Jean McConville's son recounts her death at the hands of the IRA

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• published: 02 May 2014
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AGED 11, Michael McConville watched his wailing mother dragged out of the family home by gunmen, his terrified siblings clinging to her legs as she was taken to her death. A week later they came for him. As a massive political controversy blows up in the UK over the alleged role of top Northern Ireland leader Gerry Adams in the IRA execution of Jean McConville, the woman's son has spoken out about that horrific night, its immediate aftermath — and the fact that he still sees his mother's killers walking the streets as free men today. In one of the most brutal incidents of the Ulster "Troubles" — a period in which the terrorist Irish Republican Army and Protestant paramilitaries killed almost 3500 people while the police and soldiers tried desperately to keep order — the widowed 37-year-old was abducted and executed for allegedly being an army informer. Her killers' claims, including that she used a walkie-talkie to report on the movements of IRA operatives, were found to be false by an official inquiry. Her remains were only found in 2003, 31 years after she was bundled, terrified and pleading, out of the family's Belfast high-rise to her doom.Some of the thugs who barged into the Divis flats unit were masked; others weren't, and a number were neighbours of Mrs McConville and her ten children, whose ages ranged from six to 17. Weeping with fear — she had been beaten up by the IRA the night before — she was dragged to the door, Michael McConville recounted. Unmasked IRA members calmed the sobbing youngsters by calling them each by their first names and asked one of his older brothers to come with their mother outside. Once at the stairwell, one IRA member stuck a gun to that boy's head and told him to "F*ck off". "We knew these people by name and they knew us by name," he told the BBC. "We held on to our mother and (were) crying and screaming and our mother was crying ... she was squealing as well because she probably knew that if she went outside what she was going to go through from the night before." She was wrong. It would be far worse. The children looked out the window and saw the gang putting their mother into a van, which drove off with one car in front and one behind. She was never seen again, until her remains were found above a beach — her skull shattered by a bullet.The traumatised children's horrors were far from over, however. Their father had died of cancer a year earlier so they were split up and placed in care. Michael was put in a children's home. "I knew then that my mother was dead," he said. And just days after the abduction of his mother, they made clear to Michael the repercussions of speaking out. "They brought to me to a house and tied me to a chair. They were beating me with sticks around my heads and my arms," he recalled. "They put a gun to my head and said they were going to shoot me. They fired a cap gun and stuck a penknife in my leg. "They said, if you tell anything about any of the IRA, we'll come back and we'll shoot you, or we'll shoot one of your family members." With chilling finality, a member of the IRA visited the children a few weeks after her death to drop off her purse and wedding ring. It is believed the fact she was a Protestant, who had married a Catholic and moved to a predominantly Catholic/Republican area, had fuelled suspicion against her. Despite the injustice, the killers were never brought to justice. To this day, Michael McConville said, he sees some of these IRA veterans walking down the street in Belfast. And to this day, he fears testifying against them.