CHILD SEX ABUSER STILL TRADES ON A REPUTATION BUILT ON LIES
Child sex abuser still trades on a reputation built on lies
BY DARACH MACDONALD
VINCENT McKenna knows the value of a good lie. Tell them often enough, big enough and some are sure to stick. In the past few weeks while the Court of Criminal Appeal in Dublin was considering its ruling on the appeal by the Director of Public Prosecutions against the leniency of his sentence for "depraved" sexual abuse of his daughter, the master of black propaganda was still trading on the reputation he built on lies as a former IRA terrorist turned human rights campaigner.
In an interview with a Sunday tabloid newspaper published on April 7, McKenna said he would use the appeal court hearing to expose "explosive new evidence about the Omagh bomb atrocity". The evidence, he insinuated, emerged from "working undercover for the security forces".
The gist was that McKenna says he met two dissident republicans in Dublin who asked him to "check out" the route of the car bomb to Omagh. He was to use his local knowledge of the Aughnacloy area to spot possible "dig-ins" by British soldiers along the bomb route. Omagh, he says, was chosen because it was then at the heart of Willie Thompson's constituency and dissident Republicans wanted to "split it down the middle" because Mr Thompson was prominent in the "No" camp against the Good Friday Agreement. He passed on this information to gardai, he claims, but the Dublin government ordered a "hand off" strategy because it wanted to do a deal with the emerging Real IRA.
Even a rudimentary knowledge of McKenna's past claims and stunts should have spiked that nonsense before it appeared in print. To the dismay of genuine human rights campaigners, McKenna still knows how to push the buttons and grab the headlines. His secret is that he always choses a perfect target for the journalists he contacts.
It is a ploy he has used before. As the net closed around him in the garda investigation of his serious sex abuse of his daughter, McKenna provided a front-page lead story for the Times in London with spurious figures about breaches of the IRA and Loyalist ceasefires. The liberal Guardian also ran a feature about the "campaign " to wreck his reputation as a brave critic of the IRA. In both, his credentials were as a "former IRA terrorist" from Co. Tyrone.
In the Guardian, McKenna hinted that he would go on the run rather than face a jury trial for his child sex abuse crimes. In typically dramatic fashion, he said his choices were to "stay and risk assassination, or quit, forced out by a republican smear" "I am f***ed by this," McKenna is quoted. "They are using my children as pawns to discredit me. The only thing that has saved me is my work. That's what keeps me alive."
Since coming to prominence in 1999 as a spokesman for the Belfast organisation Families Against Intimidation and Terror (FAIT), McKenna made persistent claims about IRA intimidation of Catholic youths throughout the North. Even as his allegations unravelled in subsequent coverage, he received international media attention.
Having caused a blaze of publicity over his allegations about masked and armed IRA members forcing four (initially five) Dungannon youths into exile, McKenna then championed the case of a Belfast youth whom he claimed had received a similar IRA threat.
However, John Paul Thompson, 19, of Ardoyne denied that he had been threatened by the IRA. "They could be just local residents for all I know," said the self-admitted joyrider. "They gave me a few kicks and that was that. I had a few cuts and bruises on my head, but it was being reported that I was critical and that I had been ordered out of the country. I don't know where that's coming from but it's not true."
McKenna said he was disappointed: "I was in direct contact with the boy's uncle and father and I spent most of the day arranging safe passage and accommodation for him in England. Unfortunately, it's not the first time that victims have had to retract their statements due to pressure and intimidation."
McKenna, for his part, has retracted nothing... even in the face of incontrovertible denials. Once, during a debate with Gerard Rice, the spokesman for the Lower Ormeau Residents' Coalition on BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback, McKenna said he had carried out research for Queen's University (the university denied all knowledge) showing Lower Ormeau residents were willing to have loyalist marches through their area. He claimed Rice had actually seen him interviewing residents.
Challenged later by a genuinely perplexed Rice, McKenna said, "When you're in a position of public prominence, you have to say these things."
