Lord Mountbatten
The BBC has just secured a prestigious Bafta (British Academy Film and Television Arts) award for Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure made by Alleycats of Derry and directed by Des Henderson. The series dwells on the culture of the Caribbean and also its history of slave sugar production.
What the BBC is not telling anyone is that the political commissars at its Northern Ireland division sabotaged an Alleycats documentary film four years ago – one that struck closer in time and to home at the heart of the British establishment.
In 2020, the corporation commissioned The Lost Boys: Belfast’s Missing Children, also from Alleycats. It examined the abduction and murder of a group of working-class schoolboys in Belfast in the late 1960s and early ’70s. With one exception, their bodies were ‘disappeared’, never to be found. Unlike Capt Robert Nairac, a British army undercover operative, and other ‘disappeared’, no one was bothered about the boys.
Alleycats committed the sin of unearthing fresh evidence that the abductions were linked to the paedophile gang that swirled around Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast.
The Kincora scandal remains one with multiple open wounds, including the collection by MI5 of kompromat about leading unionist politicians such as James Molyneaux MP, leader of the dominant Unionist Party, 1979-1995, and the blackmail of loyalists who were involved in collusive murder with the state.
The BBC broadcast a number of trailers for The Lost Boys – which was scheduled for transmission on Sunday May 9, 2021, at 10.30 pm – before it was pulled. BBC NI relied on an unprecedented Orwellian justification for this act: the new evidence contradicted the official narrative. The state sponsored ‘truth’ was instead to be found in the 2017 Hart Report. Judge Hart had not implicated MI5 and the RUC in the scandal, and his findings were now elevated to the last word on the affair.
The fact that Hart’s lamentable report contained a litany of mistakes, defamed an array of citizens and even managed to contradict itself over facts had no bearing on the thought police at the BBC.
Judge Hart’s trumped-up fabrications were only marginally less egregious than those produced by Sir George Terry of the Sussex police. It was Terry who laid the foundation stone for the Kincora cover-up back in 1982, when he determined that the RUC had not uncovered the scandal for over a decade because the victims were “homosexuals”, who were themselves responsible for the cover-up.
Terry wrote: “In homosexual offences, however, the victim is usually embarrassed and frequently feels some personal guilt or shame. As a consequence victims of homosexual acts are considerably less likely to make a formal complaint and even less inclined to tell others what had occurred.”
In The Lost Boys, Alleycats implicated Alan Campbell in the disappearance of the children. Campbell was the chief suspect of the RUC in the brutal murder of 10-year-old Brian McDermott on September 2, 1973. Part of McDermott’s dismembered and burned body was found in a sack in the River Lagan.
The film was never shown by BBC NI but it opened the 2023 Irish Film Institute Documentary Festival in Dublin in September 2023 to widespread acclaim.
After its release, it emerged that Joseph Mains, the warden of Kincora, had once threatened Richard Kerr, a victim of the gang, that he would be cut up with a rotating saw in a shed at the back of Kincora if he complained about the abuse he was suffering. Mains added that this was where the boy with “the red hair” (ie McDermott) had been dismembered.
Lord Mountbatten is also implicated in the scandal. An Garda Síochána has refused to release the visitor logs to his castle in Sligo, which would confirm – or refute – visits in 1977 by Mains with Kerr and a boy called Stephen Warren. The excuse is as Kafkaesque as anything conjured up by BBC censors – gardaí claim that the logs are part of an open inquiry into the murder of Mountbatten in 1979. Yet, the trafficking of the boys took place two years earlier.
Despite the impressive win at the Baftas, it is unlikely the hidden forces who really control the BBC will ever allow it to broadcast The Lost Boys.
