Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

One of the most important developments of the past 20 years has been how our society has begun to face up to some of the most horrific issues in our past and the legacy which they have left in so many traumatised lives. The vile nature of child abuse repulses anyone with a basic sense of decency. It is not a once-off crime; it carries on in the form of victims who feel isolated and betrayed; who face immense barriers in seeking justice; who continue to be abused every time the cycle of denial and disbelief repeats itself. There is only one way that we can help and support victims and that is to say loudly that we believe them and that we will stand with them to bring their abusers to account.

In the lead-up to this debate I have been subject to repeated attacks from the leaders of Sinn Féin. They have claimed that this debate is not about justice but rather that it is about opinion polls. I have been called a sleeveen engaged in a “political diversion”.  Sinn Féin members old and new have engaged in the swarming abuse which shows itself whenever someone attacks the provisional movement or its icons. There is no need to respond to their attacks, but I wish to make a simple point.  Everything I have said before now and everything I will say in this speech has emerged because victims have come to me and asked me and my party to raise their cases. What is more, as new evidence emerges every day, it is becoming clearer that they are not only honest people but that they are brave beyond anything we could imagine. Meeting them has been a privilege and I am proud to stand with them against the vicious and cowardly provisional movement which put their abusers in positions of power and continues to protect them.

Last November I stated that there is evidence of significant abuse and cover-ups within the provisional movement. There is evidence of children being raped and the rapists being allowed go free. Rapists and abusers were sent to other communities in the Republic or to the UK so that they would be protected from prosecution and allowed to roam to find other innocent victims. There is evidence of active collusion within the movement to ensure that the rapists are not subject to justice. There is evidence of young lives destroyed, not just by the abuse or the abuser but by the intimidation of the movement and the active public denials of its political leaders. I stand by every one of those statements. In fact, the reality is even worse.

The evidence is overwhelming that within the communities which the Provisional IRA worked to dominate, the abuse of children was frequent and any action which was taken was designed to limit the publicity rather than to ensure justice. This was known at the top of both parts of the movement and there was active collusion. This not only continued after the ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement; it has continued to this day. There was widespread abuse and there is an ongoing cover-up. There must be a legally empowered independent inquiry. Nothing else is acceptable and nothing else will vindicate the basic human rights of victims. In every example where a culture of abuse has been exposed and the powerful held to account it has required a handful of individuals to be willing to risk everything by standing up in public.

Maíria Cahill is brave to an extent which puts to shame those who have sought to deny her justice and undermine her claims. As a 16 year old she was repeatedly raped in 1997 and 1998, a period which spans the negotiation, ratification and implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. This was not the distant 1970s when gunfights were happening on the streets. The Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin had, in public at least, already signed up to a permanent peace. Maíria’s abuser was the O/C of the Provisional IRA in Ballymurphy and was a member of their civil administration team which ran the vigilante justice programme. He was also a Sinn Féin-backed senior activist within the community restorative justice programme.  He was well known to senior Sinn Féin politicians and sat with them on local committees. Maíria Cahill was not given an option to report her abuse.  She was told that the Provisional IRA would conduct an inquiry, one which was initially kept secret from her parents. What followed was a grotesque parody of an investigation, something which even Sinn Féin now admits was a regular occurrence.

Maíria’s own words on what happened should be heard here:

I wanted to be a lawyer or a journalist. I could have done it too - if the IRA hadn't forced themselves into my life and turned my world upside down.

You see I know those IRA people will hear this. Do you think you "helped"? Really? You'll remember, I imagine the look of fright on my face as you told me you were "investigating" my abuse. You will have watched me turn white with shock.

And you will remember watching as the rapist told me for hours, to my face and in front of you, that I was a liar, and that he didn't do those things to me.

And one of you will remember driving me out of the flat that night and stopping the car sharply so I could be sick on to the road.

You will remember my dramatic weight loss, my panic, my fright about the fact that at some point you were going to tell him what you were forcing me to tell you. And you'll remember my parents' anger at you, when you informed them that you had been "questioning" their child for months.

