These three shootings, in which the police had killed six people in a small area of Ulster in just over one month, were to prompt a series of inquiries. They caused great alarm at the Northern Ireland Office and in Westminster. Someone serving in a key position at HQNI, Lisburn at the time remembers, ‘It came as a big shock to me as it did to any other citizen.’ However, his statement needs to be treated with some caution, as Army surveillance operatives of 14 Intelligence Company were believed to have been involved in the events leading up to the Grew/Carroll shootings.
The killings became known as the ‘shoot-to-kill’ cases, because of the belief in the nationalist community that there had been a police conspiracy to murder the suspects. Many nationalists could not see how it was possible to justify the shootings. McKerr’s widow, Eleanor, said at a press conference, ‘If they thought they were suspected terrorists, why didn’t they come to my home that night and lift Gervaise?’
The ‘shoot-to-kill’ affair was to become the greatest crisis of Jack Hermon’s nine-year tenure as Chief Constable, a running sore which over a space of years allowed republican propagandists to exploit the Catholic community’s darkest fears about the police. Matters were compounded when it emerged that the police had concocted cover stories to explain what had happened in each incident.
Journalists were told that the three IRA men had gone through a roadblock, injuring a member of the police and that the RUC had been there as part of a routine patrol. In the Grew and Carroll case it was also said that their car had run through a roadblock, again injuring a member of the police. None of this was true. While many soldiers and police do not regard the use of cover stories to the press as wrong, some would have objected to the fact that the officers had also been instructed to give the same versions to CID officers who were investigating the killings, as is routine after fatal incidents of this kind.
Following an internal RUC inquiry by Deputy Chief Constable Michael McAtamney, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) decided to bring murder charges against three policemen involved in the first shooting and against Constable Robinson for his role in the Grew/Carroll incident.
Chief Constable Hermon responded by attempting to block the murder charges. He said in a later television interview, ‘To prosecute these officers would be quite disastrous: a) because they would never be convicted of any crime and certainly not of murder, and b) that the resultant outcry from certain elements of the community could have damaged our sources of intelligence.’ Apparently he threatened to resign if the charges went ahead, something he did not in fact do.
When Constable Robinson was tried, early in 1984, he revealed that SB officers at Gough Barracks had told him to give a false version of events. He and other officers had also been asked to sign forms indicating they would comply with the Official Secrets Act, something they were already bound to do as police. The SB wanted to disguise the facts that they had been waiting for the car on the basis of informer intelligence, and that Constable Robinson had been accompanied by an SB inspector, as well as the actual circumstances of the shooting. These revelations prompted the DPP to suggest that there should be another inquiry into whether there had been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
The murder trial of the three officers involved in the first incident also brought to light false evidence. Lord Justice Gibson, the trial judge, found the men innocent. He criticized the DPP for even bringing the case, asking whether it had been considered what effect such a case would have on the morale and reputation of the police and armed forces generally. He commended the police for behaving with bravery and for ‘bringing the three deceased men to justice, in this case, the final court of justice’.
These remarks caused consternation in Northern Ireland. What did he mean by the phrase ‘final court of justice’? Was the judiciary endorsing the shooting of unarmed men in questionable circumstances? Lord Justice Gibson issued a statement a few days later saying that he had not meant to suggest any backing for a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy and that he believed the police had only the same right as other citizens to use reasonable force. But with his statements the judge had lit a slow-burning fuse, one that was to consume him and others in a conflagration of violence.
Following the acquittal of Constable Robinson an outside inquiry was announced into these events. On 24 May 1984 John Stalker, the Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, was named as its head. Some RUC officers regarded the bringing-in of an outsider as a deliberate slap in the face from Whitehall. If it was the government’s intention to punish the force by ordering an inquiry but to limit the damage to RUC morale by ensuring Stalker’s findings were predictable and anodyne, then this was a grave miscalculation.
From the outset there was tension between Hermon and Stalker. The Chief Constable was uncomfortable at the damage which might be caused to morale within the force, while Stalker suspected a widespread cover-up. Relations between them were prickly, and soon focused on what the scope of Stalker’s investigation was meant to be – his terms of reference.
According to the journalist Peter Taylor in his book, Stalker: The Search for the Truth, the Deputy Chief Constable’s primary task was, ‘to investigate the circumstances in which the three cover stories had been given to the CID’. He also had to investigate why surveillance teams following Grew and Carroll had been in the Republic, and to look in general terms at the practice of SB officers seeking to protect informers.
Stalker saw
