William Matchett: Weir was a murdering, bigoted cop who fuels fake news of collusion

Beech complained of a murderous paedophile ring in government.

He portrayed himself a victim, and Scotland Yard believed him.

With allegations dating back decades, Beech seduced gullible bobbies with conspiracy nonsense implicating a prime minister, decorated military commanders and respected politicians.

Many were deceased.

For years Scotland Yard hung on his every word.

The media, close behind.

Beech wrapped lies around a few loose facts to villainise others.

When reality finally struck, lives and reputations had been ruined.

Now imagine hundreds of Carl Beeches whose claims are widely believed in Ireland.

Because this, in my opinion, is legacy.

By and large, the product of a pact between a prime minister who told the world that Iraq had WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) and links to al-Qaeda, when it had neither, and sectarian republican terrorists.

The Provisional movement executed civilians for talking to police, as official policy, and was incapable of telling the truth.
In 1998, murders mostly stopped but deceit went into overdrive with collusion.

Collusion cons people into believing horrible crimes were committed by cops and has evidence of such when, in reality, both are false.

Collusion is fake news.

Its message dominates and is damning of police, particularly the intelligence department.  

As with Beech, the narrative thrives on not asking: where is the evidence?

Detectives should not side with the accuser.

This healthy scepticism evaporated with Beech and with collusion.

Of the latter, this is not a straightforward case of police ineptitude but aggravated immeasurably by sectarian politics.

The problem here is that the Provos enjoyed plenty of sympathy in the Republic, including among anti-British elements in Dáil Eireann.

Extraditing some of Europe’s worst serial killers to face British justice was regularly frustrated in Irish courts by murder defined a political act.

Also, Dublin dodged its security duties on the border, probably the biggest factor that sustained the turmoil.

Dublin’s paternal instinct is to weigh in behind collusion, as anything else risks being labelled pro-British.
The net effect is to hide a heinous Provo past.

This suits republicans.

Despite the drawbacks, HMP Maze was full.

Inside, the leaders of vicious loyalist factions were among those who had been apprehended by the UK security forces and legal system.

Why was this not the same for Provo leaders in the Republic?

How come, after the peace deal loyalists vanished into political oblivion whilst the political rise of republicans was meteoric?

To promote collusion, former republican terrorists get a media platform, joined occasionally by former loyalist terrorists.

Given that they were all put in prison by cops, one would think this would be raised.

Not a bit.

The Carl Beech of legacy is ex-sergeant John Weir.

A bigot who sullied his police oath, Weir joined the UVF to murder innocent Catholics. The nastiest of a handful of bad cops caught by a crack team of detectives.

From his cell, Weir’s poisoned pen concocted a collusion fairy-tale for a constabulary he now loathed.

What Weir did was wrong.

Murder is murder and cannot be called by another name. He and a few like him were totally disowned by the police family.

They are not eulogised in ballads.

They are not regarded heroes or patriots.

No parks are named after them. They are wholly unrepresentative of a hard-pressed and heroic frontline.

A few fearless detectives with meagre resources, within months of being alerted to security forces working with loyalist terrorists (dubbed the Glenanne Gang many years later), gathered the evidence.

Appalled by men like Weir, they stopped them in their tracks.

I know three of the detectives, two Catholics and a Protestant.

Only one is still alive and he is seriously ill.

They went on to shape intelligence-led policing and to protect the people with great effect.

But their story, the real story, is choked by collusion fake news.

• William Matchett is author of Secret Victory: The Intelligence War that Beat the IRA and Adjunct Fellow at the Edward M Kennedy Institute for conflict prevention, Maynooth University, Ireland

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