No one knows how we settled on the Troubles as the label for the conflict in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998. It is a pathetically inadequate euphemism for a civil war in which 3,500 people died and some 40,000 were maimed. Shopping streets were bombed, busy pubs sprayed with gunfire, milkmen and postmen ambushed on their rounds and those who fell foul of paramilitary godfathers “disappeared” — abducted, tortured, killed and their bodies buried in unmarked graves.
Three decades of violence came to a stuttering end 25 years ago with the Good Friday agreement but the Troubles marked all of us who grew up in that era, permanently scarring memories and mindsets.
Today Northern Ireland remains an uneasy place, its sectarian divisions cemented by segregated schooling and housing. A paramilitary rump lurks but the conflict has moved to other battlegrounds: language, culture, Brexit and stagnant local politics.
The old tensions remain in part because the Good Friday compromise did not create a mechanism for dealing with “legacy issues”. Paramilitary prisoners were set free and terrorist arsenals destroyed but there was no formula for how to resolve more than 1,000 unsolved killings. Since 1998 several initiatives have tried to address the poisoned past: reports by respected cross-community figures, historic inquiry units, political negotiations. None has been successful.
The latest initiative is the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill, awaiting committee stage in the Lords. The bill has been spurred by the campaign to end so-called vexatious prosecutions of former servicemen, such as the soldier Dennis Hutchings who died, aged 80, while on trial for the shooting of an unarmed man in 1974.
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If passed, the bill would end Troubles-related investigations, prosecutions, inquests and civil actions. Some cases already in the court system would be halted. Instead, it would create an “information recovery” commission under which killers who give a true account of their actions could earn immunity from prosecution. The nearest comparison is South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission, set up at the end of apartheid in 1996 and generally felt to have been effective.
By any measure this bill is extraordinary. A whole class of horrific crimes would be placed, by law, beyond the reach of the criminal justice system. It would be unimaginable anywhere else in the UK but criminal justice in Northern Ireland has always run on different, often questionable lines: internment without trial, early release of terrorist prisoners, “comfort letters” for IRA members and no-jury courts for security trials.
Nevertheless, we should be clear about what it could mean. Should new evidence, perhaps a microscopic fragment of DNA, emerge linking a former IRA man to the 1987 Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen there will be no charges. Gerry Adams, the former Sinn Fein president, who was questioned for several days in 2014 about the IRA kidnap and murder of the Belfast mother Jean McConville, will never stand trial in connection with her death no matter what evidence might emerge. Neither will the suspect arrested in connection with the deaths of 21 people in the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings.
The bill would also fatally undermine the investigations of Operation Kenova into the activities of Freddie Scappaticci, aka Stakeknife, Britain’s most important double agent inside the IRA. Scappaticci led the IRA’s internal security unit, “the nutting squad”, which kidnapped, tortured and murdered suspected informants. Prosecutors have received 33 files on the case.
I cannot help but wonder if, after years of failing to tackle the legacy problem, the real energy behind this bill is the desire of the shadowy guardians of “national security” to ensure that the Stakeknife story is never aired in a court of law.
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There is overwhelming opposition to the bill from across the community divide in the province. Critics say it extinguishes all hope of justice for thousands of people for whom the anguish of violent loss remains tangible. Yet the cold, hard reality is that in most unsolved cases, those hopes are already slender to the point of being non-existent.
The police do not have the resources to investigate the past. There is little evidence in many unsolved cases because terrorist groups did not keep records and their weapons (and therefore ballistic traces) were destroyed. The court system is already facing a huge backlog; 13 legacy inquests involving at least 26 deaths (mainly at the hands of security forces) are due to open this year and another 19 cases have yet to be listed. Meanwhile the suspected perpetrators grow older. Many have already died.
With the chances of traditional justice fading, it is with a heavy and conflicted heart that I find myself agreeing it is time to find a radical alternative. It would be unnecessarily cruel, however, to halt inquests or cases already under way. Active proceedings should be expedited to their conclusion and the Kenova investigations are too important to be hidden. The Stakeknife files contain evidence of brutal IRA crimes — but also evidence about the extent to which security agencies knew about or even facilitated those crimes. Those cases must run their course because it is essential that a democratic state holds itself to a higher standard — and is seen to do so.
For all other cases it is time to swallow the bitter pill: the prospect of meaningful justice is receding fast. The task of finding the truth, the primary task of the proposed commission, is therefore more urgent.
And perhaps one day, when the work of truth-telling is done, the far more difficult task of reconciliation can begin.
