A veteran republican has revealed how the IRA in Derry were told to stop burying the bodies of executed informers in bogs.
Mickey Donnelly, a very senior republican in Derry in the 1970s and former close associate of Martin McGuinness, says the order came from senior Derry republican activists who were interned in Long Kesh.
As a result, Mr Donnelly says, a body had to be dug up from a bog. The bizarre incident came after father-of-seven Patrick Duffy, who the IRA accused of being an informer, was 'disappeared' in August 1973.
Mr Duffy, 37, from the Creggan, was abducted after visiting a pub in Buncrana, Co Donegal, to celebrate his wedding anniversary with his wife Margaret. He was murdered and secretly buried in an unmarked grave in a bog in Co Donegal.
His body was sprinkled with line to speed up his decomposition. Mr Donnelly claimed Mr Duffy's body was returned to his family only after a group of Derry internees smuggled a message out to Mr McGuinness from Long Kesh, expressing their disgust.
Mr McGuinness was OC of the Derry Brigade at the time and would have been the senior man for internees to contact about the disappearance.
Sixteen days after he went missing, Mr Duffy's body was left in a new coffin in a car abandoned on the Northern side of the Derry-Donegal border. His body was full of bog water and had been sprinkled with lime.
The stand by Derry republicans meant 'disappearing' never took hold there – even thought it was widely used by the Belfast IRA who had already disappeared five people, including widowed mother-of-10 Jean McConville.
Mr Donnelly said: "We were appalled at the attempt to secretly bury someone. In the IRA, being an informer carries the penalty of execution. That's the unfortunate reality.
"But it was another matter altogether to disappear a man. We told McGuinness we were socialist republicans, not fascists. We said every family had the right to bury their loved one with dignity and not allowing that was anathema to our principles."