You'll remember me having to pull out of university because you screwed my head over so much that something had to give.

And you'll remember putting him under house arrest when other victims came forward. Asking me to decide what you were going to do with him, so I would feel responsible. I'm glad I didn't play your sick game.

And you'll remember his "escape".

That's not help. That's an abuse of power over a traumatised young girl who should have been at university working hard to achieve her goal. I should have had everything to live for at that stage. You, and the man who abused me, collectively stripped that away from me.

Bit. By. Bit.

You had absolutely no right to involve yourselves in my life. And that, by any normal person's definition, is not help. It's torture.

After attempting to dismiss her as someone who was sick or had a political agenda, the leaders of Sinn Féin now claim that they believe her, but, of course, they actually continue to try to undermine her.How can they say they believe Maíria Cahill but dismiss what she has to say about Deputy Gerry Adam’s behaviour? They are saying that everything is true but the politically inconvenient bit. It is pathetic and I will return to this later.

It is a profoundly disturbing fact that Maíria’s case appears to be just one among many. As I said last November, I have been told of much more widespread abuse. In recent weeks I was contacted by another victim of abuse by the IRA and I met him last week. He told me a very harrowing tale of what happened to him and his brother. I have confirmed with him that all information he has given to me has also been provided to the Garda.

In 1992, as a teenager this man was raped by a member of the Provisional IRA who was using his family’s home as a safe house. The Provisional IRA member's use of the house was facilitated by a person who has been a Sinn Féin elected representative in Louth for over a decade. In response to the abuse, the young man fled his home. It was a decade later when his much younger brother told him that he too had been raped by the same man. After their father contacted the local Sinn Féin representative, Pearse McGeogh, in 2002 the Provisionals again commenced their sinister internal investigation procedures. The brothers were summonsed to a meeting involving the same man who was in charge of the internal investigation in the Maíria Cahill case and other investigations by IRA-Sinn Féin. This is a person who has held a senior position in Sinn Féin. Councillor McGeogh was also at this internal investigation meeting. There is corroboration from people other than the victims that this internal IRA investigation took place. Three days later, the Provisional IRA's designated "clean up" man said the abuser admitted what he had done to them and he also admitted abusing one other child in another house. The brothers were given three choices, namely, that the IRA would execute him; it would bring him to them to deal with him; or it would expel him. Obviously, the brothers wanted no hand, act or part in any murder. This rapist was exiled from the country, but there was no possibility allowed for him to be handed over to the legitimate forces of justice in our country. This was 2002, five years after the permanent ceasefire and in the jurisdiction of this State. The boys were offered the services of a Provisional movement-approved therapist. Due to the profound and ongoing impact that the rapes and the IRA inquiry had on the brothers, the case did not disappear as the local Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin representatives would have liked. Only in 2008 did their local Sinn Féin Deputy and councillor advise that the Garda should be informed. However, neither of these men nor any other person in the movement has given their support to the brothers. No one in the movement ever actually went to the Garda to inform it of the abuse or to corroborate the facts they know to be true.

These are not isolated cases; they are the tip of an iceberg. I understand that as many as 28 victims are now discussing how to have the truth of what happened to them acknowledged. Many more remain scared of the power and reach of a movement which retains iron discipline. As with abuse in other areas, it is also increasingly clear that there was enough information over the course of many years for this abuse to at least be acknowledged. For example, in 2000 there were reports of the abuse of girls by a Provisional IRA activist and efforts to cover this up. The director of Foyle Women’s Aid in Derry spoke nine years ago about how men involved in the Provisional IRA and community restorative justice, CRJ, had "cleaned-up" a gang-rape scene. Women’s Aid in Derry and Belfast were told at the same time that they would only have cases referred to them by the CRJ if a commitment was given not to tell the police. Even the international monitoring commission was concerned enough to comment on the CRJ’s behaviour in 2006. Of course, much, much more was known within the Provisional IRA and, as the conclusive evidence shows, within Sinn Féin.

