February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Mackin, released on Saturday without charge after being questioned about a 1983 murder case that he says he had never heard of, returned to New York on Monday with plenty of questions of his own about the incident.
Three unmarked cars forced Mackin’s vehicle to a halt, and armed men in boiler suits surrounded his car. Although he quickly realized that the men were officers from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Mackin said the experience was nonetheless terrifying for him and his family. Nor did the men offer any identification. He remembered thinking later that had this been a loyalist hit, the men would have opened fire immediately.
“One guy stuck his rifle through the car window right at me and said, ‘Get out, you murdering bastard,’ ” Mackin said on Tuesday, describing the experience by phone from his plumbing business in the Bronx.
“There were plenty of comments like that. The whole thing was done with maximum speed. They weren’t ordinary police officers; this was some sort of rapid response unit.”
Mackin was a member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party before he left Northern Ireland, though he denies having been a member of its military wing, the Irish National Liberation Army. Despite multiple arrests, imprisonment, beatings and police harassment, Mackin has never been charged with any crime in Northern Ireland. The Royal Ulster Constabulary, PSNI’s predecessor, said as Mackin’s long and uncertain wait for asylum was coming to an end in 1992 that there were no outstanding warrants for his arrest.
On Jan. 8, 1992, Federal immigration judge Annette Elstein granted political asylum to Mackin and his family on the ground that their return to Northern Ireland would expose them to danger.
Belfast may have seemed a safer place to visit in 2004, but the whole experience, Mackin said, underlined the need for effective community policing in Northern Ireland and the full and proper implementation of the Patten Report on policing in Northern Ireland that led to the creation of PSNI as a reformed force to replace the RUC.
Many of the junior ranks of the RUC when Mackin was still in Belfast “are now,” said Mackin, “high-ranking officers.” Therein lies the problem, he continued, his opinion of PSNI echoed by senior Sinn Fein members at the weekend, such as Pat Doherty, the party’s spokesperson on policing: for republicans, PSNI simply put new uniforms on old problems.
Mackin did not have time for such reflections on Friday. Bundled into a car with three police officers, he was driven away at high speed to the Antrim Serious Crimes Suite for questioning.
“They were throwing out stuff like, ‘Your friends in America and Sinn Fein can’t help you now,’ and all this,” Mackin said. “You’re in shock at this stage.”
Some children witnessed the arrest and told Mackin’s wife and sister. They called the police to ask what was going on.
“The police told them that they had no idea what they were talking about,” he said. “They were told that if I’d been abducted, then to file a missing person’s report, with the police.”
It wasn’t until a solicitor from Belfast law firm Madden and Finucane called the police that Mackin’s arrest was confirmed. By then, the news of Mackin’s arrest had reached New York and fellow Irish republicans started to act.
Mackin paid tribute to everyone who offered support, particularly Reps. Eliot Engel and Joseph Crowley, old friends of his, and noted that while his treatment during questioning — a series of questions about his activities in New York as an occasional fundraiser for Friends of Sinn Fein, and the 1983 murder of an RUC officer in County Tyrone — was significantly less menacing than he remembered in the 1980s, the officers’ tone softened even more when a U.S. consular officer from the consulate in Belfast contacted PSNI, then visited Mackin, asking that as a U.S. citizen he be afforded the same rights that he could expect in America.
“They were saying [about the 1983 murder] that, ‘We think we can connect you to this’; total nonsense, of course,” Mackin said. “But an ordinary guy wouldn’t have been treated the way I was.
“This was very frightening for the kids especially,” said Mackin, whose three children are too young to recall the bad old days in Belfast.
On Saturday afternoon, before a PSNI officer would have had to renew a holding order for Mackin for a further 12 hours, he was released.
What does he make of the incident? First of all, Mackin said, the recent publication of the Cory Report into collusion had laid further suspicion at the door of the police in the case of Pat Finucane, the lawyer murdered by loyalists in 1989. Finucane had been an expert witness for Mackin in a Bronx court only three months before his murder. The Cory report called for a full inquiry into Finucane’s murder, implicating the police.
A full-page Friends of Sinn Fein advertisement that appeared in March in the New York Times, in which the party outlined specific reasons for not participating in the Northern Irish police board, must have also caused upset in certain quarters, Mackin concluded.
The Mackins flew back to New York on Monday, as planned. At JFK, immigration officials questioned Mackin about his visit to Northern Ireland, and whom he had visited and associated with. Then the family was told they were free to go.