Six months ago, President Michael D Higgins, quietly and away from the cameras, hosted a reception in Áras an Uachtaráin for the families of those who were killed by the IRA during the Troubles.
“Those of you here with us today have suffered unimaginable loss,” Higgins told the families, highlighting “the inappropriate, insufficient language” that has been used over the years to describe the pain inflicted upon them.
Travelling south, Karen McAnerney, whose brother Terence McKeever was abducted, tortured and killed by the IRA in 1986, nearly backed out of the journey, fearing that it would “be another box-ticking exercise”.
“But then I thought, ‘I’ll go on,” she told The Irish Times. “I was pleasantly surprised at how well we were treated. It’s not like he’s a minister. He’s just like the king, he’s a figurehead, so he doesn’t have a lot of power, but he treated us with respect.”
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The organisation to which she belongs, the South East Fermanagh Foundation, has not always felt so welcome, or heard in Dublin, where often its call for the Irish State to face up to the ghosts of its own Troubles past have been ignored, or rejected.
Some of those questions, it believes, will be difficult to answer – of the State’s failure to stop IRA gunmen fleeing south of the Border after attacks, of failed Garda investigations, or missing evidence. The list of accusations is long.
“We don’t use the term ‘collusion’. We’ve never used the term collusion. We say collaborators. There were collaborators who signed off on two codes – the code of the Garda Síochána and the code of the Provisional IRA,” says Kenny Donaldson, who leads the South East Fermanagh Foundation.
The claims against the Garda are different from those that have been made against the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which featured in a number of cases where its officers were involved in sectarian killings.
“We know it was different. There aren’t cases where I feel that servants of the Irish State were actively involved in murder. Nevertheless, there were collaborative actions that went on,” says Donaldson.
Today, Donaldson represents families on both sides of the Border who lost loved ones to the IRA and other organisations, including Private Patrick Kelly killed in the Don Tidey kidnapping and Garda Richard Fallon, the first garda to die in the Troubles.
“I don’t know if I’d use the term sectarianism, but I do think that there is a political class in the Republic who have a very, very limited understanding of what happened in Northern Ireland,” he says.
“And they haven’t made it their business to try to understand. We’re not getting the phone rang, the email pinged or a door knocked by people wanting to come to understand. We’re having to fight to get people to listen,” he says.
Karen McAnerney’s brother Terence was kidnapped by the IRA as he drove north from his Ballsbridge, Dublin, home to the family’s engineering business in Co Armagh on June 16th, 1986. The business did work for Aer Rianta and the Irish Defence Forces and also the British army.
[ ‘The IRA called us collaborators’: a sister’s quest for justiceOpens in new window ]
McKeever had been threatened by the IRA and warned to stop working for the British army. “It was a time of recession, you had to go where the work was. We did work on both sides of the Border. It didn’t matter where we worked,” his sister says.
Believed to have been kidnapped south of the Border, McKeever’s body was found just metres inside Northern Ireland at Mullaghduff bridge, Cullyhanna, south Armagh, just 7km from Castleblaney, Co Monaghan.
For years, McAnerney has campaigned, unhappy about the Garda investigation into her brother’s death, and the absence of any investigation at all by the RUC, along with the disappearance of evidence from a Garda station.
“All the items had disappeared,” she told The Irish Times. “So then I was very angry and started to pursue it, saying, ‘This shouldn’t happen out of a Garda station that’s supposed to be protected and safe.’”
Ten years younger than her brother, he had become very protective of her in the months after the IRA threats against him. “He never shot anybody. He was brought up a gentleman. He supported the GAA, my father voted for the Unionist Party.
“We were brought up to respect people, I was told never to mow the lawn on a Sunday, to respect the churches around us. That’s how we were brought up,” McAnerney says.
The people who killed her brother “are put up on a pedestal and revered”, she says, far from convinced that the killers will ever be brought to justice.
Ian Sproule (23) returned to his family’s farm in Castlederg, Co Tyrone, shortly before 1am on April 13th, 1991, following a birthday party, getting out of the car to open the garage door.
Seconds later, two IRA gunmen opened fire, shooting 41 bullets into his car. Minutes later, a caller rang the farmhouse, taunting his father, Robert. “Have you seen the mess we’ve left you outside yet?” the caller said.
Soon, the IRA claimed that Sproule had been a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, basing the allegation upon a leaked Garda intelligence document – though no evidence to back this up has ever emerged, even after a later investigation.
The intelligence file was just two weeks old when it was passed into the hands of the IRA, later prompting a senior RUC officer to allege to the Smithwick tribunal that there had been collusion by a member of the Garda in his murder.
For years his brother John has campaigned: “I’ve met the Garda ombudsman. I’ve met Charlie Flanagan. I’ve met Simon Coveney. I’ve met Michéal Martin. I’ve met the next man down in the Garda. Nothing.
“In the Smithwick tribunal it was said with beyond doubt there was collusion in my brother’s murder,” says Sproule, angered that all of the attention is placed upon inquiries into allegations of British collusion.
“What’s wrong with my brother? Why can’t we even get truth and justice? That’s not there for us. It’s not there, nothing. It makes you mad when the Irish State demand that the British state do this, or do that, yet they don’t do anything themselves.”
His brother’s killing is not the only tragedy. His wife Margaret’s first husband, William Pollock, was murdered in 1986 when a booby-trap IRA bomb in a car trailer exploded just six months after the couple married.
“It happened about 300 yards from their house. His mother and father were in the car. He got out to hook on a trailer. When he lifted it, the bomb went off. The coffin just showed his head, it couldn’t show the rest. It blew off from the bottom down.”
Nearly 40 years on, his wife will not go out after dark on her own: “I have to be with her, she won’t go out herself. I wanted to buy a trailer, she wouldn’t let me buy it. After all these years she’s still traumatised.”
