Andrew Windsor Mountbatten, formerly Prince Andrew, was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Andrew was stripped off his royal title in November 2025 over his links with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. There are images of then-Prince Andrew in the Epstein Files, which have documents alleging child sex abuse among others. Andrew is the grand-nephew of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, who too was accused of child sex abuse.
While the allegations against former Prince Andrew linked to the Epstein Files are in the news, people aren’t aware of the charges against his grand-uncle, Lord Mountbatten.
Lord Mountbatten, who was the viceroy when India gained Independence and oversaw the bloody Partition, was accused of being involved in the Kincora Boys’ Home scandal. The case has to do with an organised child sexual abuse ring at an orphanage in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the 1970s.
This article is based on reports and books. It needs to be stated that Lord Mountbatten isn’t alive to defend himself. In fact, he was killed a year before the first allegations of abuse at the Belfast orphanage, to which he was later linked, emerged.
Lord Mountbatten was killed in Northern Ireland in 1979 in a blast triggered by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), an insurgent group that was fighting for a united Irish homeland.
Lord Mountbatten’s name reportedly figured in FBI files from the 1940s in connection with his “love for young boys”. The Belfast Kincora Boys’ Home Scandal was in the news as recently as in 2022, when a person, one of them who claimed to have been abused by the British royal launched a legal action.
So what was the Kincora Boy’s Home Scandal? And what do the survivors say about Lord Mountbatten’s involvement?
WHAT WAS THE KINCORA BOY’S HOME SCANDAL?
The Kincora Boys’ Home was an orphanage in Belfast, the capital of British-ruled Northern Ireland. It was set up in 1958 by the local health authority to provide full-time accommodation for boys aged 15–18 who faced an abusive or otherwise compromised home life.
The home was also the centre of an organised child sex abuse ring, which first came to public attention in 1980, following a report in The Irish Independent.
The newspaper alleged that despite the first reports of abuse reaching the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC, the police force of Northern Ireland from 1922 to 2001) in 1977, which had passed on detailed reports naming both the survivors and the abusers to the Director of Public Prosecutions, no prosecution had taken place.
The Irish Independent report prompted MP Gerry Fitt to raise the issue in the British Parliament. Between 1980 and 1981, three members of staff at the home, William McGrath, Raymond Semple and Joseph Mains, were charged with a number of offences relating to the systematic sexual abuse of children in their care over a number of years. They were all convicted.
ALLEGATIONS OF A STATE COVERUP OF CHILD SEX ABUSE CLAIM
The case, however, got more scandalous following allegations that MI5 and British security forces had, despite information, allowed systematic child sexual abuse in the 1970s to continue at the Kincora Boy’s Home. That was allegedly done to protect individuals like McGrath, who was allegedly an asset of the MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency.
In his book, The Dirty War, Irish journalist Martin Dillon claimed that McGrath, who was also the leader of an obscure loyalist paramilitary group called Tara, might have been employed by MI5 since the 1960s and was being blackmailed into providing intelligence on other loyalist groups.
Army intelligence officer Brian Gemmell told the BBC in 2014, that McGrath had reported evidence of abuse in Kincora in 1975 but was ordered by MI5 superiors to stop investigating the case.
Allegations of a state coverup were also made by journalist Chris Moore in his 2025 book, Kincora: Britain’s Shame. The book talks about MI5’s early knowledge of the abuse and efforts to conceal it, including by destroying files.
Nevertheless, an investigation by the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA) chaired by Sir Anthony Hart found no credible evidence of state collusion, wider rings, or deliberate cover-ups by MI5/MI6, attributing failures to prosecute the case timely to the RUC’s “ineptitude” rather than conspiracy.
WAS LORD MOUNTBATTEN INVOLVED IN KINCORA CHILD SEX ABUSE RING?
The very first allegations against Lord Mountbatten are said to be in an FBI memo from 1944, which included a claim from a “confidential informant” that he was “a homosexual” and allegedly had a “perversion for young boys.” The document, however, did not cite any concrete evidence to back those claims.
The first public claims linking Mountbatten to child sex abuse at or connected to Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast appeared in April 1990. Robert Harbinson wrote in Now, a Dublin magazine, that Mountbatten (along with his friend, Anthony Blunt, and others) was part of what he described as an “old-boy network”, allegedly “holding gay orgies in country houses” on both sides of the Irish border, including at Kincora.
More direct accusations emerged in 2022, when Arthur Smyth, one of the 39 survivors of Kincora Boys’ Home, alleged that Lord Mountbatten had molested him twice in the 1970s while he was a resident there, according to a BBC report.
Smyth had waived anonymity, and sued the Department of Health, the Secretary of State, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Belfast Health and Social Care Trust and the Business Services Organisation (BSO), seeking damages for assault and battery.
“He wants the facts finally to emerge about his abuse generally and specific allegations about two separate incidents implicating the now-deceased royal,” Smyth’s lawyer said.
Allegations of child abuse by Mountbatten were also made by Colin Moore, in his book Kincora: Britain’s Shame. Moore claimed that Mountbatten had abused at least five boys trafficked from Kincora.
There are survivor’s accounts and allegations by several journalists and writers, but no definitive evidence that Mountbatten sexually abused children.
The 2017 HIA report claimed that the abuse at Kincora Boys’ Home went for as long as it did, not due to the involvement of powerful individuals like Mountbatten, but rather due to ineptitude on the part of the local authorities. In its report, the HIA stated that the article making the original allegations “did not give any basis for the assertions that any of these people [Mountbatten and others] were connected with Kincora.”
There was no chance of Lord Mountbatten refuting the charges because he was killed in the IRA blast in Northern Ireland barely a year before the abuse at Kincora Boys’ Home came to light.
