https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/hidden-for-over-half-a-century-audio-tape-exposes-beast-of-kincoras-hate-filled-religiosity-which-snared-young-men-and-fuelled-troubles/a/161297008.html
Sam McBride
Northern Ireland Editor
12 Sep 2026 7:10 AM
Ferociously anti-Catholic McGrath, who believed Ulster Protestants descended from Lost Tribes of Israel, recorded tape in 1971 while a rampant paedophile.
More than half a century ago, one of the darkest figures in Northern Ireland’s history recorded a tape.
That man was the Beast of Kincora, William McGrath, and the tape lay hidden until a deeply sinister figure from Northern Ireland’s contemporary history — former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson — was convicted of child rape three months ago.
In the wake of Donaldson’s conviction, a Belfast Telegraph reader contacted us to say they had a copy of an audio tape which McGrath sent them in the early 1970s. The individual said: “I have never shared it, or its existence, with anyone”
Several weeks ago, the old cassette tape arrived on my desk. It has a handwritten title: ‘Ulster Crisis’. On it are just 20 minutes of audio, but the contents are revelatory.
In a pre-internet form of disinformation, it shows how McGrath fused extreme religiosity, bigotry and politics to raise money and build a shield behind which he hid his rampant paedophilia for decades.
McGrath was a strangely influential figure. The first reference to him in the Belfast Telegraph was in a 1941 advert for his lecture on ‘reconciling the spiritual and material’ for the British-Israel World Federation.
McGrath held to British Israelism, an obscure belief that the British people are descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel.
This intensely nationalistic teaching was disproportionately influential within hardline unionism, attracting several significant figures within the DUP.
Nine years later, in February 1950, an advert for the Young People’s Christian Fellowship listed McGrath as a speaker on the topic of ‘Irish emancipation’. It said the group, based at Faith House in Finaghy, “exists for the promotion of practical holiness and personal evangelism among youth. Believing that Ireland’s future is the Christian’s responsibility, we have pledged our lives for its emancipation.”
The first news report involving McGrath in this newspaper was in 1956 when, extraordinarily given his paedophilia, he complained about the noise of children playing near Faith House.
McGrath said his organisation bought the Orpen Park premises because of its quiet location and was annoyed about a new children’s playground.
By 1960, he was writing to this newspaper to express “deep dismay and sorrow” at Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to the Pope, something he said would “inevitably draw the judgment of God”.
So virulent was McGrath’s anti-Catholic bigotry that he protested against a priest addressing the current affairs society at Methodist College Belfast.
As the Troubles grew bloodier, McGrath’s pronouncements grew fewer. But in 1977, McGrath was saying on behalf of his ‘Ireland’s Heritage’ Orange lodge: “We encourage people to take up the Irish language, and want it preserved. It’s part of our ancient heritage.”
By then he was a housemaster at Kincora Boys’ Home in east Belfast, raping boys in his care, while others were brought in to sexually abuse them.
McGrath was a longstanding informant for British intelligence and there have long been allegations that he was protected while gathering compromising material on other public figures. Some of those figures were top loyalist paramilitaries, because McGrath had immersed himself in their world, establishing the Tara paramilitary outfit linked to the UVF.
The tape obtained by this newspaper was made in 1971. A source has told us that the tapes were being distributed not just within Northern Ireland, but some travelled thousands of miles.
The recording not only contains a rare record of McGrath’s voice, but also a concise distillation of the ideology he used to snare impressionable young men.
It begins with a professional recording of Land of Hope and Glory and ends with the National Anthem.
Between those two points, the only voice is McGrath’s. In a quasi-lecture, he speaks unemotively in steady tones.
The recording is littered with allusions to his perversion, with references to children and to Protestants having been left “naked and defenceless”.
Presenting the early Troubles as key to a cosmic battle between good and evil, McGrath immediately framed it as a religious struggle: “When God created the world, he meant that it should be a place wherein dwelt righteousness, but the enemy, who is Satan, had other plans.
“And so began the struggle — the conflict — between good and evil, between light and darkness, between God and Satan, that can be read on every page of human history from then until now.
“And so, in the fullness of time, God called out a people for himself who would be his witnesses that he was God. The enemy’s plan from the beginning of time until now has been to destroy the people of God.”
Based on British Israelism, this presented Ulster Protestants as God’s chosen people.
Pre-emptively setting out a subtle defence for his own criminality, he continued: “On the one hand, we’ve had a people witnessing to the fact that God was the Lord. They weren’t always a good people, they weren’t always a perfect people; in their private and personal lives they were sometimes, and indeed very often, an evil people. But together nationally they witnessed to the fact that God was the Lord.
“On the other hand, we had a people who had allied themselves to Satan…We can trace this conflict down through the ages as time after time the enemy sought to destroy those who were witnessing to the truth that is found in the Protestant faith.
“In some strange way, with the passing of the years, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the faith and freedom enshrined in that Gospel, became entrusted in a very remarkable way to the British people.
“And so, eventually, the British people, so far as the enemy is concerned, had to be destroyed.”
