Mairia Cahill
Gerry Adams with Joe Cahill
Martin Morris
Martin Morris – the former IRA man at the centre of the Mairia Cahill rape allegations – is also suspected of raping two other female members of the Cahill family, the Sunday World can reveal.
It is understood Morris managed to escape a police probe into the matter because the women, now in their late twenties and early thirties, declined to report the matter to authorities.
However, the Sunday World has been told the Gerry Adams and other senior members of the IRA and Sinn Fein were informed of the allegations at the same time as Mairia Cahill first pointed the finger at Morris more than 15 years ago.
It is understood all three women are grandnieces of the now deceased former IRA chief of staff Joe Cahill. Cahill was fully aware of the allegations before he died.
He did, however, tell one of the women: “If I had known, I would have told you to go to the RUC.”
Mairia and the other two women were all teenagers when they first made rape allegations against convicted IRA prisoner Morris in the late 1990s.
At the time, Morris held a senior post in the west Belfast office of the Community Restorative Justice (CRJ) organisation.
Following his release from prison, Marty Morris, as he was known, took on a new role as a member of the IRA’s so-called ‘Civil Administration Team’ in west Belfast.
He was responsible for dishing out IRA-style justice to people deemed guilty of anti-social behaviour.
Morris was to the fore in a number of highly-publicised ‘punishment attacks’ in the Ballymurphy and Turf Lodge areas of west Belfast.
In fact, so savage was the violence Morris dished out to suspected offenders, he earned himself the nickname ‘Blood-on-the-Boots’.
He remained in charge of a punishment squad right up until he was offered a paid position with the Community Restorative Justice organisation, a Government-funded group, strongly supported by Sinn Fein, prior to the party accepting the police as the primary service of law and order.
When rape allegations were first made against him, Morris was held under IRA house arrest at a number of locations in west Belfast, before being moved to a house in Ardoyne and then on to another in Glengormley.
The IRA’s decision to move quickly against Morris was an effort to placate members of the Cahill family, who were steeped in the republican tradition. It also served to limit any damage to Sinn Fein’s reputation in west Belfast.
Morris’s IRA comrades Padraic Wilson and Seamus Finucane were tasked with conducting inquiries into the allegations of rape from the three female members of the Cahill family.
However, the Sunday World can today confirm that while Morris was still under so-called ‘house arrest’ a CRJ wages cheque was delivered to him.
At the time, the Sunday World telephoned the CRJ office to inquire if they knew the whereabouts of its missing member. A spokesman told us: “He isn’t here and he is not expected back.”
The same spokesman later told us it was wrong that he had been employed there in the first place.
Prior to the devolution of justice and policing to the devolved Government at Stormont, Martin Morris’s name was mentioned in the highest echelons of power in Belfast, Dublin and London.
Senior members of the SDLP lobbied senior officials in both the British and Irish Governments to quiz the party about Morris’s whereabouts, who was by then hiding out in Donegal, prior to moving to England.
Four years ago, one of the Cahill women at the centre of the sex abuse allegations against Morris spoke to the Sunday World. She specifically asked us not to use her first name in order to protect the feelings of an elderly aunt.
Ms Cahill said she was still a teenager when Morris – who was nearly 40 years of age at the time – first attacked her.
The woman said she used to visit Morris’s house and sit up late drinking with him, while his wife slept upstairs.
It was in the front room of Morris’s house that she was attacked for the first time. She maintained that after that she was repeatedly raped by him, but was too afraid to speak out.
Once she plucked up the courage to speak out she was driven by IRA men Wilson and Finucane to an address in west Belfast, where she confronted Morris.
The two IRA men ordered her and another family member to attend a meeting where they were told it would be up to the Cahill family to sort it out.
And she also told us she met with Gerry Adams on a number of occasions to discuss the matter, but all of these meetings proved fruitless.
BBC’s Spotlight programme this week featured Joe Cahill’s grandniece Mairia, who accused Morris of repeatedly raping her. And she also accused Adams of being part of a republican plan to brush the matter under the carpet.
Although charges were brought against Morris, they were eventually dropped. And charges against Padraic Wilson and Seamus Finucane of forcing Mairia to attend a meeting organised by the IRA were also dropped.