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A member of the Ard-Chomhairle of the IRSP has rounded angrily on
Denis Bradley over comments he made to the BBC following the shooting
of an alleged teenage drug dealer in North Belfast on Friday. In his
comments to the BBC the former priest and political activist turned
Policing Board deputy had said: "The attack was animalistic. It won't
stop young people doing what young people do," he said. "All it does
is make the young person probably worse than what he or she was
before."
"That's cant, and, more than that it's rank hypocrisy coming as it does from Denis Bradley", the IRSP's Terry Harkin said. "Where was Denis in 2003 when the INLA and IRSP exposed the use of, what was then, a young boy as a paid agent of the PSNI? I reached out to Denis then on behalf of the Republican Socialist Movement and the boy's family, I phoned his office repeatedly, leaving detailed messages with his secretary, over a three week period to ask him to help this boy and all I got was one, very short message on my answer service." "If Denis and the other agencies that should have provided support to this young man and his family had acted when he was being abused by the state and not waited to pontificate when something detrimental happened to him, then we would have seen a much different outcome. It's not as if nobody knew about the case, Sky News ran a 15 minute segment every hour over a 24 hour period on him early last year, it's still available on the Internet. Countless column inches and at least three TV interviews have been done on this case in the last 12 months alone. So people knew, and Denis knew, what was going on with this young guy, why are they only crying foul now? And why did they not help him when they could?" "If Denis Bradley wants use his position as Number 2 on the Policing Board to comment on this case, would it not be more fitting for him to be asking the Police Ombudsman why no report has been published into the recruitment, employment, payment and exploitation of this boy as a state spy a year after the complaint was originally made?" STATEMENTS ENDS |