'Reconciliation will never be achieved if the needs of victims keep coming second to the needs of victim makers.'

Claire Hanna is the Social Democratic & Labour Party MP for Belfast South

Mention of the 1974 Guildford and Birmingham bombings evoke memories of two of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history and the hard-fought battle for justice finally won after false accusations, serious police misconduct and suppression of evidence.  

However, nearly fifty years on, the families of those cruelly murdered by the IRA are still seeking justice against the true perpetrators.  

The outline of the Government’s proposals for dealing with the legacy of the Troubles were formally announced in the Queen’s Speech earlier this month, effectively amounting to an amnesty for Troubles related criminality. 

The agreement reached by Northern Ireland parties and the Irish and British Governments in the 2014 Stormont House talks to establish a unit to investigate all deaths during the Troubles will be abandoned in favour of a new process that focuses on “information recovery and reconciliation” in a move away from the “cycle of investigations”. The agreement of neither victims and survivors nor Northern Ireland’s political representatives has been sought or secured.  

Victims have spent lifetimes seeking the truth of what happened to their loved ones. After decades of information being withheld by the state and paramilitaries alike, having the truth declared is an indispensable step in healing and reconciliation.  

With Johnny Mercer MP having resigned as Armed Forces Veterans Minister over what he deemed a ‘betrayal’ of veterans by the Government, the debate and media coverage in Britain has focused on the prosecution of former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. One veteran was reported in The Times as saying:  

“We should all get together and say enough is enough, it is water under the bridge and let’s forget it and carry on.” 

The Government has confirmed that the legislation would extend to paramilitaries. Should the families of the Guildford and Birmingham bombings just forget it and carry on too? Should the families of the Ballymurphy shootings and Bloody Sunday victims have done so?

No one wants to move forward more than victims themselves but they cannot just forget it and carry on because it is convenient for others, particularly those who carried out the killings. ‘Moving on’ while glossing over inconvenient details allows those who have picked and chosen which victims to champion to retell the past in a way that creates neat ‘goodies and baddies’ and which supports their present day narratives. 

I have no doubt that being subject to a criminal investigation is distressing, whether it be for a former soldier or anyone else, but there are means of improving that process that do not require abandoning the rule of law and retrospectively justifying past actions.  

A frequent criticism levelled at the judicial process is that the events occurred so long ago that memories have faded to such an extent that prosecutions are futile. 

That line fails to address why that would not pose a similar challenge for a truth and reconciliation process. Neither state nor paramilitary actors have voluntarily parted with the information families so desperately want and need; any ounce of truth, whether the location of the bodies of those ‘disappeared’ by the IRA, or the vindication of victims of Bloody Sunday or Ballymurphy Massacre, has had to be dragged from perpetrators over decades, so it is a struggle to believe either will engage in good faith in a process that does not have at least the prospect of a credible investigation.   

That this process has ‘dragged on’ in the decades since the 1998 Agreement is precisely because who inflicted the most and who know the most, have delayed and dodged accountability. It is only they who can expedite this process and there is no confidence that they will do so willingly.  

I do wonder if Johnny Mercer MP and others who claim that soldiers are unfairly targeted for prosecution whilst IRA killers benefit from lack of record keeping and formal structures fully appreciate the logical conclusion of their argument: that the state body brought in to quell violence and restore order should be held to the same standard as the loyalist and republican paramilitaries posing the risk, that they inadvertently legitimise the IRA myth, not borne out by the facts, that the Troubles were a war between military forces and that victims were simply occasional collateral damage?  

The prospect of a society based on the rule of law after years of senseless killings was one of the reasons that the Good Friday Agreement received such an overwhelming endorsement by the people of Northern Ireland. 

The past echoes down through generations of families and communities and reconciliation will never be achieved if the needs of victims keep coming second to the needs of victim makers. 

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