From relative obscurity, Vincent McKenna sprang to prominence when the Good Friday Agreement was collapsing. Already a trenchant opponent of the new political arrangements (his bizarre views were posted on a far-left website couched in quasi-Marxist jargon) the Aughnacloy man became the darling of 'No' Unionists and British Tories. Hardly a day went by when some statement of the FAIT spokesman did not grab headlines.
In August, 1999, the Daily Mirror published a glowing profile of the "spokesman against terror" billing him as a reformed IRA member dedicated to weeding out paramilitaries. For two days, double-page spreads gave accounts of his cruel childhood in Aughnacloy and his exploits as an IRA activist: "I firebombed my way around Tyrone," he boasted.
It was all a product of McKenna's fertile imagination. His siblings, still living in the Aughnacloy, Ballygawley and Caledon districts denied his accounts.
"I think he must be gone clean off his head. None of this is true, not a word of it," a married sister, Patricia Gordon of Caledon insisted. "We were not abused or neglected, none of us... and especially not him. As a child he was an only boy for ten years and he was taken everywhere and denied nothing he ever wanted. He was spoiled rotten and now look how he's turned out.
"I hear tell that he's writing a book," said Gordon. "I can't even imagine what lies he will put in that about us all."
McKenna's accounts of "firebombing" also raised eyebrows. Around Augnhnacloy, some call him "Zip".That is an allusion to the firelighter he used with a can of petrol in an attempt to burn down the home of a neighbour family in Aughnacloy. The family escaped with their lives when the fire burned through the wires for the doorbell, setting it off and alerting them.
Other targets of his arson attacks included a chip show and a second-hand clothes shop in Aughnacloy.
Meanwhile, senior Republican figures and gardai were astounded at the effrontery of McKenna, who left Aughnacloy as a teenager and moved to Monaghan town where he worked in a local poultry factory-Former associates were initially flabbergasted by McKenna's new persona as a "Good Samaritan" who found safe homes in England for troublesome youngsters "forced into exile" by the IRA.
Before his conviction, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Body chairman was demanding possession of the Monaghan house that was home for his four eldest children and on which his former wife, Fiona McCleary, has been paying the mortgage alone for six years.
McKenna's allegations against Monaghan man Jim Lynagh, who was shot dead by SAS troops at Loughgall in 1988, were described as "vicious propaganda" by senior Republican figures who knew both men. McKenna said Lynagh was intent on carrying on a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" of Protestants in border areas. That is now repeated often as established fact. Colum Lynagh, brother of Jim and a former Republican prisoner, denies that McKenna even knew Jim.
TV McKenna trades on his "IRA pedigree" and few references to his conviction for child sex abuse omit that tag. He was arrested in Aughnacloy for his arson offences in 1981 on a charge of "endangering life". He was remanded to Crumlin Road Jail in Belfast.
Another remand prisoner there at the time was Owen Smith, now Sinn Fein chairman of Monaghan UDC.
"He tried to ingratiate himself with the Republican prisoners, but we knew even than that he was a wrong one," Smith recalled. "Then he got bail and was gone. Nobody was getting bail then because it was right in the middle of the hunger strikes. But he got it."
McKenna jumped bail and fled across the border. Then in 1983- when there was a national furore over the extradition of maverick INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey - McKenna made his boldest move so far to get noticed. Having notified a Sunday tabloid, he rode his motorbike to Aughnacloy and turned himself in at the checkpoint.
"The whole thing was such a set up," says Eilish McCabe of Aughnacloy, whose brother Aidan McAnespie was shot dead by British soldiers on his way to the Aghaloo GFC grounds. "In all of the years that checkpoint was there, he was the only arrest they made."
Released in 1985, McKenna returned to Monaghan where he worked in a mushroom plant, but soon ended up living in Armagh city where he claims he developed a serious drinking problem, consuming up to "six bottles of poteen" a day. Then, he says, he was rescued by a Protestant clergyman and converted to the Elim Pentecostal church and "born again". It was then he decided to dedicate himself to "exposing" the IRA.
