLEY

Blunt was also active in

Northern Ireland politics. In

one of his books, the Irish

author and journalist, Robin

Bryans, described how

Blunt - whom he had known

extremely well - had once

tried to inveigle him into a

scheme to undermine Ian

Paisley. Unfortunately,

Bryans did not reveal the

details of this plot; in par-

ticular he failed to disclose

the date. Nonetheless, it is

abundantly clear that MI5

schemed and plotted against

Paisley during the early and mid-1970s by attempt-

ing to link him with a homosexual netherworld,

precisely the terrain about which Blunt was so famil-

iar. See

Village

December 2017. If the plot Bryans

wrote about falls into this timeframe, it raises the

possibility Blunt was a cog in it, a further indication

of his return to the MI5 fold.

If it was earlier, in the mid to late 1960s, before

Paisley became a target of MI5, the British spies

would have been keen to learn the minutiae of the

plot as part of its efforts to build up a picture of Pais-

ley’s life and associations. Ultimately, it recruited

William McGrath, the housefather at Kincora, who

knew about Paisley’s involvement in string of UVF

explosions in the late 1960s. See ‘Blackmailed’ in

INTERNATIONAL

Portora Royal College and Kincora

Blunt and Derek Hill

Richard

Kerr at the

approximate

age he was

abused by

“Andrew”

IF THE FULL TRUTH ABOUT THE

VENAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN IN

CARE IN NORTHERN IRELAND

IN THE 1970s WAS TO EMERGE,

IT WOULD THROW THE TORY-

DUP CONFIDENCE AND SUPPLY

ARRANGEMENT INTO TURMOIL.

THERESA MAY YET CLINGS

TO POWER WITH THE AID OF

THE DEMOCRATIC UNIONIST

PARTY (DUP), AT LEAST ONE OF

WHOSE MOST SENIOR MEMBERS

FREQUENTED THE SAME SEEDY

PADEOPHILE UNDERWORLD AS

BLUNT IN THE MID AND LATE

1970s.

July-August 2018

6 7

Village

December

2017.

Either way

Blunt would have

been of enor-

mous potential to

MI5 as a source in

the very early

1970s when they were desperate for information

about the men directing the Loyalist opposition to

London. A man like Blunt would have been invalu-

able to them because he would have helped to break

their dependency on the RUC Special Branch which

was loyal to the Stormont Government and, in their

eyes, neither reliable nor competent.

It has been common knowledge for decades that

Blunt cooperated with MI5 after it discovered his

treachery but the depth of that cooperation has

never been fully fathomed. If he gave them informa-

tion which they used to ensnare Loyalist

paedophiles, it would make sense of the strenuous

efforts that a string of senior ofﬁcials in Whitehall

exerted to dissuade Margaret Thatcher from naming

him as the traitor referred to obliquely in

Private Eye

The magazine had stopped just short of naming

him. One of their concerns must have been that he

would blow the whistle on their dirty trick opera-

tions in Ireland.

PART 2: THE HOTEL VICTIM

GROUP

THE TRANSFER OF 14-YEAR-OLD

BOYS FROM WILLIAMSON HOUSE

TO KINCORA

Ultimately whether Blunt was ‘Andrew’ and back in

the MI5 fold or not, it is crucial not to lose sight of the

real essence of this scandal: the existence of the

Anglo-Irish Vice Ring and its exploitation by MI5 and

MI6 to recruit Loyalists including DUP members.

The links between the key suppliers of children to

the ring such as Eric Witchell at Williamson House

and the trio of abusers at Kincora were strong. The

Kincora trio consisted of Joe Mains (an MI6 and later

MI5 agent); William McGrath (also an MI6 and MI5

agent); and Raymond Semple (who did what Mains

told him). All of them were visitors to Williamson

House. Mains sometimes stayed overnight.

In 1975 a group of 14-year olds under the care of

Witchell at Williamson House was transferred to

Kincora. Up to this point, Kincora had normally

housed 16 –18 year olds. Some, if not all, of the new

inﬂux from Williamson House had already been

crushed and remoulded to the point where they

were fearful and compliant sex drones; probably the

very reason for their transfer. They were now ear-

marked as bait for an MI5 ‘honey trap’ operation

based at a series of hotels in Belfast and at least one

in Bangor. Over time, some of the boys, especially

Richard Kerr,

would begin to

resist, but not at

this stage.

Most, but not

all, of the new

boys installed at

Kincora hailed

from Williamson

House. They

included Richard

Kerr who arrived

in August 1975;

‘F’, who is still

alive; ‘B’, who later shot himself, and ‘S’.

Steven Waring, who had not been in Williamson

House, joined a few months after Kerr. He commit-

ted suicide in 1977.

