Truth and Reconciliation in NI? Not much hope of either

Most of the discussion on the report of the Eames-Bradley Consultative Group on the Past has focussed on the proposal for a £12,000 ‘recognition’ payment to the nearest relative of someone who died as a result of the conflict. The Group gave an extensive private briefing to journalists a week before the publication of the report and it was entirely predictable that what became known as the ‘blood money’ proposal would provoke angry responses from a wide and varied range of groups and individuals.

Some more cynical observers believe that the Group wanted to distract attention from some of the other proposals which, if implemented, would have an effect that is far from the community reconciliation that the Group claims as its main priority.

At the core of the report is a Legacy Commission of three, headed by an international commissioner. This commission would take over the work of the PSNI’s historical enquiries team into unsolved deaths during the Troubles. It would also, where prosecutions were deemed unlikely, i.e. most of the deaths concerned, undertake a process of ‘information recovery’ where it would seek to elicit information from individuals and agencies involved in the death who would be promised immunity from prosecution. There would also be a ‘thematic examination’ unit which would investigate alleged patterns of deaths — the one singled out for most attention is the claim of widespread collusion between members of the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries.

A remarkable feature of this 190-page report is that although it provides figures that show paramilitary groups were responsible for 90 per cent of the deaths there is no attempt to deal with the problem of eliciting information from former republican and loyalist terrorists. This creates a profound imbalance in the mechanisms proposed. The Legacy Commission is to have powers to compel the production of documents and also to compel the appearance of witnesses. The report makes clear that the Commission will be looking at the documents collected by Stalker/Samson inquiries into allegations of a police ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy in the 1980s and the three Inquiries by Lord Stevens into allegations of collusion — Stevens involves over 10,000 documents totalling over one million pages.

There is no consideration of how the Commission will be able to extract documents and witness statements from members of the IRA or UVF. Gerry Adams has already declared that republicans will not co-operate with a ‘British appointed commission. Pressed on this issue in interviews Denis Bradley admitted that while the Commission would have power over state agencies and members of the security forces it would have to rely on moral pressure from ‘their communities’ to ensure reciprocation from paramilitaries. This less than convincing response is symptomatic of the lack of intellectual and moral seriousness in the report.

Politically the report is dead in the water as far as any hope of getting a cross-community consensus or inter-party agreement is concerned. In his presentation of the report Bradley made clear his exasperation with politicians who ‘over the last few days have perpetuated the politicisation of victims’. This was aimed at Unionists who had denounced the ‘recognition’ payment.

Bradley’s problem, and indeed the problem of the report, is that the politicians’ response articulates profound communal division over victims and the past. Unionists, politicians and those who have voted for them, do not agree with Bradley when he proclaims: ‘we cannot wash our hands and say we were not part of the problem’. Most firmly believe in the innocent victim/perpetrator distinction.

The Eames Bradley group’s orientation to these issues was heavily influenced by the peace and reconciliation industry which has grown up in Northern Ireland under more than 30 years of direct rule and the peace process. The place of a local political class was usurped by NGOs, community groups, former paramilitaries and academics. A key characteristic of this group was an ideology that fused in different combinations local versions of liberal theology, recycled 1960s Marxism, human rights absolutism and the utopian legal theory of transitional justice.

It represents a framework for understanding Northern Ireland’s past which is structurally biased against Unionism and puts terrorist organisations on a level with the security forces. A group dealing with the past but with no historians on it and whose extensive bibliography contains not one book by an academic historian produces a poor man’s post-modernism of ‘story-telling’ where the ‘police story’ or the ‘army story’ has the same truth value and moral content as the ‘former combatants’ story (transitional justice speak for terrorists’ narratives).

The poor benighted Northern Ireland populace, the vast majority of whom never joined a paramilitary organisation, are being faced with five years of being forced to be ‘reconciled’. For a majority that essentially means acknowledging that unless they listen to the usually self-justifying narratives of those responsible for most of the devastation of the Troubles, they are in danger of being responsible for future conflicts. This is the constant refrain of a community relations industry which has already had substantial amounts of state funding without any noticeable impact on continuing sectarian division in Northern Ireland. Under Eames-Bradley, the Treasury will be asked for £100m more to fill this black hole.

Eames-Bradley is the product of the fag-end of direct rule and the peace process. The social groups and ideas that produced it are characterised by their distance from and hostility to the unionist political class which now has an effective veto on key governmental decisions for the first time since 1972. Although the British government will pay attention to what Sinn Fein, the SDLP and Dublin have to say about the report, it will be difficult to ignore the hostility of Unionism. The Group may hope that once again a British government will ignore Unionist concerns but with Brown already in debt to the DUP over its support on 42 days detention and struggling not to be engulfed by the worst economic crisis since the 1930s this may prove unfounded.

Similarly with the Republic’s economy rated as one of the sickest in the Euro zone and its electorate facing the most savage cuts in wages and public expenditure in the history of the state, the Eames-Bradley proposal that Dublin should pay a share of the hefty bill for their proposals is unlikely to be a vote-winner.

The Group prefaces its report with a quote from the English Christian writer, Margaret Fairless Barber whose most famous work was entitled ‘Meditations on the Road to Heaven’. Unfortunately the report evokes another road altogether — the one that is paved with good intentions.