In Armagh, he met his second wife Sandra with whom he later lived in East Belfast with their two children.
From then on then, McKenna lived on his reputation of an IRA man who reformed. His every move seemed calculated to undermine the Good Friday Agreement Former associates in FAIT blame him openly for wrecking that body. Documentary evidence also suggests that McKenna used FAIT to help other child sex abusers, pointing out that they "do not kill people".
In late 1999, the Aughnacloy man was front and centre for a standing ovation at the "Save the RUC rally in the Ulster Hall. He was the darling of leading anti-agreement unionists including Geoffrey Donaldson and David Burnisde who promoted him as a authority of impeccable credentials. Meanwhile, McKenna was folding the FAIT tent around him and setting up on his own. By setting up the Northern Ireland Human Rights Bureau, he caused widespread confusion that he was somehow connected to the Human Rights Commission set up under the Good Friday Agreement.
Ederney-born Fr Joe McVeigh of the Human Rights Centre in Belfast - a totally separate organisation which pre-dates the agreement said, "I have no doubt that this so called Human Rights Body was a contrived attempt to undermine the peace process. It exists solely to disparage Sinn Fein as a political party and to take the focus away from the RUC and British government abuse of human rights here."
In the Court of Criminal Appeal last week, McKenna's reputation as a "family man" was in tatters. His repuation still held as a "human rights campaigner". Judge Geoghegan, spokesman for the three judge bench, said there were mitigating reasons for the leniency shown by Judge Matthew Deery at the initial trial the widespread publicity (which McKenna generated himself) and the fact that he had championed victims of paramilitary violence as a reformed terrorist. Defending counsel Michael O'Higgins SC argued that his guilt was mitigated by his reformed zeal on behalf of victims of the IRA.
That sticks in the craw of those who knew the real McKenna. Even for those who still choose to believe what they want to believe, he has lost his shine.
BY DARACH MACDONALD
VINCENT McKenna knows the value of a good lie. Tell them often enough, big enough and some are sure to stick. In the past few weeks while the Court of Criminal Appeal in Dublin was considering its ruling on the appeal by the Director of Public Prosecutions against the leniency of his sentence for "depraved" sexual abuse of his daughter, the master of black propaganda was still trading on the reputation he built on lies as a former IRA terrorist turned human rights campaigner.
In an interview with a Sunday tabloid newspaper published on April 7, McKenna said he would use the appeal court hearing to expose "explosive new evidence about the Omagh bomb atrocity". The evidence, he insinuated, emerged from "working undercover for the security forces".
The gist was that McKenna says he met two dissident republicans in Dublin who asked him to "check out" the route of the car bomb to Omagh. He was to use his local knowledge of the Aughnacloy area to spot possible "dig-ins" by British soldiers along the bomb route. Omagh, he says, was chosen because it was then at the heart of Willie Thompson's constituency and dissident Republicans wanted to "split it down the middle" because Mr Thompson was prominent in the "No" camp against the Good Friday Agreement. He passed on this information to gardai, he claims, but the Dublin government ordered a "hand off" strategy because it wanted to do a deal with the emerging Real IRA.
Even a rudimentary knowledge of McKenna's past claims and stunts should have spiked that nonsense before it appeared in print. To the dismay of genuine human rights campaigners, McKenna still knows how to push the buttons and grab the headlines. His secret is that he always choses a perfect target for the journalists he contacts.
It is a ploy he has used before. As the net closed around him in the garda investigation of his serious sex abuse of his daughter, McKenna provided a front-page lead story for the Times in London with spurious figures about breaches of the IRA and Loyalist ceasefires. The liberal Guardian also ran a feature about the "campaign " to wreck his reputation as a brave critic of the IRA. In both, his credentials were as a "former IRA terrorist" from Co. Tyrone.