The reinvigorated Belfast and Bangor hotel

‘honey trap’ operation got under way in September

1975, a few weeks after Kerr’s arrival at Kincora.

Another young boy, ‘D’, would be consigned to

the hell of this existence the following year. He is still

alive. Collectively, these boys will be referred to as

the Hotel Victim Group.

Kerr, who has described what took place to

Vil-

lage

, was the ﬁrst of the Hotel Victim Group to arrive

at Kincora. On the surface, there was no logical

reason for the transfer of the new residents. Ian

Cameron and MI5, however, were the beneﬁciaries

of the new arrangement because it allowed them to

replenish their ongoing “honey trap” blackmail

operations in Belfast and Bangor with a fresh batch

of younger teenagers who were sexually compliant.

In addition, MI5 was in complete control of Kincora,

a detached house which was smaller and more

manageable from their perspective than Williamson

House which consisted of two buildings. Kincora

was also controlled by three men, all of whom were

paedophiles. Witchell – as a paedophile - was very

much on his own at Williamson House, at least at

that point in time. In a nutshell, MI5 could remove

the members of the Hotel Victim Group from Kincora

at will.

Members of the Hotel Victim Group were also

shipped to England and Scotland by Mains on the

orders of Joss Cardwell, an inﬂuential Loyalist politi-

cian. (See

Village

February 2018.)

OPERATION CLOCKWORK

ORANGE AND THE REFERENCE

TO THE “PROSTITUTION RING

SUPPLYING BOYS TO HOTELS IN

BELFAST AND BANGOR”.

The account Richard Kerr has provided about the

deﬁlement of boys – including himself - at hotels in

Belfast and Bangor is independently conﬁrmed by

contemporaneous British Army notes.

One of MI5’s darkest projects in Northern Ireland

was entitled Operation Clockwork Orange. It went

through a number of phases. It was primarily

designed to counter Loyalist anti-State activities. It

involved, inter alia, the collection of damaging infor-

mation about DUP and other Loyalist politicians as

well as paramilitaries.

Colin Wallace, a British Army PSYOPS ofﬁcer, was

asked by MI5 to assist Clockwork Orange. Towards

this end, he was provided with information which

he recorded in his notebook. Forensic examination

has proven that his notes are authentic. In Decem-

ber 1974 Wallace recorded the following: “Joseph

Mains may be extensively involved in a prostitution

ring supplying boys to hotels in Belfast and Bangor.

The hotels include: Girton Lodge, Park Avenue; Stor

mont; Europa and the Queen’s Court in Bangor.

[John] McKeague is said to use the Royal Avenue

Hotel for the same purposes. Bearing in mind that

the East Belfast UDA leadership use the Girton

Lodge and the Park Avenue for their meetings, it is

simply [not] credible that they did not know what is

going on there. Note: Mains has a brother in the

RUC. He also has a questionable relationship with

Belfast Corporation Welfare Chairman (Cardwell)

and Legal Adviser (Young)”.

In September 1975 Wallace wrote a letter to his

former boss at British Army HQ in Northern Ireland

which referred to “homosexual prostitution at a chil-

dren’s home in Belfast”. The relevant extract reads

as follows: “My concern now is that there may be an

attempt by the Ministry [of Defence] to deny any

form of ofﬁcial ‘dirty tricks’ organisation existed

within the Security Forces. For example, in the Min-

istry’s summary of my oral representations made [at

an employment tribunal] to John Groves and Mr Fair-

bairn on 10 May reference is made in paragraph 3 to

Robin Bryans

Richard Kerr

THERESA MAY’S NAIVETY AND

LACK OF CURIOSITY, FIRST AS

HOME SECRETARY AND NOW AS

PRIME MINISTER, HAS ENABLED

AN ON-GOING COVER-UP OF

THIS FAR-REACHING SCANDAL.

Blunt was not prosecuted

for his treachery, nor for his

paedophilia, all of which were

concealed from public view until

1979 when Robin Bryans, an

Irish writer and friend-turned-

enemy, outed him with the help

of Private Eye magazine’”.

6 8

July-August 2018

‘actions’ which I was asked to launch during the

[Ulster Workers Council anti-power-sharing] strike.

The word “actions” appears to have been used by

MOD to conceal the fact that I referred to the

attempts made by the Security Service [i.e. MI5] to

discredit various Loyalist politicians, including the

Rev Ian Paisley [of the DUP], by the use of forged

documents and by linking the MPs with loyalist par-

amilitary figures involved in homosexual

prostitution at a children’s home in Belfast”.

