Earlier this month, the government leaked a plan to introduce a statutory bar on prosecutions for crimes committed before the Good Friday Agreement (GFA). Applicable to both military veterans and paramilitaries alike, this scheme would effectively herald the end of any prosecution for offences committed during the period colloquially known as the Troubles (though an exemption may be granted for gross human rights violations, torture and war crimes). The plans drew a rare, unified response of outrage from Northern Ireland’s political establishment, and yet neither the policy nor the manner of its communication to the public was unique. To say that the approach of recent British governments towards truth, justice and reconciliation in Northern Ireland has been that of a bull in a china shop would be to understate both the clumsiness of the beast and the fragility of the shop. It is an approach that has been characterised by a combination of insensitivity towards those affected by the violence and political posturing towards the English electorate. As we turn once again towards renewed discussions on the future of Northern Ireland’s past, these familiar trends continue to bedevil meaningful action.
The GFA did not provide any mechanism for dealing with violence of the past, or the thousands of unsolved murders which occurred during the period of conflict. This was perhaps a necessity to get the deal across the line, and yet it has left a gaping wound in a society trying to heal on numerous fronts. The lack of a comprehensive mechanism to address the legacy of the Troubles has given rise to a litigation-driven, piecemeal approach in which a composite of inquiries, coroners’ inquests, isolated prosecutions and civil actions have taken hold. Rather than leading to societal healing, on the occasions when one of these processes results in a conclusion, and more often where it makes the news for failing to do so, there tends to be a venting of frustration and despair from others affected by the conflict.
A case in point came last November, when Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Brandon Lewis took to the despatch box to announce that there would be no public inquiry into the murder of Catholic solicitor Pat Finucane. Killed by loyalist paramilitaries in front of his children, it has already been established that state collusion contributed to his death and that in its aftermath there was a relentless attempt to frustrate the cause of justice. Lewis’s announcement provoked a customary outpouring of emotion in Northern Ireland, with the lines on local radio call-ins buzzing with politicians and members of the public offering their opinions of whether this was a travesty of justice, or whether too much attention was being paid to just one death during a conflict which took the lives of over 3,600 others. One caller was on the cusp of naming the loyalist paramilitaries he believed to have killed his own brother, before being interrupted and deftly swept off air by the show’s presenter. Such is the turgid state of truth recovery in Northern Ireland that such an instance was barely remarkable.
The Stormont House Agreement (SHA) of December 2014 is the closest that the various factions have come to agreeing a coordinated mechanism for dealing with the past. Its proposal for a hybrid between investigations with the possibility for prosecutions, and truth recovery and reconciliation, appeared to bridge the gap between the disparate groups. Yet, having initially received the backing of the five main political parties in Northern Ireland, the Police Service and both the Irish and British governments, it is yet to be implemented. Critical to the British government and Ulster Unionist parties’ later reneging is a continuing narrative that it will be a one-sided affair, leading to a witch-hunt against veterans who served in Northern Ireland.
“Apparently no amount of pain and suffering to the Northern Irish population is above politics”
Under the uniquely competent stewardship of Julian Smith as Secretary of State, there had been a commitment to return to the SHA within the “New Decade, New Approach” agreement of January 2020, which had re-established power-sharing. Yet before he could help fulfil the pledge of bringing in legislation to enact the SHA within 100 days, Smith was sacked from his cabinet post and his replacement, Brandon Lewis, retreated in March 2020 with a vague plan focused on information retrieval and resisting any investigation, no matter how compelling the grounds, if the evidence was not brand new. The proposal was rebuked by the cross-party Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in a scathing interim report, suggesting the plans raised legal, ethical and human rights concerns, and a response from Lewis in January 2021 offered few further details on how it would be brought into force.
