"Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA Volunteer and, rightly or wrongly, I take a course of action as a means to bringing about a situation in which I believe the people of my country will prosper . . . The course I take involves the use of physical force, but only if I achieve the situation where my people can genuinely prosper can my course of action be seen, by me, to have been justified . . . I cannot complain if I am hurt, if I am killed or if I am imprisoned. I must consider these things as possible and probable eventualities . . . I have no one to blame but myself".

Jean McConville was abducted from her home under the command of Gerry Adams by Sinn Fein/ IRA in front of her 10 screaming children. Jeans body was found in a shallow grave recently, she had four fingers chopped off, mant bones were broken from a vicious beating and she was then shot in the back of the head!

Of all the hideous and blood thirsty atrocities carried out by the blood-thirsty fiends of Sinn Fein IRA in the name of so called Irish Freedom, the murder of Mrs Jean McConville must rate as one of the most blood-curdling tales to emerge from over 30 years of terror.

 The execution of Jean McConville Beaten up and killed for one simple act of charity. You might imagine that she had suffered enough. She was 37 and her husband Arthur had died from cancer just 10 months earlier. Her eldest daughter was in Muckamore Abbey (a home for the mentally retarded), and her eldest son Robert, 17, was interned on the prison ship Maidstone, suspected of involvement with Sinn Fein IRA.

Jean McConville was 20 when she first met Arthur in Belfast. It was not a time of plenty, but it was a time of peace. He was Catholic, a British Army squaddie. She was a Protestant girl from working-class East Belfast. She changed her religion and began producing children. In early 1973, when the world first heard about Jean McConville, her daughter Anne was 19; Robert, the internee, was 17; Arthur was 16; Helen was 15; Agnes 13; Micky 11; Thomas 8; Suzanne 7; Billy and Jim, the twins, were six years old.

The Troubles came to Belfast in 1969. The family moved into a new home, a little house in St Jude's Walk part of the notorious Divis complex, overlooked by the appalling high-rise Divis Flats. You might think Jean McConville and her family had suffered enough. But Arthur was diagnosed with cancer and in the February of that year, 1972, he died. Robert was already in prison. Anne was in a home. Billy, one of the twins, lost a kidney and Helen broke her leg. Jean, trying to hold it all together, suffered a mental breakdown. But the fates weren't finished with Jean McConville. On just another brutal day in the Belfast of the Seventies, a single sniper's shot rang out from the Divis Flats, cutting down a young British soldier. As he lay bleeding on the pavement, Jean McConville came out of her house with a pillow, put it under his head and, as his life ebbed away, whispered a few prayers into the dying squaddie's ear. But others were whispering at the sight of such common decency.

 Their whispering soon leeched back to the brave men of `B' Company, Provisional Sinn Fein IRA, Belfast, a group of notorious serial killers living in the twisted reign of terror of 1972. Everybody had suffered enough. But not Jean McConville or so some people thought. They daubed `Brit Lover' in red paint on the front door of her home and then, on the bitterly cold night of December 6, things took a sinister turn. A woman lured her into a car, where she was pushed to the floor and taken to a house on the Glen Road. They held her for four hours and beat her, claiming she was an informer, but that was nonsense.

She was found by the Army, wandering barefoot and confused. It was freezing cold. The Army took her to the barracks in Albert Street and tried to make some sense out of what had happened. ``They came and asked me to collect her. When I got to the door of the barracks I could hear her screaming, but she insisted on coming back to look after us,'' recalls her daughter Helen. The following evening Jean McConville was still sore from her ordeal.

But some people are never satisfied. Certainly not the bitter men of `B' Company. Shortly after Helen left eight men and four women descended on the house. ``They dragged her from the bathroom. They said they were only taking her for a few hours. My elder brother Arthur followed them down to a waiting car. One of the men pulled a gun and put it to his head and told him to f**k off,'' says Helen. ``They had been wearing masks, but they took them off outside. Arthur knew who some of them were, but he has never said who and he never will, or the same might happen to him.'' For years after that, Helen would pass one of the women almost every day, but their gazes never met.

The kids waited for their mother to come home and Helen took charge of the household. They were afraid to report her missing to the RUC, so Christmas 1972 came and went. Their granny, Mary McConville, 68, came over from her house in Collingswood Walk to help out. They scraped together a few presents but it was a cold and lonely Christmas without a mother, abandoned by the community. What happened to Jean McConville? She was taken to a house in the Beechmount area of Belfast for what Sinn Fein IRA call "interrogation". The brave "freedom fighters" put a plastic bag over the head of the Roman Catholic mother of 14 and began to question her. She suffered terribly until the last breath was squeezed out of her sad life. Some time after Christmas, a man called to the McConvilles' house. He had their mother's purse, with just her three rings inside it. He told them that he knew nothing about her, that he had just been asked to return it.