DID THE British state, by commission or omission, have a hand in the murder of Billy Wright, as his father still maintains? Not by deliberate commission or collusion, according to the findings yesterday of a public inquiry under retired Scottish appellate judge Lord MacLean. But institutional dysfunctionality in the Northern Ireland prison and security services, and individual omissions contributed, the report says, “to facilitate” the killing of Wright in 1997, “the result of negligence rather than intentional acts”.
Wright, founder of the viciously sectarian Portadown-based Loyalist Volunteer Force, and implicated in some 20 killings, was murdered two days after Christmas in the Maze Prison by three INLA members, also prisoners. His father has alleged that the killing could not have taken place without state collusion.
The state has a special duty of care to those in prison and the failings exposed by MacLean, and his two other panel members, even short of outright collusion, represent a serious indictment of both the prison and police services. As much was duly acknowledged by Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson in his statement and apology yesterday in the Commons. “His murder in a high security prison should never have happened. It was wrong and I am sincerely sorry that failings in the system facilitated his murder.” The report rightly recommends a thorough review of the prison service similar to the Patten overhaul of policing.
The 700-page report, at a cost of some £30 million since it was established in 2004, outlines a litany of failures: the destruction of files by both the prison service and police, the latter raising suspicions of deliberate malpractice; the failure of both to pass on knowledge of threats to Wright or to take proper account of them; the prison service failure to assess the risks of putting INLA and LVF prisoners in such close proximity or to classify two of the killers, Christopher McWilliams and John Kennaway, as high risk; and serious lapses in the prison supervision regime, of risk assessment procedures, and of management.
The report also acknowledges worrying gaps in its exploration of the circumstances of the killing, including the destruction of documents – the significance of which it says it cannot quantify – and its inability to interview key witnesses because they were unwell or, in the case of the Maze governor Martin Mogg, had died. The inquiry has also drawn an alarming blank on the smuggling of two guns into the UK’s most high security jail.