Claudy Bombings Enquiry Verdict
Cardinal Conway's image took a battering on 24 August 2010 when a report by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland was released. In it, the Ombudsman, Al Hutchinson, revealed his conclusions following an eight year investigation into three terrorist bomb attacks in the small village of Claudy on 31 July 1972 in which nine innocent civilians, three of them children, died.
A local priest, Father James Chesney had been long rumoured to have been a leader of the IRA unit responsible for the murders. Hutchinson revealed that following the outrage, Father Chesney had been transferred by the Church across the border into Donegal in the Republic of Ireland, following discussions between Cardinal Conway, the then Primate of All Ireland and William Whitelaw who was then the British Government's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. This was with full knowledge of Sir Graham Shillington the Chief Constable of the Northern Ireland Police, the then Royal Ulster Constabulary, who "would have preferred that Chesney be transferred to Tipperary".
In other words, Whitelaw had colluded with these other parties to cover up the truth and protect Chesney from questioning and probable prosecution. Although the Ombudsman didn't say so, such action amounted to conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, a criminal and prisonable offence. Whitelaw, Conway, Shillington and Chesney have all since died without ever having to give account for themselves.
Cardinal Seán Brady denied that the wider Church was involved in a cover-up to protect a priest suspected of being involved in three IRA car bombings in Claudy in Derry in 1972, and he accepted the report's findings.
Read more about this topic: William Conway (bishop)
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