A Question Of Fait

Vincent McKenna is making quite a name for himself. He is the fellow who runs Families Against Intimidation and Terror (FAIT) in Belfast.

He went to London recently to brief Conservative leader William Hague and his shadow home secretary before both men used McKenna's information in a Commons debate on punishment beatings. He advised them, he claims, not to name the suspected Omagh bombers because that would abort any prospects of a fair trial. Then he flew home and named the alleged bombers at the annual general meeting of Robert McCartney's UK Unionist Party (during which Conor Cruise O'Brien was conferred with life membership).

Mr McKenna doles out "information" at will to anyone who cares to listen. In a formal briefing to this columnist and a reporter from the News Of The World, he named several leading members of Sinn Féin, Derry who, he said, were having extra-marital affairs with the wives of leading rural Sinn Féin leaders. He gave chapter and verse, citing the absence of one prominent Sinn Féiner from public view as evidence of the man's emotional collapse after his wife's dalliance with a fellow negotiator at Stormont. It turned out that their man had merely come down with a severe flu.

The other stories were equal rubbish. One of them, about Mitchel McLaughlin, had actually been front-paged in the unionist News Letter, complete with denial of adultery by Mr McLaughlin. It is an old propaganda dirty trick—get a journalist to ask a man how often he beats his wife and publish his indignant denial.

Asked where on earth he had heard such tosh, McKenna said that his informant (whom he named) was a former member of the INLA in Derry who had been beaten up by the IRA (this much was true.) Asked where he had got sulphurous and equally inaccurate stories about financial corruption among prominent Sinn Féin members in Belfast—he named Gerry Adams and Joe Cahill among others—McKenna airily named another informant, a distraught woman whose son had been beaten severely by the IRA (this much, also, was true.)

McKenna works virtually alone from the FAIT office. His sole helper is a 20-year-old, unsalaried female on work experience. McKenna said he got no salary either, prompting an indignant assertion by the voluntary chairman of FAIT, Sam Cushnahan, that he most certainly did. Cushnahan was obliged to distance FAIT from McKenna after McKenna publicly named the alleged Omagh bombers, thereby almost certainly giving them a rock-solid defence in court, should they ever be brought to trial.

An example of McKenna's sloppy and dubious information gathering techniques is classically illustrated by the following case. He invited this reporter to check out an experience of "intimidation and mutilation", with the details of which he was, he guaranteed, intimately acquainted. The young son of a woman who had five other children had caught his finger in a shop door, said McKenna. The finger had been amputated, he said. The IRA had called to the woman's house and warned her against suing the shopkeeper, who was paying protection money to the IRA, he said. They told her to leave the area, he said.

The woman was astonished when contacted. She had made one phone call to FAIT, spoken to a young woman, had obtained the name of a solicitor and asked for help in rehousing. She never heard from FAIT again. She is now suing the shopkeeper for injuries to her son's finger (he got stitches in it and is undergoing physiotherapy). The 10-year-old boy was a member of a shoplifting gang and had been fleeing the shopkeeper at the time, she acknowledged candidly. Her older son is a joyrider. Her husband abandoned the family at Christmas, after the birth of her sixth child.

Members of Sinn Féin had called to her house to talk about the joyriding and in the course of telling her horrific family story to them, she had mentioned the long-distance prospect of a windfall should her case against the shopkeeper succeed. Sinn Féin counselled her against such flimsy hopes for the future and concentrated on the joyriding. She asked them to help her get rehoused in a different area, far from the bad company she blamed for her son's involvement in joyriding. She asked FAIT, also, to help her get rehoused. She asked this columnist for help. The woman understandably cries a lot.

Vincent McKenna, who has never met her or spoken to her, uses her as ammunition in his campaign against Sinn Féin. "There's no point talking about loyalists," he says. "They're just out and out criminals, up to their eyes in drugs and money-lending."

Last year McKenna published a survey which showed, he said, that the majority of nationalist residents along the Ormeau Road supported the right of Orangemen to march there, even though the marchers give a traditional five-fingered salute when they pass the Ormeau Road bookie's shop where five Catholics were assassinated. Queen's University Belfast, where he had a part-time job, distanced itself quickly from the survey. McKenna has a thing or two to say—all of it libellous—about the staff in Queen's.

David Trimble quotes FAIT statistics regularly and with approval. McKenna said, before he went to brief William Hague, that Tony Blair would cut off FAIT funding when it comes due for renewal in March because FAIT "will not allow the British government to cover up the IRA's breaches of the ceasefire." He made the prophecy self-fulfilling by afterwards naming the alleged Omagh bombers, an action which will almost certainly persuade Blair to get rid of the dangerously loose cannon on the legal deck.

McKenna, by the way, is as charming as he is self-deluding. Walter Mitty, they call him in West Belfast. He acknowledges freely that he is being questioned, south of the Border where he was born, about alleged child sex abuse. A Provo set-up, he says, and indeed, after the guards took him in for questioning, the Provos accused him in graffiti along the Ormeau Road of being a child sex abuser. Which begs the question: why are the Republicans so alarmed by this man?