SENIOR UNIONIST politicians have insisted the Catholic Church still has serious questions to answer over the Claudy bombing, while the Ulster Unionist Party leader Sir Reg Empey has described Cardinal Seán Brady’s response as “entirely inadequate”.Sir Reg said Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman Al Hutchinson’s report on the Claudy bombing, in which nine people were killed and more than 30 injured in three no-warning IRA car bombs, made for “depressing reading”.
The decision of the late northern secretary William Whitelaw and the late Catholic primate cardinal William Conway to apparently acquiesce to a senior RUC decision not to arrest or interview one of the chief suspects, Fr James Chesney, was wrong, he said.
“Questions remain, however, as to whether the RUC were acting independently or whether they were under political direction,” he added.
Cardinal Brady said the Claudy bombing of July 1972 was an “appalling crime” and it was “shocking” that a Catholic priest was one of the suspects. But he denied the church was involved in any form of cover-up and said the case should have been properly investigated and resolved during the lifetime of Fr Chesney, who died in 1980.
“If there was sufficient evidence to link him to criminal activity, he should have been questioned at the earliest opportunity like anybody else,” Cardinal Brady said.
Sir Reg expressed dissatisfaction with the primate’s response. “The statement made by Cardinal Brady is, unfortunately, entirely inadequate. In particular, the absence of an apology to the victims of Claudy falls very far short of what should be expected of church leaders in the exercise of their position of moral authority,” he said.
Sir Reg said republicans also must provide a full and honest account of the bombing. Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, who was a Provisional IRA leader in Derry city at the time, should apologise for the IRA’s actions at Claudy, he added.
East Derry DUP MP Gregory Campbell said he did not accept that information on the bombing only went as far as the late northern secretary Mr Whitelaw and said the then British prime minister Ted Heath must have known about the details of Claudy. He called for an apology from current prime minister David Cameron to the Claudy victims.
“Many questions surround this atrocity but most notable is the role of one Roman Catholic priest,” he added. “I hope Cardinal Brady can now release any documentation his church has on the events at the time and any discussions held with the then [British] government about James Chesney.”
Mr Campbell called on Mr McGuinness to disclose what information he may have about the bombing. Claudy survivors had not had a fraction of the investigative resources compared to those deployed on Bloody Sunday, he added.
“The report on the Claudy bomb is now concluded, but like the victims of atrocities such as Enniskillen, Omagh, Kingsmill, Darkley, Teebane and others, they are left with a bitter taste that the lives of their loved ones were secondary to those who died in the Bogside in January 1972,” he added.
The Bloody Sunday families expressed their sympathy to the Claudy families. “We think we know better than most what they have gone through and still go through. They, too, have waited a long, long time for the truth to begin to be acknowledged. We feel deeply for them and hope that they may begin to achieve a modicum of closure,” they said in a statement.
Mr McGuinness is on holidays abroad and was not available for comment yesterday. However, Sinn Féin Assembly member Francie Molloy said Claudy was wrong and should not have happened.
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