Victims who must wait for the truth

At the end of his impressive new history, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, Paul Bew poses the question of whether the end of the Troubles and the establishment of our new power-sharing administration mean that ‘the enmities of Irish history are losing their power to hurt and destroy’.  The conflicting responses within the province to the issue of dealing with the history of the Troubles and its tens of thousands of victims would not encourage a positive response to Lord Bew’s question. There is a real danger that the related issues of victims and truth recovery will become the latest fronts on which the province’s traditional conflicts are being waged. For while republicans and nationalists have been broadly supportive of some form of truth commission, unionists have been sceptical or down-right hostile. There is a cross-community consensus that more needs to be done to address the needs of victims but little beyond that. There is a chasm between the general unionist view that there exists a clear distinction between victims and perpetrators and Sinn Fein’s opposition to any ‘hierarchy of victims’.  Into this minefield has come the Consultative Group on the Past set up last year by the then Secretary of State, Peter Hain, and headed by Lord Eames and Denis Bradley. As part of its work the group held a series of public meetings across Northern Ireland.  At these meetings considerable anger and resentment was expressed by Unionists towards the Eames-Bradley project. This in part reflected leaks from sources close to the group that it was considering an amnesty for those committing offences during the Troubles and that it might consider suggesting that the conflict be considered a ‘war’. This fed into a broader feeling that the whole project of truth recovery would result in a marginalisation of Unionist and Protestant voices and experience and a post hoc transformation of a terrorist campaign into a legitimate struggle against discrimination and state oppression.  While this negative reaction might in part be put down to an ingrained culture of defensiveness and pessimism, it was also a reflection of some longer-term realities. One reality is the difference between Northern Ireland and the vast majority of international examples of truth recovery processes. In the South African and Latin American examples, the situations most referred to by those making the case for a local truth commission, it was the state and its agents which were responsible for the vast majority of deaths and traumatic events. In Northern Ireland it was paramilitary groups that killed and injured the majority of victims. According to Lost Lives, the invaluable study of deaths during the Troubles, republican paramilitaries were responsible for 58 per cent of deaths between 1966 and 2003 with the Provisional IRA accounting for the bulk of these: 48 per cent of the total of all deaths. Loyalist paramilitaries were the other main agency of death accounting for 30 per cent of the total.  The security forces were responsible for less than 10 per cent of the total: the British Army for 6.5 per cent; the RUC for 1.4 per cent and the Ulster Defence Regiment for 0.2 per cent.  As John Ware’s recent excellent Radio 4 programme on the tenth anniversary of the Belfast Agreement catalogued, Tony Blair’s management of the peace process prioritised the consolidation of the republican movement’s commitment to a political way forward and this meant agreeing to a series of high-level semi-judicial inquiries into the behaviour of state forces, most notably the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday.  For Unionists the result has been a hierarchy of victims where Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson are remembered while the hundreds of Unionist and Protestant victims of what they regard as an IRA campaign of ethnic cleansing in the border areas of Fermanagh, Tyrone and South Armagh are forgotten.  At the Consultative Group’s public meeting in Enniskillen, which I attended, a packed and largely Unionist audience heard a number of speakers from the floor demand that the group ‘draw a line’ under the past as any truth recovery process was only capable of opening up old wounds.  This is a serious point and Professor Adrian Guelke who has written on both Northern Ireland and South Africa has pointed out the possible destabilising effect of a truth commission on the infant power-sharing structures at Stormont.  Denis Bradley responded to these arguments by pointing out that it would be impossible to forget about the past because over the next few years we will have the Saville Report, the reports of the ‘collusion’ inquiries and over 40 inquests into victims of state violence during the Troubles.  Unionist complaints about a hierarchy of victims would, he implied, be intensified by this drip-drip of reports which focussed on the alleged state crimes and abuses. Some broader truth recovery process would help to deal with these long-standing Unionists concerns by widening the focus to paramilitary violators of human rights.  This is a serious argument but it faces one major practical challenge which was made clear when sources close to the IRA leadership claimed that it would not co-operate with the Eames-Bradley group because it had been set up and given its terms of reference by the British state.  Although the group did meet the Sinn Fein president, it is unlikely that he would be of much assistance given his continued denial that he was ever a member of the IRA. This lack of co-operation must be potentially damaging for the whole project. The group has been able to talk to senior members of the security forces and to see some of the evidence collected by Lord Stevens into alleged collusion by the security forces with paramilitaries. But without any input from those responsible for the majority of killings how can it hope to address its credibility problem with Unionists? On this basis it would seem more realistic and useful if the group eschewed any notion of an over-arching truth recovery mechanism like a truth commission. Instead it could recognise that the time is not ripe for such a body given that it would simply become a theatre for the successive acts of two conflicting morality plays.  This does not mean the adoption of a Northern Irish version of the ‘pacto de olvido’: the pact of forgetting by which the political elites in post-Franco Spain sought to manage the transition to democracy in the 1970s. Rather it might concentrate on being an advocate for the victims and their needs. Some of these needs are to do with health and welfare issues but there are also those which relate directly to the way in which society as a whole gives acknowledgement and recognition to the experiences of bereavement and violence.  Here they might consider possibilities like state support for a major oral history project to actively solicit, collect and archive the experiences of victims and survivors. This would provide a source of inestimable importance for any future attempts to construct a more inclusive narrative of the Troubles. For now memories are too raw and conflictual to make such a narrative possible.   Henry Patterson, Professor of Politics, University of Ulster, is author of Ireland since 1939: The persistence of conflict —Penguin 2007.