There is no doubt that there was and remains a cover-up within the Provisional movement. At every stage the sole priority has been to protect the movement and, in doing so, to deny real justice to victims and refusing to end the culture of impunity within which the abuse grew. Last November, when I stated there were many cases of child abuse within the Provisional movement, a succession of Sinn Féin leaders emerged to attack me, both the old leadership and the "new faces". Deputy Pearse Doherty said it was "unfounded..untrue..disgraceful" and "new ground in terms of lowness". Deputy Mary Lou McDonald said it was "cynical" and causing distress. Deputy Gerry Adams said: "Micheál Martin is completely out of order. A new low."

In recent weeks both the leader and deputy leader of Sinn Féin have accepted that my allegation was right. Under the force of evidence, they have both admitted that abuse within communities controlled by the Provisional movement was systematically dealt with in the movement and kept away from the justice system. They have said that the movement handled these cases. Neither of them has said that they got this information since November, so they were clearly deliberately not telling the truth back then. They have, of course, advanced arguments to try and justify what happened while pretending not to justify it.

The basic point about the Provisional IRA-Sinn Féin cover-up of abuse is that it was not something accidental. It was not some unfortunate and unacknowledged secret; it was a standard operating procedure within the movement, directed from the top and enforced at every level. The discipline and public image of the movement came first, and non-co-operation with the justice system was an absolute principle. Deputy Adams is on the record as having supported this policy. He is also on the record, in his own words, as having participated in a 20 year cover-up of abuse. In January 1995, he told supporters in north Belfast there were counsellors who could deal with issues of child and drug abuse. He said: "The RUC are not acceptable and, indeed, are using these issues for their own militaristic ends." These chilling words are reflected in his own actions and is exactly what happened to the victims I have met.

4 o’clock

Every single person who has gone public with an allegation of abuse or murder against the Provisional movement in the years since has at some point been attacked as having a political agenda, being in the hands of the "securocrats" or been involved in criminal activity. There is no exception to this. Every single victim and family member who exposed it has been attacked or undermined.

Since Sinn Féin finally admitted the widespread nature of abuse within the movement to which it remains a full and loyal part, its members have continued to offer excuses for what happened. The most common is the idea that there was effectively nothing else that could be done because of the lack of public faith in policing. This is untrue on many levels. First of all, the principal reason people would not go to the police is because they knew that they and their families would be subject to immediate and brutal reprisals by the movement. Just like the Mafia, its so-called protection of an area was always based on excluding all other options and demanding obedience.

There is also the fact that its behaviour was the same south of the Border. An Garda Síochána is and always has been a legitimate, democratic, civic policing service, yet when Provisional IRA men abused children in Louth and elsewhere, the Garda was kept away and the cover-up was imposed. This behaviour continued past the ceasefires, past the Good Friday Agreement, past the establishment of the Northern Executive, and it has continued to this day.

Professor Liam Kennedy's report, They Shoot Children Don't They?, has revealed some of the scale of what was involved. Between 1990 and 2013, some 251 children were shot or beaten by the Provisionals. He stated that Sinn Féin centres acted as co-ordinating centres for human rights abuses against children. In addition, he showed that many of these measures happened in addition to police and judicial action - they were not a replacement for a community which supposedly refused to report anything. The Irish Newssums it up well in its editorial today by stating:

Anyone tempted to support this savagery needs to think about living in a society where armed gangs arrange to meet their chosen victim then shoot them in cold blood.

There can be no ambivalence about this issue.

What we are dealing with is pure barbarity which too often goes unpunished by the legitimate forces of law and order. That also needs to change.

Deputy Adams and the rest of the Sinn Féin leadership have repeatedly used the phrase "we call on anyone with information to come forward". This formula might fool some people but it is nothing but another cynical manoeuvre to pretend to do something while continuing to protect the movement. A party almost unique in Europe for the scale of its discipline has been using this line for seven years. However, no matter how often it calls on its members to come forward and help the police, no one ever does. Sinn Féin claims to have expelled 13 members for witnessing Robert McCartney's brutal murder. It also claims to want people to go to the police, yet why has Sinn Féin not given the evidence it used for expelling these people to the police?

