Glimmer of hope in a lost cause

EVERY time a body is washed up on the western shores of Britain Margaret McCormick's eyes light up in the fleeting notion that the long-lost brother to whom she was once so close has been recovered from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

But Willie Maxwell's corpse is unlikely ever to be retrieved from the wreck of the ill-fated Mhari-L: while the bodies of

people who have fallen from ferries are invariably recovered, crew members of fishing vessels, allegedly dragged to doom by Cold War submarines, tend to remain in Davy Jones's Locker.

For McCormick, a kernel of hope may lie in the glasnost of New Labour, as evidenced by the recent flow of information about the bomb dump at Beaufort's Dyke in the Irish Sea.

Her late mother, who never got over the loss, was re-assured by Bernard Moffatt, of pressure group the Celtic League, that he would not rest until the deaths of Willie Maxwell, at 23, brothers Stuart and Keith Campbell, at 27 and 26, Mark Amos at 20, and George McKend, at 25, were explained by the authorities.

Moffatt is now pressing for an independent inquiry by the European Parliament into a sorry catalogue of tragedies at sea, which many people firmly believe were caused by military activity.

''If the openness of Britain's New Labour Government is to mean anything, it should draw back the curtain on a dark episode from the closing period of the Cold War,'' he says.

''In the period between 1979 and 1989 there were scores of accidents at sea caused by submarine activity of both Nato and Warsaw Pact navies.''

The Celtic League has compiled a list of some 160 incidents, 14 of which led to collision and/or the unexplained deaths of scores of fishermen from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany.

The authorities have rarely admitted liability. An exception was in 1982, when an

Irish boat, MFV Sheralga, was dragged for 10 miles by the submarine HMS Porpoise.

''For more than two weeks the British maintained no submarines were in the area until the Celtic League produced a photograph of HMS Porpoise taken just hours before the incident in the Irish Sea,''

Moffatt points out.

''Substantial compensation was eventually paid out. Despite this disgraceful epi-sode, however, no disciplinary action was ever taken.''

The Cite d'Aleth, Le Course, and Galy ar Mor were lost in the Pembroke Strait area during the 1980s. A total of 23 men are still unaccounted for:

missing, surely dead, in a

zone known to be used by British and French navies for ''war games''.

The families of the two men lost with the Alert 11 off the island of Muck in 1988 are

convinced that a submarine bereaved them; the boat went down in a fleet exercise area, and the weather was splendid for sailing.

Similar maritime conditions attended the disappearance of La Jonque, and the French families of the five men lost believe that sub-marine activity is the only rational explanation.

The Celtic League has logged several ''close encounters''. For example, in May 1987, just outside Larne harbour, a submarine suddenly surfaced bet- ween two car ferries, one of which had to alter course.

Six months later an Irish skipper lost #17,000 worth of gear when his boat was pulled along forcibly until the 32-ton stress-tested chain snapped.

The Cold War is over; the Holy Loch base is closed, the British submarine force is in decline; the deaths of fishing folk have all but ceased; but the mysteries will endure.

So, too, will the heartache.

It is 13 years next February since the Mhari-L sank off the Isle of Man, but Margaret McCormick's determination to have Willie's death explained is as clear-cut as it ever was.

''We never had any hesitation in saying that it was a cover-up,'' says McCormick, who lives in Cumbernauld. ''They thought we were a bunch of hysterical females until we took bundles of petitions to Parliament. You

don't just lose a trawler. The search lasted three days, but they did not find the Mhari-L, apparently, with all their sophisticated sonar.''

SHE adds: ''Yet another fishing boat from Kirk-cudbright managed to locate the wreck under the

sea with a black and white radar screen.''

In 1985 British Telecom vehemently denied suggestions that the Mhari-L had been entangled by a cable, but it suddenly changed its mind a couple of days later. The official inquiry into the sinking of the Mhari-L found that the boat's nets had been snagged, and that it had capsized because the crew had been leaning the wrong way, an explanation which Margaret McCormick finds ''insulting and laughable''.

''If I won the lottery, I would finance the recovery of the boat, which would show that it was not attached to a cable,'' says McCormick. ''They were young men, most of whom were married, with young families or pregnant wives.

''They went out to work in the morning, and they were never to be seen again. There were no bodies to bury. There is no solution. My mother never got over it and died

broken-hearted.

''So did Mary McMillan, whose two sons were lost. My son, the godson of Willie, says he will carry on my fight to get to the bottom of it all.''

Most of the sinkings investigated by the Celtic League

happened during a period of intense underwater naval activity at the tail-end of the Cold War, and Bernard Moffatt is convinced that the auth-

orities knew more about some of them than they have

ever admitted.

The answers, he suggests, may lie in intelligence, Department of Transport and Ministry of Defence records, some of which he wants opened.

The Welsh Nationalist leader, Dafydd Wigley, is to raise the issue in Parliament.

Whether two bereaved mothers will rest in peace, and Willie Maxwell and the four colleagues who shared his fate on February 20, 1995, will ever get a proper funeral, is in the lap of the gods. And maybe in the lap of New Labour, too.