There are two ways of dealing with the past. We can unearth it and learn from it, or we can bury it.
The British government’s legacy bill on the Troubles, which is currently going through parliament, is designed not just to bury the past, but to give it a state funeral at Westminster.
The bill proposes to effectively grant an amnesty to those who have killed and tortured. It will prevent victims from accessing justice through the legal system and it will deny the right to take civil actions against those responsible for death and destruction.
Victims’ groups and relatives believe that it is an affront to justice and the Council of Europe has serious concerns about it.
Read more:
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So why is the British government saying, “Troubles? What Troubles?” The answer is that Britain is simply doing what it has always done: concealing its past.
It built an empire on slavery, murder, theft and plunder across much of the globe and then claimed it was merely spreading democracy for the benefit of those not fortunate enough to be British and white.
The legacy bill is the latest chapter in that distortion of history, which this time claims that Britain was an impartial referee here between two warring factions. It has failed to acknowledge its role in controlling and arming loyalist murder gangs.
However, although the winners normally write the history of war, this bill has received a helping hand from the losers. The concept of granting impunity to those involved in the Troubles first came from the IRA, which lost the war and agreed to administer what it used to call British rule in Ireland.
Former Irish justice minister Michael McDowell has revealed that “the leadership of Sinn Féin begged on bended knee for an effective amnesty in criminal law for IRA historic crimes”. The Dublin government gave in and drew a line “across the page of historic Provisional IRA criminality” in the north.
At the same time, says McDowell, Britain provided “letters of comfort… to the suspected perpetrators of at least 300 deaths”.
So SF achieved the burial of significant parts of the past before the present legacy bill was conceived. This suggests that the party (and the Irish government) supports an amnesty for the IRA, but wants to bring everyone else to justice.
Not only is the bill designed to conceal who did what, it will also deny us the opportunity to discover why. It refers to “events and conduct” relating to the north from 1966 to 1998. “Conduct” presumably includes policies and decision-making which led to violence.
So we will never know who politically authorised the Bloody Sunday killings (although we have a fair idea), or why the Ballymurphy massacre happened. Julie Hambleton will never know who ordered the IRA’s 1974 Birmingham pub bombs, which killed her sister Maxine and 20 other civilians
We will never learn who in the West Midlands Police knowingly advocated the imprisonment of six obviously innocent men.
Bessbrook’s Alan Black will have no right to discover who killed his 10 work colleagues at Kingsmill in 1976, or who organised it and why. The O’Dowd and Reavey families will be denied the right to know the truth about the Glenanne gang and who directed it.
Who in the IRA approved Freddie Scappaticci’s torture and murder of over 20 people? Who in Britain’s defence hierarchy directed his actions to conceal his role as an informer?
This bill is designed to ensure that we will never know the truth about the Troubles, which was not so much a war, more a series of callous and sadistic war crimes. Burying the truth along with the victims of unwarranted violence makes a mockery of what they call the peace process.
So in the absence of an open and honest approach to the past, how did the war turn out? Murder and torture won. The big loser was the truth. What a heartless world we have made for ourselves.