Deputies Adams and McDonald have said that the Provisional IRA ran its own set of internal courts in order to keep abuse cases within the community. They clearly have good sources for this. Why have they not given any information to the Garda or the PSNI? The Sinn Féin Parliamentary Party has people in it who, unlike Deputy Adams, admit to their Provisional IRA past. If Deputies Adams and McDonald knew about the abuse and the cover-ups, surely they do? Why have they not been able to bring forward any information to help even a single victim?

Of course, Deputy Adams's apologists repeatedly say, and no doubt will say once again today, that he gave evidence against his brother in court. The effort to portray him as taking action to support his niece is an obscene distortion of what actually happened. To describe him as helpful to the case is testament to how low some people will go in protecting him.

The facts of the Áine Adams case have been established and admitted by Deputy Adams. He has admitted that he was told in 1987 about the abuse and that he believed it. His brother confessed to the abuse, yet it took 20 years and repeated efforts by the police before Deputy Adams gave any information. As was shown in the first trial, he said as little as possible as late as possible. He was, in the words of the counsel, mainly interested in saving his "political neck". In direct opposition to what Sinn Féin claims, nothing he said helped Liam Adams to be convicted because he was not a witness at the trial in which his brother was convicted.

Deputy Adams and his apologists continue to respond with fake outrage and claims of personal hurt. It may have worked once, but it has gone on too long and the evidence is too overwhelming. In 20 years he did nothing to help his abused niece except tell the social services that she had head lice and lived in a dirty house. He actively tried to talk her out of taking a case to the police. Even worse, he stood by as his brother moved between jobs in west Belfast and Louth where he, an admitted child abuser, worked with children.

Deputy Adams has offered various and contradictory accounts. He claimed he did not know where his brother was even though he was working in his constituency and he gave a warm dedication to him in his biography. His claim to have had Liam Adams removed from a job in west Belfast has been contradicted by the organisation which employed him.

Perhaps the most fundamental point is that Deputy Adams and his party appear to reject the core moral and legal obligation on any person who has any knowledge of child abuse - the obligation to immediately report this to the legal authorities. Deputy Adams reported nothing about an abuse case he knew about for 20 years until he was dragged into court. It was two years after the first contact with the PSNI before he admitted that his brother had confessed to him.

The Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin cover up has too many dimensions to go into them all today, but we should note the sheer number of times that figures acknowledged as Sinn Féin representatives have turned up in these cases. The most striking example of this is Pádraic Wilson, someone Deputy Adams continues to refer to as a "decent man". Pádraic Wilson was a leader of the Provisional IRA in the Maze. He was twice temporarily released to attend Provisional IRA conventions. When he was released under licence, Mr. Gerry Kelly, MLA, was at the gate to greet him and hail him as a movement hero. After his release, Pádraic Wilson assumed an active role in enforcing Provisional IRA justice and close to the Northern leadership of Sinn Féin. He is a consistent thread in many of the stories from the last decade and a half. He was involved in the investigation into the abuse of Maíria Cahill. He was involved in the investigation into the rape of brothers in Louth and other cases, yet Sinn Féin has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect Pádraic Wilson. When he was first arrested, Sinn Féin threatened to withdraw support for policing unless he was released. It held demonstrations on his behalf and stated without qualification that he had no case to answer. There is no doubt that within the Provisional republican movement there remain untouchables.

It is not possible to discuss this issue and ignore the colossal and ongoing hypocrisy of Sinn Féin. Deputy McDonald has in the past spoken in this Chamber attacking the failure to implement faster compulsory reporting of child abuse. The record is full of Sinn Féin Deputies demanding full disclosure and criminal charges for institutional abuse. As if she has no sense of irony, Ms Martina Anderson, MEP, on Monday made a public statement attacking the British Government's failure to prosecute illegal behaviour by British forces. She issued a statement demanding that the British be held to account. In September, Ms Caitríona Ruane, MLA, of Sinn Féin informed the Northern Assembly that there needed to be a strong independent legal inquiry of abuse in the Kincora Boys Home because of the involvement of security forces in covering it up. She also said that a normal inquiry into historical abuse was not enough because it could not compel the production of secret evidence.

