A veteran IRA figure charged in connection with the murder and secret burial of a Belfast widow in the bloodiest year of Northern Ireland’s Troubles has dementia, a court has been told.
Lawyers for Ivor Bell told Belfast crown court on Monday that their client would be unable to fully participate in his trial because he has been diagnosed with a vascular form of dementia.
Bell, 79, is accused of soliciting the killing of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 children, who was dragged away from her child at gunpoint, driven across the Irish border, shot dead and buried in secret on a Co Louth beach.
The west Belfast republican was arrested after he allegedly spoke about the McConville murder on the Belfast Project tapes. They are recorded testimonies for Boston College in the United States of IRA and Ulster Volunteer Force members over their roles in the armed paramilitary campaigns in the conflict.
The Provisional IRA accused McConville in the December of 1972 of working as an informer in the Divis Flats complex, an accusation both her family and a former police ombudsman Nuala O’Loan have rejected.
It was not until 1999 that the IRA admitted it had murdered the 37-year-old and buried her body in secret. McConville was the most famous of the “disappeared” victims the IRA killed and buried during the Troubles.
Her remains were found in 2003 when a man walking his dog on Shelling Hill beach in Co Louth stumbled across them.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has pursued the Boston College Belfast Project through the US courts, successfully winning the right to seize recordings that were not only allegedly related to the McConville case, but to other Troubles-related murders.
Historians and journalists have argued that the PSNI’s pursuit of the Boston College material will destroy any chance of an authentic truth-recovery process about what happened during the Troubles between 1969 and 1997.
In Belfast crown court on Monday, Bell’s lawyer said his client’s dementia meant he “wouldn’t be able to properly follow the course of proceedings”.
A lawyer for the crown told the judge, Mr Justice Treacy, that the prosecution would like to have Bell examined by a psychiatrist and have full access to his medical files.
Treacy adjourned the case until 16 December when legal teams will provide further information on how proceedings can continue in the trial.
