“You see? I’m smiling,” said Susan Phoenix as she walked along College Green in Westminster at lunchtime on Tuesday. She hadn’t expected to feel that way.
Phoenix had just come from a meeting with UK defence ministers in Whitehall, along with other family members of the 29 victims of the 1994 Chinook helicopter disaster on the Mull of Kintyre.
The crash on a Scottish hillside killed 25 senior intelligence officials from the British army, MI5 and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), then the North’s police. Phoenix’s husband, Ian Phoenix, was among them. Four RAF crew also died.
The bereaved families of the Chinook Justice Campaign want answers. The crash has been shrouded in official secrecy – documents were ordered sealed for 100 years. Tuesday was, remarkably, the first time they were invited to meet UK ministers.
They had been apprehensive in the morning, worried about being stonewalled again. Afterwards, they ignored the December drizzle falling over Westminster, happy they felt listened to for the first time since 1994.
“After 31 years of not being listened to and of banging your head off a brick wall, that was actually refreshing,” said Niven Phoenix, the son of Susan and Tyrone man Ian, a detective superintendent in RUC special branch.
Des Conroy, who lost his father Desmond – an RUC detective chief superintendent – also emerged from the meeting with renewed optimism.
As the families gathered on College Green across from the Palace of Westminster, he said the meeting had been “100 per cent worthwhile”.
Hours earlier, Conroy, the Phoenix family and the others met at the same spot before walking to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), a towering bastion a few minutes away.
Des Conroy, whose father Desmond Conroy was a detective chief superintendent in the RUC and was killed in the 1994 crash on Mull of Kintyre. Photograph: Mark Paul/The Irish Times
Before they set off, Conroy had pondered the meaning of the word “hope”.
“It’s a great word – hope,” he said, as the noise of Westminster’s morning bustle filtered across the green. He agreed hope could be a dangerous word too.
“I hope they listen . . . I hope they do something . . . I hope they don’t hide behind the judicial review [that the families took against the decision not to hold a public inquiry].”
Conroy said his father Desmond was “larger than life”. He had five children – Des was the youngest at 21 when the crash happened. His father called his family the “magnificent seven”. After 1994, Des’s mother kept in contact with “the widows”.
Des was in a “bad place” for a few years after losing his father. “But we held ourselves together as a family and moved on,” he said.
Now, along with the other families, they want a judge-led full public inquiry. There were investigations in the past, but none dealt with the fact that the helicopter was known not to be airworthy.
Recalling her late husband Ian, Susan Phoenix said he was “an exciting man”. He “really considered himself an Irishman . . . he loved the people,” she said.
He was also considered a “loose cannon” in his job, in the best meaning of that phrase – a man who would never blithely just go with the flow.
“That’s why we are rocking the boat, because he would have done it for others,” said Susan Phoenix.
She had always tried to confront the reality of the crash. The family had lived in Islandmagee in Antrim, 32km over the water from the Mull. Two days after the crash, she got the RAF to fly her over the site.
“Just a blackened hill,” she said. “But I actually got comfort from seeing he died there, because we loved hillwalking together. We loved places like that.”
Alliance Party MP Sorcha Eastwood who is backing the Chinook campaign for a public inquiry. She accompanied them to the UK Ministry of Defence in London on Tuesday. Photograph: Mark Paul/The Irish Times
The three MoD ministers they met on Tuesday – Al Carns, Vernon Coaker and Louise Sandher-Jones – did not commit to a public inquiry. But the families said they asked “intelligent questions” and seemed genuinely interested.
Sorcha Eastwood, an Alliance Party MP who backs the campaign and was at the meeting, said Tuesday must be “the start of dialogue”.
Before this week, she said, the families had been treated in the “most shabby and underhand way”.
But then hope intervened.
