The new Bloody Sunday case may well open a can of worms
4 min read
Endless inquiries and new legacy proposals are not helping reconciliation in Northern Ireland. The only way forward is to have all-round amnesty for Troubles-related crimes, says Lord Bew
The decision to charge Soldier F in connection with the Bloody Sunday shootings of 1972 is another awkward moment in the unhappy process of dealing with the legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles.
There is a very strong case – brilliantly articulated by Douglas Murray in his prize-winning book on Bloody Sunday – that the state must indicate it has higher standards than the terrorist. It was in support of such an argument that I was happy to act as an historical adviser to the Bloody Sunday tribunal (Saville) which lasted for much of the first decade of this century and cost £200m.
But there is still no end in sight to this inquiry culture. The Boucher inquiry into the activities and handling of Freddie Scappaticci – head of the IRA’s internal security squad and also a British agent – has already cost, it is reported, £35m and is likely to lead to further prosecutions.
Lord Justice Kerr’s recent pronouncement that the family of the murdered lawyer Pat Finucane did not receive justice from the multi-volume report produced by Sir Desmond de Silva, strongly implies that further legal activity may be expected in this area.
Is it really reasonable 20 years after the Good Friday agreement that the massive UK subvention to Northern Ireland should be raided so regularly for such cases when Northern Ireland is facing a waiting list crisis in its hospitals worse than elsewhere in the UK?
Of course many will say that you cannot put a price on justice. But the fact is that the Good Friday agreement, as Tony Blair said explicitly at the time, tore up significant elements of the criminal justice system through its early release programme for those convicted of terrorism. That was precisely why the then prime minister underpinned the agreement by a referendum rather than put the full moral responsibility upon the British government.
To be clear this was done in the name of peace and reconciliation and at least, to a significant degree it succeeded in that Northern Ireland ceased to be a place of large-scale political violence. But the current inquiry culture and the government’s proposal to deal with the legacies of the past are not producing any effect of reconciliation.
The result is that Northern Ireland is obsessed with the past in an unhealthy way both among nationalists who look for the next state atrocity to be investigated and also the unionist community who feel their victims have not receive the same attention nor public airing of their wounds in the media.
Consequently, Northern Ireland is more fixated on the conflict 20 years after the end of the Troubles than Britain was on the second world war in 1965.
There is still one way out, brutal and unfair as it is to many still-suffering families. That is to have an across-the-board amnesty for all Troubles-related crimes. The state should then implement a compensation scheme. The state should also say that it is confident that the great majority of its people behaved well during the conflict and is prepared to sponsor an official history, directed by a serious scholar, of the Northern Ireland Office of the sort that used to be commonplace in British life.
Meanwhile the new Bloody Sunday case may well open a can of worms. There are still intense and legitimate controversies about the orders the soldiers were operating under on that day.
Then there is the role of Martin McGuinness. At the time that Saville reported, Martin was already a secular saint. The young man who said that innocent victims of his bombs were “nosy parkers” was quite forgotten. The truth is that he had become central to the Northern Ireland peace process at the time of his death. Nobody really wanted to raise difficult questions about his role on the day of Bloody Sunday. However there is, for example, in the archives of the Saville tribunal a document of an agent working for the British which claims that Martin felt guilty about the role he had played on the day.
Is this report and others like it just guff? I do not know for sure. But it is certain that any new trial is likely to open up broader questions yet again.
Professor the Lord Bew is a crossbench peer and acted as historical adviser to the Bloody Sunday inquiry between 1998 and 2001
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