In the Guardian, McKenna hinted that he would go on the run rather than face a jury trial for his child sex abuse crimes. In typically dramatic fashion, he said his choices were to "stay and risk assassination, or quit, forced out by a republican smear" "I am f***ed by this," McKenna is quoted. "They are using my children as pawns to discredit me. The only thing that has saved me is my work. That's what keeps me alive."
Since coming to prominence in 1999 as a spokesman for the Belfast organisation Families Against Intimidation and Terror (FAIT), McKenna made persistent claims about IRA intimidation of Catholic youths throughout the North. Even as his allegations unravelled in subsequent coverage, he received international media attention.
Having caused a blaze of publicity over his allegations about masked and armed IRA members forcing four (initially five) Dungannon youths into exile, McKenna then championed the case of a Belfast youth whom he claimed had received a similar IRA threat.
However, John Paul Thompson, 19, of Ardoyne denied that he had been threatened by the IRA. "They could be just local residents for all I know," said the self-admitted joyrider. "They gave me a few kicks and that was that. I had a few cuts and bruises on my head, but it was being reported that I was critical and that I had been ordered out of the country. I don't know where that's coming from but it's not true."
McKenna said he was disappointed: "I was in direct contact with the boy's uncle and father and I spent most of the day arranging safe passage and accommodation for him in England. Unfortunately, it's not the first time that victims have had to retract their statements due to pressure and intimidation."
McKenna, for his part, has retracted nothing... even in the face of incontrovertible denials. Once, during a debate with Gerard Rice, the spokesman for the Lower Ormeau Residents' Coalition on BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback, McKenna said he had carried out research for Queen's University (the university denied all knowledge) showing Lower Ormeau residents were willing to have loyalist marches through their area. He claimed Rice had actually seen him interviewing residents.
Challenged later by a genuinely perplexed Rice, McKenna said, "When you're in a position of public prominence, you have to say these things."
From relative obscurity, Vincent McKenna sprang to prominence when the Good Friday Agreement was collapsing. Already a trenchant opponent of the new political arrangements (his bizarre views were posted on a far-left website couched in quasi-Marxist jargon) the Aughnacloy man became the darling of 'No' Unionists and British Tories. Hardly a day went by when some statement of the FAIT spokesman did not grab headlines.
In August, 1999, the Daily Mirror published a glowing profile of the "spokesman against terror" billing him as a reformed IRA member dedicated to weeding out paramilitaries. For two days, double-page spreads gave accounts of his cruel childhood in Aughnacloy and his exploits as an IRA activist: "I firebombed my way around Tyrone," he boasted.
It was all a product of McKenna's fertile imagination. His siblings, still living in the Aughnacloy, Ballygawley and Caledon districts denied his accounts.
"I think he must be gone clean off his head. None of this is true, not a word of it," a married sister, Patricia Gordon of Caledon insisted. "We were not abused or neglected, none of us... and especially not him. As a child he was an only boy for ten years and he was taken everywhere and denied nothing he ever wanted. He was spoiled rotten and now look how he's turned out.
"I hear tell that he's writing a book," said Gordon. "I can't even imagine what lies he will put in that about us all."
McKenna's accounts of "firebombing" also raised eyebrows. Around Augnhnacloy, some call him "Zip".That is an allusion to the firelighter he used with a can of petrol in an attempt to burn down the home of a neighbour family in Aughnacloy. The family escaped with their lives when the fire burned through the wires for the doorbell, setting it off and alerting them.
Other targets of his arson attacks included a chip show and a second-hand clothes shop in Aughnacloy.
Meanwhile, senior Republican figures and gardai were astounded at the effrontery of McKenna, who left Aughnacloy as a teenager and moved to Monaghan town where he worked in a local poultry factory-Former associates were initially flabbergasted by McKenna's new persona as a "Good Samaritan" who found safe homes in England for troublesome youngsters "forced into exile" by the IRA.
