The kerfuffle around the possibility of Gerry Adams receiving compensation for being unlawfully interned has thrown up revealing reactions – some predictable, others surprising.
The most surprising, perhaps, for people of a certain age, is that many under 30 don’t know what internment was or what impact it had on the nationalist community.
Well, after all, internment ended 50 years ago this December, so maybe it’s understandable that someone born, say, in 1995 wouldn’t know much about the ins and outs of events 20 years earlier.
Here’s a thumbnail sketch. On August 9 1971, the British army carried out a mass arrest of 342 people – all but one Catholic/nationalist/republican – supposedly suspected of involvement in the IRA campaign which had been intensifying throughout 1971.
‘Supposedly’, because many of those arrested were involved in the civil rights campaign since 1967, others were misidentified, and yet others just happened to be the only male in the house. No IRA leaders were arrested.
Mayhem ensued, particularly in Belfast and Derry. In the next 48 hours, 17 people were killed, 10 of whom were Catholic civilians the appalling Parachute Regiment shot in Ballymurphy.
It’s estimated 7,000 people, mainly from Catholic districts, were displaced, with unionist mobs attacking vulnerable places like Ardoyne. Whole streets were laid waste. Thousands fled south.
The Catholic community quite justifiably regarded the whole disastrous operation as a one-sided attack on them by the Stormont regime. They withdrew en masse from the state, with 130 councillors boycotting councils, the SDLP withdrawing from public bodies and organising a rent and rate strike.
It was all done at the behest of Brian Faulkner, the last, unlamented, pretentiously titled ‘prime minister’ of this sub-polity. It was Stormont’s last throw of the dice and it failed abysmally.
Sadly the British took over the process when they booted Faulkner and his Orange band out of Stormont in March 1972 and they continued the one-sided approach to internment.
During the period from August 1971 to December 1975, 1,981 people were interned: 1,874 Catholic/republican and, wait for it, 107 Protestant/loyalist.
Disgracefully, the British didn’t even start interning their loyalist proxies until 1973, by which time the UVF and UDA had killed scores of Catholics in sectarian shootings and bombings.
However, the process wasn’t just obviously one-sided. It was arbitrary, biased and vindictive, with RUC Special Branch selecting people at will.
Faulkner even interned Paddy McGuigan, of the group Barleycorn, who wrote ‘The Men Behind the Wire’, number one in the Irish charts in 1972. Case proven.
The often arbitrary, mean and malicious targeting of people detained is important because there was no come-back against the allegations – note allegations – on which someone was detained on the word of a notoriously partisan police force.
That’s important because of the unacceptable response of Keir Starmer in the House of Commons to the prospect of compensation for wrongful detention.
The law required a secretary of state to consider and sign off each detention. He seldom did. Other politicians and officials consigned people to indefinite imprisonment. In fact, by 1973 it had become an automatic conveyor belt presented by the RUC.
Now, here’s the thing. Implicit in Starmer’s response – “We will look at every conceivable way to prevent these types of cases claiming damages” – is the assumption that they shouldn’t be entitled to damages because internment meant they were guilty of some crime. Why else would they not be entitled?
The reality of course is that none of them had been convicted of anything and indeed many hadn’t done anything illegal.
If you’ve ever looked at a detention order served on someone you’d be astonished at the preposterous scattergun of ‘allegations’ presented: in one case holding seven positions in the IRA.
It’s the British government that was at fault, not only for not carrying out its legal requirements (as the Supreme Court has found) but in breaching the fundamental human right of all those interned not to be imprisoned without trial.
Internment was a practice in all British colonies, described as “legalised lawlessness” by Professor Caroline Elkins of Harvard.
Incidentally, when the Israelis imprison Palestinians indefinitely under ‘administrative detention’ they are using British ‘legalised lawlessness’ provisions they introduced when Palestine was a British mandate.
At least Starmer, the much-vaunted ‘human rights lawyer’ of yore, had the wit not to suggest Adams should be disbarred from compensation because he’s Gerry Adams – legally impossible, but what some illiterate British media demand.
However, the very fact that Starmer is determined to subvert the consequences of a Supreme Court decision is a shame and disgrace for someone with his legal background, yet entirely unsurprising for a British prime minister.