Orde to meet families of S. Armagh victims

The gang, which is also believed to be behind the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, was exposed last week in the BBC documentary, which claimed it had killed scores of Catholics with impunity in South Armagh and Tyrone.
Orde said he was prepared to meet with the victims’ representatives to discuss the allegations made in the documentary.
“I am happy to meet with the representatives of the Pat Finucane Center and a delegation of international human rights lawyers so that we can pursue a genuine and meaningful approach to dealing with the difficult issues of the past for all of the people who have been hurt,” Orde said.
Among the gang members named on BBC television were former RUC officers William McCaughey, Gary Armstrong, James Mitchell and Lawrence McClure, former UDR officer Robert McConnell and loyalist paramilitary Stuart Young.
The Reavey family, who lost three family members in a gun attack on their Whitecross home in 1976, have claimed the RUC never properly investigated the murders.
Eugene Reavey, who lost three brothers in the attack, said his family were innocent victims. “If we were guilty of anything, then it was to be members of the GAA — even the RUC has acknowledged this. The men who killed my brothers were given a free hand to do whatever they wanted to,” he said.
The attack on the Reavey household was followed 30 minutes later by a similar attack on the O’Dowd family in Ballydougan. Again three family members were gunned down. Noel O’Dowd, who lost two brothers and an uncle, said his family had never been given answers about what happened.
“The failure by the British and Irish governments to properly investigate the Dublin and Monaghan bombings ultimately cost the lives of our family members and those of many others in subsequent years,” he said. “We want answers about how deep the conspiracy went — to what level it was known. The so-called RUC investigation into our case was wound up in under six months. No one in the subsequent 28 years has done as much as lift the phone to us; the last contact we had with the RUC was in July 1976.”
An international delegation will join the Pat Finucane Center in its meeting with Orde. The team arrived in the North last week and will be quizzing Orde on not only on the Reavey and O’Dowd killings, but a series of other attacks believed to have been carried out by the gang. Among them, the bomb and gun attacks on Donnelly’s Bar ib Silverbridge, the Rock Bar in Granemore, the murder of two GAA supporters at Altnamackin, and a bomb attack on Kay’s Tavern in Dundalk.
The delegation members are Piers Pigou, a former investigator with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Susie Kemp, a barrister who was the Legal Director of the Centre for Human Rights Legal Rights Action in Guatemala, Steve Sawyer, a former prosecutor and legal counsel to the Centre for International Human Rights at North Western University in Chicago.
The delegation will be led by Professor Douglass Cassel, president of the board of directors of the Justice Studies Center of the Americas, and director for the Centre for Human Rights in Chicago.