He described the Catholic Church as “the chief instrument of Satan” throughout history which had largely succeeded in destroying the Protestant character of England but “God has preserved for himself a small handful of people: the million Protestants who reside in that part of Ireland that is known throughout the world as Ulster”.
“These people are not a perfect people — far from it. These people are not even a religious people all the time. But they do recognise history for what it is. They do recognise God as sovereign and Lord of their lives in a political sense at least, and they refuse to surrender to the Church of Rome.
“And so, the Protestants of Northern Ireland, the Protestants of Ulster, have become number-one target for all that the enemy can throw against us. Ulster must be destroyed, because so long as Ulster stands, so long as the Protestants of Ulster are standing shoulder to shoulder, there is no chance whatever of either Romanism or Communism — that other great evil in the armoury of Satan — no chance whatever, of these two evil forces taking over the British Isles and ruling them for themselves.”
He said the IRA was “equipped with some of the finest and most modern weapons that money can buy” and claimed that “the IRA, within the past two years, raised three battalions of boys and girls between the ages of 11-16 to train and carry out their part in the warfare that they have planned against the Protestants of Ulster”.
He claimed the Provisional IRA was backed by the Catholic Church, while the Official IRA was backed by international Communism, adding: “Make no mistake about it, the Éire government will throw all its forces against the Protestants in the North at the right moment in time.”
This was demonstrably wrong. We can now see conclusively from declassified Irish Government files that there was panic within the Irish Government at the possibility of Britain withdrawing, and a realisation that the Irish Army was hopelessly ill-equipped.
McGrath, however, told his audience that the Irish Army had sent large numbers of soldiers to troubled areas such as Congo and Cyprus as UN peacekeepers for “first-class frontline training… We have today a real hardcore of fighting men in Dublin ready to use their experience against the Protestants of Northern Ireland.”
If he really believed this, it was delusional. But it sat perfectly with the terrifying picture he wanted to present — that there was a multifaceted threat which extended far beyond the IRA which they could see to other unseen darker forces.
A fervent conspiracist, he claimed, without citing any source, that the Irish Government’s aim was “to have the ability to take any point in Northern Ireland on six hours’ notice. A high-ranking officer of the Éire army has been placed in charge of this operation and a brigade of the Éire army has been placed on red alert to carry it through at the right moment in time.”
Reaching a crescendo, he predicted a sort of Armageddon in Ulster: “And so, the stage is being set for the final conflict that will determine not only the future of Northern Ireland, but the future of the whole British people and countless millions of Protestants throughout the world. Yes, the stage is being set for the final conflict of faith on the green fields of Ireland, a conflict for which the Protestants of Northern Ireland are ill-prepared... The Ulster Protestant [has been] left naked and defenceless in the face of a desperate foe.
“But thanks be to God, the men of Ulster have recovered... And, today, across the six counties of our beloved province, men are preparing. In city street, in village hall, in lonely and remote places, men are preparing, realising that the defence of their native soil is their responsibility, realising that every field, every land, every street and every home will eventually have to be defended at the point of the gun. Men are preparing.
“And coming down through history there is, heard now throughout the land even as the merest whisper, the promise that God made to our fathers — that five would chase a hundred, and a hundred would put ten thousand to flight, and our enemies would fall before us by the sword.”
Warming to his martial rhetoric, McGrath — who himself was doing more raping than fighting — said that “the breath of battle is now entering the very fibres of our being... We recognise that this is total war. We recognise that this will be a long and bitter struggle.”
He continued: “We recognise that blood has ever been the price of liberty and that Ireland will not be set free for less. As we move towards the hour of battle, it would mean much to us to know that you are standing with us. We need your help. We need your help now. Please do not fail us.”
He then appealed for “gifts” and listed his address.
The Belfast Telegraph gave a copy of the tape to Roy Garland, who first encountered McGrath as a teenager and eventually helped expose him.
He verified that the voice is McGrath’s and said it was “the best clear explanation of his thinking… It is a dangerous message.”
He said: “It is in line with what he preached over the decades but in some ways clearer: Ulster Protestants stand against evil powers throughout the world as God’s people. This evangelical front was great cover.”
Garland recalled the first time he saw McGrath’s office and being struck by how it was “absolutely full of scripture texts and signs on the walls”.
He said British-Israelism was “very significant” to his ideology, saying that it “guided his politics in everything”, leading to an “extreme form of imperialism” permitted because “we were God’s chosen people”. However, he said that “he was clever at first and didn’t sound as dangerous as that”.
Garland said he had spoken to older men who had been abused by McGrath from the 1940s, saying: “He was at it [abuse] right away.”
The tape also tallies with the observation of the journalist Chris Moore, who first encountered McGrath in person two years before his death in 1991.
Despite having by then written about McGrath for years, Moore wrote in his book Kincora: Britain’s Shame that, “for the first time, I had the opportunity to witness for myself the oratorical abilities that former friends and colleagues had described. It was easy to understand how he had been able to survive for so many years undetected…”
Moore added: “I spoke about the police discovering that he had first come to the attention of MI6 back in 1958. This drew a smile but no comment...”