Before his conviction, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Body chairman was demanding possession of the Monaghan house that was home for his four eldest children and on which his former wife, Fiona McCleary, has been paying the mortgage alone for six years.
McKenna's allegations against Monaghan man Jim Lynagh, who was shot dead by SAS troops at Loughgall in 1988, were described as "vicious propaganda" by senior Republican figures who knew both men. McKenna said Lynagh was intent on carrying on a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" of Protestants in border areas. That is now repeated often as established fact. Colum Lynagh, brother of Jim and a former Republican prisoner, denies that McKenna even knew Jim.
TV McKenna trades on his "IRA pedigree" and few references to his conviction for child sex abuse omit that tag. He was arrested in Aughnacloy for his arson offences in 1981 on a charge of "endangering life". He was remanded to Crumlin Road Jail in Belfast.
Another remand prisoner there at the time was Owen Smith, now Sinn Fein chairman of Monaghan UDC.
"He tried to ingratiate himself with the Republican prisoners, but we knew even than that he was a wrong one," Smith recalled. "Then he got bail and was gone. Nobody was getting bail then because it was right in the middle of the hunger strikes. But he got it."
McKenna jumped bail and fled across the border. Then in 1983- when there was a national furore over the extradition of maverick INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey - McKenna made his boldest move so far to get noticed. Having notified a Sunday tabloid, he rode his motorbike to Aughnacloy and turned himself in at the checkpoint.
"The whole thing was such a set up," says Eilish McCabe of Aughnacloy, whose brother Aidan McAnespie was shot dead by British soldiers on his way to the Aghaloo GFC grounds. "In all of the years that checkpoint was there, he was the only arrest they made."
Released in 1985, McKenna returned to Monaghan where he worked in a mushroom plant, but soon ended up living in Armagh city where he claims he developed a serious drinking problem, consuming up to "six bottles of poteen" a day. Then, he says, he was rescued by a Protestant clergyman and converted to the Elim Pentecostal church and "born again". It was then he decided to dedicate himself to "exposing" the IRA.
In Armagh, he met his second wife Sandra with whom he later lived in East Belfast with their two children.
From then on then, McKenna lived on his reputation of an IRA man who reformed. His every move seemed calculated to undermine the Good Friday Agreement Former associates in FAIT blame him openly for wrecking that body. Documentary evidence also suggests that McKenna used FAIT to help other child sex abusers, pointing out that they "do not kill people".
In late 1999, the Aughnacloy man was front and centre for a standing ovation at the "Save the RUC rally in the Ulster Hall. He was the darling of leading anti-agreement unionists including Geoffrey Donaldson and David Burnisde who promoted him as a authority of impeccable credentials. Meanwhile, McKenna was folding the FAIT tent around him and setting up on his own. By setting up the Northern Ireland Human Rights Bureau, he caused widespread confusion that he was somehow connected to the Human Rights Commission set up under the Good Friday Agreement.
Ederney-born Fr Joe McVeigh of the Human Rights Centre in Belfast - a totally separate organisation which pre-dates the agreement said, "I have no doubt that this so called Human Rights Body was a contrived attempt to undermine the peace process. It exists solely to disparage Sinn Fein as a political party and to take the focus away from the RUC and British government abuse of human rights here."
In the Court of Criminal Appeal last week, McKenna's reputation as a "family man" was in tatters. His repuation still held as a "human rights campaigner". Judge Geoghegan, spokesman for the three judge bench, said there were mitigating reasons for the leniency shown by Judge Matthew Deery at the initial trial the widespread publicity (which McKenna generated himself) and the fact that he had championed victims of paramilitary violence as a reformed terrorist. Defending counsel Michael O'Higgins SC argued that his guilt was mitigated by his reformed zeal on behalf of victims of the IRA.
That sticks in the craw of those who knew the real McKenna. Even for those who still choose to believe what they want to believe, he has lost his shine.
Further Information
Publisher: ULSTER HERALD
Ref: UH/1018
Published Date: 16-May-02
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