The secret royal pardons for IRA terrorists

IRA terrorists were among hundreds of people in Northern Ireland to receive royal pardons signed by the Queen, MPs were told yesterday.

Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers revealed that the royal prerogative of mercy was exercised in the province at least 365 times between 1979 and 2002.

The true total will be much higher, since the Northern Ireland Office claims records for the ten-year period between 1987 and 1997 have gone missing.

Critics now say there appears to have been a ‘cover-up’ over the use of amnesties, issued by the Queen on the advice of ministers. The bulk of the cases – 347 – from the period 1979 to 1986 are non-terrorism related and predate the peace process.

A number are thought to have been handed to loyalist and republican ‘super-grasses’ who gave key evidence at court cases during the Troubles.

However, it is believed that around 10 per cent of the earlier pardons – and the majority of those issued under Tony Blair’s government between 1997 and 2002 – did relate to terror offences.

In this period, royal pardons were granted to escaped IRA terrorists as part of the Northern Ireland peace deal. Among those to benefit were Angelo Fusco, Paul Patrick Magee and Robert Campbell who were convicted for their part in the murder of SAS Captain Herbert Westmacott but were among a group who escaped from a north Belfast jail in June 1981.

Former Labour minister Kate Hoey, who uncovered the pardon figures via Parliamentary questions, suggested the Queen had been put in an ‘invidious’ position. ‘I want to know who all these people are. I think that the public will want to know,’ she said.

She asked why the pardons had apparently not been listed in official government journals, the Belfast Gazette or the London Gazette, as would normally be the case.

Miss Hoey also insisted that the Govern- ment must explain how a decade of records covering a key period, during which John Major’s administration was advancing the peace process, could have vanished.

‘There was clearly a cover-up. How can records not be found on something that the Queen has to sign off?’ she said.

Former Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay, an expert in Northern Irish politics, added: ‘It would be laughed at like a Carry On film were the scale of the incompetence and the gravity of the cover-up not so serious. Why were the records lost? Who “lost” them?’

The Northern Ireland Office said the figures related to decisions taken under previous governments and said no amnesties have been issued by the current administration.