That the British government and its agencies in the Six Counties again stand accused of deliberately withholding and delaying disclosure in the cases of at least 20 murders carried out by unionist murder-gangs between 1988 and 1994 should come as no surprise to many. Speaking in response to the latest revelations about the Greysteel, Sean Graham and other unionist death squad murders, Breandán Mac Cionnaith said,
“The British state's involvement in Ireland has long been characterised by murders and deaths, by cover-ups, deceit, duplicity, dishonesty and by outright lies. The title of ‘Perfidious Albion’ was not proffered upon the British state without good reason.
Many families across the island of Ireland have spent decades in pursuit of the truth, repeatedly coming up against one barrier after another.
In only a few high-profile cases has Britain ever conceded proper public inquiries aimed at establishing the truth.
However, for the vast majority of many hundreds of families who lost loved ones at the hands of the British state and its agencies, their collective experience has been completely different.
For them, successive British governments have used every effort and every mechanism imaginable to hide and cloak what happened to the hundreds of people killed by the British state and by its ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ forces.
Whenever it has been challenged about the truth of the circumstances which led to hundreds of Irish citizens being murdered, the British state has responded with denial, concealment and cover-ups.
When faced with even the remotest chance of the truth being revealed, the British state and its agencies have invariably lied, deliberately lost and destroyed files, and deliberately lost and destroyed evidence.
Inquests have been, and still are, continually frustrated and repeatedly delayed.
That is the reality of what passes as a pretext for truth and justice under British rule in the Six Counties.
It is also the stark and bitter reality of the outworking of those policies which nationalist political parties in the Six Counties agreed with the British government more than a decade ago.”