Abuse at children’s home may have been ‘orchestrated’ by police and MI5, inquiry is told

POLICE and MI5 may have actively “orchestrated and utilised” years of sexual abuse at a Belfast children’s home at the height of the Troubles in return for intelligence, a public inquiry has heard.

A review into historical abuse in Northern Ireland was told that the allegations involve the state not only fail- ing to act to stop the child abuse at the Kincora Boy’s Home but conniving in it as part of a deliberate strategy.

The inquiry, overseen by the retired High Court judge Sir Anthony Hart, is beginning to hear evidence relating to abuse at the notorious former home in east Belfast during the Seventies. Three senior care workers at Kincora were jailed in 1981 for abusing boys – one of whom, William McGrath, was believed to have been an MI5 agent.

It is alleged that the security services knew about the abuse but did nothing to stop it, instead using the information to blackmail and extract intelligence from the influential men, including senior politicians, who were the perpetrators.

Joseph Aiken, counsel to the longrunning inquiry, said: “If it is the case that the state, whether in the guise of the police, intelligence agencies or otherwise, did connive, collude, orches- trate, utilise, exploit or cover up sexual abuse at Kincora, then those facts should be laid bare.”

He added: “Although it is an established fact that children were abused by staff in Kincora, this inquiry in addition has to address, amongst others, a range of extraordinary allegations – not that the state failed to prevent abuse because of missed opportunities or ineffective systems of oversight and regulation, but that it, with deliberation and planning, cynically orchestrated and utilised the abuse of children it was supposed to care for in order to further its own ends.”