Wallace’s Clockwork Orange notes and his Sep-

tember 1975 letter were furnished to the Hart Inquiry

which clearly did not appreciate the signiﬁcance of

either. On their own – and at a minimum – they con-

ﬁrm that MI5 knew about the existence of a

paedophile network involving Joseph Mains and

John McKeague in Belfast and Bangor ﬁve years

before it was exposed in the

Irish Independent

, yet

did nothing to interfere with it.

TAKING THE WORD OF A

CONVICTED PAEDOPHILE AT FACE

VALUE

When Kerr’s social worker rang Kincora looking for

him while he was out of the home being deﬁled, Joe

Mains would brush her off by saying he had gone on

some sort of an outing. She was not fooled and

would eventually expose the scandal through the

Irish Independent

in the Republic of Ireland.

Others, beguiled by State lies, have not demon-

strated the same penetrating insight as Kerr’s social

worker. To cover his tracks, Joe Mains would enter

false destinations for the boys into the Kincora log-

book, or make no entry at all. While Kerr refused to

appear in person before the Hart Inquiry in 2016, it

examined a written account he had provided con-

cerning his trips to England. Hart ultimately decided

to {i} accept the veracity of the Kincora logs main-

tained by Joe Mains at face value and {ii} use them

to dismiss Kerr’s account of his trips to England and

{iii} dispute his credibility. Does it need to be

stressed that the organisers of paedophile rings

have never been known to {i} make accurate and

incriminating records of their crimes, {ii} preserve

them and {iii} ultimately furnish them to the police?

PART 3: THE NEXT GENERATION

OF VICTIMS

THE BLIGHTED LIFE OF A BOY

CALLED ‘CHARLES’

After the departure of Kerr and the others from Wil-

liamson House in 1975, Witchell found a set of new

victims to torment. ‘Charles’ (not his real name) was

a few years younger than Kerr. His ordeal began in

1975.

Last month

Village

outlined some of the activities

Witchell engaged in while at Williamson House.

Charles’ account adds further detail to our knowl-

edge of him. He recalls how Witchell presented

himself as “plausible”, and how he ‘hoodwinked

people into thinking that he was a man of God”; how

he “wore a cloak, portraying himself as a man of God

but was a paedophile”. Witchell, an Anglican Fran-

ciscan, should not have worn the habit of his Order

as it was a condition of his employment that he

would not.

Witchell’s horriﬁc abuse of Charles lasted ﬁve

years, only ending when he left Williamson House

at age the age of 18.

Charles had been abandoned by his parents at

Brefne Residential Nursery in Belfast as an infant.

He was transferred to Williamson House at the age

of 4 at the end of the 1960s.

Charles’ motive for talking to

Village

is to tell the

story of what happened at Williamson House on

behalf of the victims who took their own lives. Rich-

ard Kerr shares this identical motive, as does his

brother Alan Kerr, whose story will be told in the

next edition of

Village

BEFORE WITCHELL, SOME HAPPY

TIMES AT WILLIAMSON HOUSE

Unlike Richard Kerr, Charles has many happy mem-

ories of Williamson House. They all pre-date 1975.

For a start, the children were always well fed and

clothed, and the home boasted a full complement

of staff to mind the children. Charles remembers

games of tennis and football; playing in a recrea-

tion room which had a television; visits from

well-wishers. Christmases were memorable too

for all the right reasons: Charles and his friends

spent time with kindly families who welcomed

them into their homes over the festive season.

There was also a string of Christmas celebrations

around Belfast to which they were taken.

The children were integrated into the wider

community by being enrolled at various primary

and secondary schools nearby. Some of the Cath-

olic boys, for example, went to a Christian

Brothers school.

Charles recalls how the Catholic and Protestant

children got along perfectly well with each other.

‘The Catholics were like my family”, Charles, a

Protestant, recalls. Charles got to spend time

with two other families in the community who

treated him kindly. He went with one of them to

the Martyrs Memorial Church on Sundays where

Ian Paisley gave his sermons. Charles recalls

having chatted to Paisley, something that

occurred a few times as the family he accompa-

nied to Paisley’s church often turned up half an

hour before the sermons began, when Paisley

came out to mix with them.

Charles enjoyed Paisley’s captivating style of

preaching. “He was charismatic”, he recalls. Pais-

ley would quote scripture and make the

occasional reference to Catholics but, insofar as

INTERNATIONAL

The ‘Clockwork Orange’ notes with references to the use of hotels by Joseph Mains. This provides

corroboration of the evidence of Richard Kerr about the use of the Park Avenue and other hotels

as locations of abuse.