This craven hypocrisy gets directly in the way of achieving justice on issues such as the Dublin and Monaghan bombings and the Bloody Sunday murders. Why should the British feel pressure when they hear demands from people who talk about accountability but never demonstrate it themselves - people who call for co-operation with the police but never help the police? It remains the fact that our Government is the only actor in the peace process that has been willing to be fully open and transparent about darker part of the recent violence. The Provisional IRA-Sinn Féin continues to believe that truth and accountability are things to be demanded from other people.

I feel I must also respond to Deputy Adams's effort last Friday to again claim that the Provisional IRA is indistinguishable from the organisation which secured our independence. Sinn Féin's campaign to falsify our history by claiming continuity from a genuine republican movement which secured sustained popular legitimacy shows its continued cynicism. If ever there was a movement which acted against the 1916 Proclamation's demand that republicans not dishonour their cause, it is the Provisional movement.

They have no right to call themselves republicans and it is time for people to stand up against their falsification of republican history.

The abuse of children by the Provisional IRA was widespread. There was a culture of covering it up which continues to this day. Anyone who played a part in the many negotiations of the peace process has stories of Sinn Féin issuing direct or implied threats of the process being in danger because of police action. As has been seen in the Padraic Wilson case, and in Deputy Adams’s own arrest, Sinn Féin has no problem threatening to withdraw consent from policing when it wants to. No matter how non-political a criminal action was, the Provisional IRA and its political representatives in Sinn Féin have demanded that they be viewed as political and an attack on the peace process.

In the case of the four people, including Padraic Wilson, charged in connection with Maíria Cahill’s case, there is, unfortunately, concern over the prosecution service’s behaviour. Concerns about the PPS need to be addressed. The PPS itself has concerns and has requested Sir Keir Starmer to review this case. We know from two other victims that they are concerned about how the case was handled by the service. The complete failure of the system to find and prosecute any of the abusers or those who covered the abuse up in the Provisional IRA’s own system is a gross indictment and raises many legitimate questions. This is why there must now be a strong, legally empowered commission of inquiry into abuse within the provisional republican movement. There is no other way of getting to the truth of what happened and, equally, there is no other way of helping the victims.

Martin McGuinness's proposal is nothing but a smokescreen. It would not have the power to compel evidence and it would be subject to political oversight.

When I proposed to Government the establishment of a commission of inquiry into institutional abuse, there were many who questioned whether it would help. No one says this now. The Ryan commission was part of a process which enabled survivors to begin healing by telling their stories. In some cases, where this was possible, abusers were exposed and charged.

The inspiring women of Goldenbridge fought for many years to be believed. I recall my meeting with Ms Christine Buckley well over a decade ago when I was Minister for Education. She told me how they had suffered in silence and then they suffered again as they had to struggle against a system which just wanted to move on. She looked me in the eye at the end of our first meeting and said, "Please tell me you believe me". It is the same with Maíria Cahill. That is basically what she wants. She wants people to say, "I believe you and I believe you were abused and you were raped". That is fundamentally all she has asked for and people could not do that in an unequivocal manner. In this context, we must do the same as we did in earlier cases.

There was significant and appalling abuse within the provisional republican movement. This abuse was covered up within the movement and continues to be covered up to this day. There are legitimate concerns about the handling of cases and this issue needs to be addressed. We all have to agree that people should not be helped to avoid responsibility in this type of barbaric behaviour. That is why we need an inquiry, North-South, independent and backed up by legislation; nothing else will do.

Let us stand with the victims.  Let us say we believe them. Let us support them in fighting against those who have tried to marginalise and dismiss them. Let us stand for justice and decency against the lies and the cover-ups.

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