British inquiry into Collins ‘farcical’
The father of a young soldier who committed suicide while under the command of the military officer declared: “I have absolutely no confidence in it.
“It will be another internal inquiry by officers into officers.
It is all farcical.”
Taxi driver Billy Cochrane’s son Paul, aged 18, a soldier in the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment (RIR), shot himself at a military base in Armagh city in July 2001 after being refused home leave even though outside medical authorities claimed he was suffering from a loss of hearing.
The British Ministry of Defence inquiry into Col Collins is expected to focus on allegations of a culture of bullying.
It will run separately from an inquiry announced earlier into claims he seriously mistreated Iraqis during the war.
The Northern Ireland-born commander, who won the praise of President George W Bush and the Prince of Wales for a rousing eve of battle address to his men, has strenuously denied all the claims. The death of Pte Cochrane at Drumadd Barracks, Armagh, will be at the centre of the second investigation.
But the dead soldier’s father insisted that any inquiry should be a public one, as more than 130 MPs had demanded last year.
He said Col Collins had once promised to do all he could to establish the circumstances surrounding his son Paul’s death, but had walked away once the family started asking their own questions.
Mr Cochrane, 43, from the Cregagh area of east Belfast, said yesterday: “They’ve decided to hold an inquiry into Tim Collins after only three days, and yet Paul had been dead nearly two years and they’ve refused to release one document about him.”
There was absolutely no evidence Col Collins had given his son a difficult time, he insisted. But senior officers had failed to respond properly when his son had requested leave.
The request had been granted by a captain in the medical corps after the soldier had lost the hearing in his left ear, but was later overturned. Mr Cochrane said: “Paul wrote to him (Collins) asking for help, asking him why a regiment which prided itself on being a family regiment had disowned him.”
The family first met the commanding officer after their son’s death.
Mr Cochrane added: “He (Collins) promised us he would do everything in his power to find out what happened to Paul, but he hasn’t done one thing.
“On the night Paul died, he (Collins) stood in our house and cried. He told me ‘I would have walked on broken glass for your son’.
“After Paul was buried, he said he would leave no stone unturned. He would find out what happened, but as soon as he found out we were questioning things that had happened to Paul, the army discontinued having any contact with us.”
Ulster Unionist Lagan Valley MP Jeffrey Donaldson later claimed Col Collins was being used as a scapegoat in a sinister plot to get rid of the Royal Irish Regiment.
Although he believed a full inquiry was needed into the death of Pte Paul Cochrane and other suspicious deaths in the army, Mr Donaldson insisted shadowy forces within the British Government and the military were planning to scrap the regiment as part of a deal to appease republicans in Northern Ireland.
“There are those in the Ministry of Defence and the army who have an agenda which is about discrediting Tim Collins and the RIR,” said Mr Donaldson.
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