Brefne Residential Nursery

SIR ANTHONY BLUNT, BRITAIN

AND MI5’S ARCH TRAITOR,

WORMED HIS WAY BACK INTO

THE GOOD BOOKS OF BRITISH

INTELLIGENCE BY EFFECTIVELY

PROVIDING THEM WITH DETAILS

OF A PAEDOPHILE NETWORK

IN IRELAND OF WHICH HE

WAS A MEMBER AND WHICH

THEY LATER EXPLOITED

FOR BLACKMAIL AND

DESTABILISATION PURPOSES

JJuly-August 2018

6 9

Charles recalls, he didn’t really dwell on the issue.

“The implication was that the Catholics were

going to go to hell. He didn’t say so in so many

words” but that was what he meant. Charles, who

clearly had a mind of his own from a young age,

took no heed of Paisley’s bigotry and continued

to get on perfectly well with his Catholic “family”

at the home.

What Charles did not know was that Paisley

knew what was going on at Kincora from at least

1973 (see

Village

December 2017). Paisley – one

of the best informed men in Ireland about the

seedy underbelly of Loyalist politics and paramili-

tarism – must have learnt or at least suspected

that Kincora was not an isolated aberration and

that similar violations were being perpetrated at

other homes. Yet, while he occasionally visited

care homes and orphanages – including William-

son House – he never once lifting a ﬁnger to end

the suffering of a single victim at any of them.

KINCORA WAS WHERE

WITCHELL SAID HE SENT ‘BAD

BOYS’

Eric Witchell used the existence of Kincora to

intimidate and control the children he abused at

Williamson House. “He threatened us with Kin-

cora,’ Charles has explained. “If you are a bad

boy, you’ll end up in Kincora”, he would warn.

William McGrath, the Housefather at Kincora,

was a familiar face to the children at Williamson

House. Witchell introduced him to them as

“Master McGrath”, his idea of a joke as Master

McGrath was then a popular dog food.

He described McGrath as “his friend, someone

who worked in another home” but he did not tell

them it was Kincora. “They were often together

having cups of tea and biscuits. [McGrath] would

chat with Eric in a room”. He saw them together

“many, many times”. Richard Kerr conﬁrms what

Charles has to say about McGrath’s regular visits

to Williamson House.

Raymond Semple, the third abusive staff

member at Kincora, also visited Williamson

House. However, he may have been visiting a rela-

tive who worked there, a ‘lovely’ person who was

not involved in any abuse, according to Charles.

Mains, McGrath and Semple were all convicted

of child abuse in December 1981. How and when

did Witchell ﬁrst become acquainted with Mains

and McGrath and what did they discuss? Some of

their deliberations must have involved the selec-

tion of suitable candidates for the transfers from

Williamson House to Kincora. These are ques-

tions Witchell will have to answer if he is brought

before the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual

Abuse in London. Professor Alexis Jay, who is now

in charge of it,

can hardly be

expected to

understand the

full extent of the

sexual abuse

which took place

in England, Scot-

land and Wales

– much of which

was successfully

concealed by the

Special Branch

on orders from

MI5 – if she

chooses to

ignore the

research and evi-

dence available

about the modus operandi of MI5 in Ireland.

Unfortunately, she cannot rely upon the Hart

Report as an accurate account of what happened

in NI. At the very least, she should conduct inter-

views with the many witnesses - whether victims

or perpetrators - who did not contribute to the

Hart Inquiry, especially Eric Witchell.

Witchell, if he chooses to tell the truth, will be

able to provide details about the trafﬁcking of

Richard Kerr to Enoch Powell MP, something that

is deﬁnitely within her remit. See

Village

May

2018. Witchell should also be asked about what

he knows about Anthony Blunt, again some-

thing within Professor Jay’s remit.

Colin Wallace, whose life was derailed

because he tried to tell the truth about Kincora,

is another witness who should be interviewed.

In addition, MI5 should be required to furnish

Professor Jay with the list of the agents it

recruited inside the DUP. It should not be limited

to those who attained elected public ofﬁce.

Two pictures of Kerr in London. The Hart Inquiry refused to believe Kerr’s account of his visits to London, instead relying upon dishonest entries placed

in the Kincora log by Joe Mains, a convicted paedophile. The photo on the right was taken while Kerr was meant to be residing at Kincora in Belfast. Sir

Anthony Hart, author of the 2017 Hart Report.

Enoch Powell, MP and Ian Paisley, MP

Eric Witchell (left); Joe Mains, Warden of Kincora, and William McGrath, housefather at Kincora,

who were both regular visitors to Witchell at Williamson House

Professor Alexis Jay of

the Independent Inquiry

into Child Sex Abuse.

Will she call Eric Witchell

before her?

Colin Wallace, whose life was

derailed because he tried to

tell the truth about Kincora, is

another witness who should be

interviewed by Professor Jay’s

Inquiry. In addition, MI5 should

be required to furnish her with

the list of the agents it recruited

inside the DUP