New claims Mountbatten sexually abused children from notorious Belfast boys' home

The Journal

16-05-2025

A NEW BOOK claims that boys were taken from a notorious Belfast children's home to Lord Louis Mountbatten's home in Co Sligo, where he then sexually abused them.
'Kincora: Britain's Shame' alleges that MI5 and the British political establishment have attempted to cover up his involvement in a paedophile ring which operated out of Kincora Boys' Hostel in East Belfast in the 1970s.
The book was written by former BBC journalist Chris Moore, who has investigated Kincora for over 40 years.
Kincora opened on Belfast's Upper Newtownards Road, close to Stormont's Parliament Buildings, in May 1958. It closed in October 1980 following the exposure of sexual abuse there. The building was demolished in 2022.
According to the book, five people claim that they were sexually abused and raped by Mountbatten, who was a great-uncle to King Charles III.
Moore spoke to three of them, who alleged that they were taken to Classiebawn Castle, Mountbatten's home in Mullaghmore, in the summer of 1977, and were raped by him. Two of the boys lived in Kincora at the time.
One of the men said they were taken to Classiebawn by Joe Mains, a paedophile who was a warden at Kincora.
Speaking to
The Journal
, Moore said that Mains was the leader of the paedophile ring.
'Joe Mains took naked photographs of the boys in Kincora, so that he could show these boys to his clients, and they could order whichever boy they wanted,' he said.
'That's new evidence that's come from one of the survivors of Mountbatten's sexual abuse.'
The former Kincora Boys Home on Upper Newtownards Road in Belfast was demolished in 2022.
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Mains, along with two other senior staff at Kincora – Raymond Semple and William McGrath – were jailed in 1981 for abusing 11 boys there.
McGrath was the housemaster at Kincora and a prominent member of the Orange Order. He was also involved with Tara, an armed Loyalist paramilitary organisation.
In the book, Moore writes that police sources told him that McGrath was an agent informer for MI5 in the 1970s while employed at Kincora.
MI5 'obstructed investigations'
He said that George Caskey, an RUC detective who led inquiries into the boys' home in the 1980s, told him that MI5 'obstructed' his investigations and that to him, this represented 'criminal actions'.
Nothing was done about it. They got away with it.
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'I have used secret documents that disclose exactly how MI5 frustrated the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s,' Moore said.
'I've got emails and telex messages that they used at the time that show that MI5 did not want any of their officers to be questioned or to be summoned to a court.'
He said MI5 persuaded the British government not to have a full judicial inquiry, which resulted in a 'watered down' inquiry 'under an English judge, as MI5 demanded'.
Mountbatten was killed when the IRA detonated a bomb on his boat in Mullaghmore, Co Sligo in August 1979. His 14-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, and a local teenager who worked for him – Paul Maxwell – were also killed. Another member of his party – the Dowager Lady Brabourne – died the day after the attack.
During a visit to Ireland in 2015, then-Prince Charles visited the site of the attack in Mullaghmore. The killing was later dramatised for The Crown, the Netflix series about the British royal family, in 2020.
Arthur Smyth was 11 years old when he claims he was raped twice by Mountbatten in 1977. He told Moore that he had no idea who Mountbatten was until he saw on the news in 1979 that he had been killed.
'I went up to my bedroom. I started crying. I felt sick,' Smyth says in the book.
'That somebody in high stature like this could do such a thing, because we all think that a paedophile is a bloke that you don't know, that he's weird-looking or he doesn't look right, but he fooled everybody.
'He was a paedophile and people need to know him for what he was … not for what they're portraying him to be.'
In 2022, Smyth waived his right to anonymity to make the allegation against Mountbatten and
launched legal proceedings
against a number of institutions.
It came a month after the publication of a report by NI Police Ombudsman Marie Anderson, which found that complaints made about the failure of police to investigate allegations of sexual abuse in Kincora
were 'legitimate and justified'
.
Moore writes in the book that two separate investigations into Kincora in 1975 were blocked by MI5 and the then Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
'Those investigations should have been allowed to grow then… For five years after that, boys continued to be raped and sexually abused.'
He also writes that secret government files on Kincora have been locked away, some until 2065 and others until 2085.
He said that the British intelligence services 'need to reveal what they know'.
'What's in the files? What is it they're hiding? What do they want to hide? Did they know that boys were being sexually abused? Did they do nothing about it?'.
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