And so, we get to a week in early May when the two most consistent features of the government’s approach to legacy in Northern Ireland came to the fore once again. First, there was a return to posturing towards an English electorate which the government clearly calculates to be more concerned with the interests of elderly British army veterans than the appropriate conditions for reconciliation in Northern Ireland. The leaking of a plan which appeared to grant a de facto amnesty to veterans, published by two right-leaning newspapers only hours before the polls opened in local elections in Great Britain, was a clear indicator that no amount of pain and suffering to the Northern Irish population is above politics. This, of course, was only the latest in a now lengthy pattern of the government stoking instability, with the Brexit debacle being the example par excellence. While still unclear what the details of the plan are, its positioning as an election device echoes a more general pledge in the 2019 Conservative manifesto to do “more to give veterans the protections they deserve.”
Whatever the current plans for legacy in Northern Ireland are, they have clearly not been fully worked out. It certainly sounds like there will be greater protection from prosecution for veterans than that offered under the recently passed Overseas Operations Act. And yet, following the leaked policy, there was no detail in the Queen’s Speech beyond a quick mention. The more thorough background briefing notes offered nothing in the way of further information. Indeed, the legacy legislation appeared to be one of the only bills given no detail in the document. If there was firm movement towards a bill then one would have expected Johnny Mercer, the great champion of veterans’ protection, to have remained in office, rather than leave under acrimonious circumstances accusing the government of continuing to fail former service personnel. In a recent evidence session to the Defence Committee he stressed “if I had thought legislation was going to be forthcoming on this, I would not have left government.” The issue is looking like one the government exploits for an electoral bump, but baulks at the actual difficulty of following through on.
None of this is to mention that in posturing towards a domestic electorate with a plan that looks like an amnesty, the government appears to have turned a deaf ear to the pleas of veterans themselves. As Mercer stressed in his committee appearance, veterans would not believe an amnesty to be fair either: “To pretend otherwise is delusional,” because such a policy would imply their wrongdoing in the first place. As ever, the devil will be in the detail. Mercer has called instead for a more qualified plan which would itself offer little solace to bereaved families, many of whose relatives never obtained an effective investigation in the first place.
The second characteristic of the government’s recent approach has been to give scant consideration to the emotions of victims’ families. If leaking an amnesty plan for political ends demonstrated apathy towards the wider victims’ community, the response to the Ballymurphy Inquest verdict was indicative of a disdain for those who successfully campaigned to clear their relatives’ names. Released hours after the Queen’s Speech had appeared to commit the government to ending prosecutions, the Coroner in the Ballymurphy Inquiry found that the ten victims of the Belfast massacre had been entirely innocent. As David Cameron had made a statement after the Bloody Sunday Inquiry referring to the actions of the paratroopers as “both unjustified and unjustifiable,” attention naturally turned to Westminster in anticipation of Boris Johnson’s remarks. And yet they did not immediately come.
Silence prevailed until the next day, when Johnson issued an apology to the first and deputy first ministers in a phone call. This only incensed the bereaved families further, and yet it was another day before his written apology was delivered to them, just two minutes before Lewis took to the despatch box for a televised address. A further week followed before he publicly apologised to the families at Prime Ministers’ Questions. And yet that was an apology for the botched investigation, not for the actions of the paratroopers. At one level, the episode was a poorly choreographed disaster for the government, which appeared to have been taken off guard at a finding that state forces had brutally killed innocent members of the public they had been sent to protect. At another level, however, the government has emerged politically unscathed. Johnson managed to evade losing any kudos in his domestic heartland by standing in front of a camera and offering an apology for the actions of the Army over those horrific days in August 1971. Above all else, this was an insult to families who had waited half a century, fighting the state through both the media and justice system, to obtain the truth of what happened to their loved ones.
Where do we go from here? Rather than the somewhat unpopular SHA mechanism, it looks likely that the almost universally unpopular de facto amnesty will be the starting point for renewed deliberations on dealing with the past. That may yet move towards a more qualified statute of limitations. What will follow is almost certainly another lengthy period of consultation with practitioners, victims and veteran groups all inputting opinions based on their varying aspirations and goals. During this process, memories will continue to fade, and bereaved family members and perpetrators of offences alike will die of old age. Litigation and inquests will continue, with any individual glimpses of justice tainted by the collective grief of those who did not obtain the answers they were looking for. Unless there is a radical shift in the corridors of Whitehall, in both substance and tone, this cycle looks set to continue, keeping Northern Ireland’s past locked in its present for years to come.
