It is sad, but increasingly obvious, that those responsible for the almost 4,000 deaths during the Troubles here are determined to ensure that the truth largely remains buried with their victims.
The British state and nationalist and unionist paramilitaries have adopted a common conspiracy of silence, which grows increasingly inaudible as the killers, witnesses and relatives of the victims now die of old age.
Soon the truth will be buried for ever and our past will be politically disinfected to make it a no-go area for those seeking justice.
In his novel 1984, George Orwell wrote: “Who controls the present, controls the past.” Welcome to a quick course on how to manage history.
It suits all three protagonists in the Troubles to conceal what they did.
The British government, both directly and by using armed unionists, consistently broke its own laws and regularly engaged in murder. To prevent further investigation into its activities, it recently introduced the Legacy Act, which ended historical inquests and prevented new civil cases from being lodged in court.
It also established the oddly named Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR). Its vision is to create a society which is “more reconciled”.
There are two problems with this concept. The first asks how you might measure reconciliation – and if you can’t measure it, how will you know you have more of it in the future than you have now?
The second problem raises the question of who is expected to be reconciled with whom? Does the commission expect that the family of someone murdered by state collusion will somehow be reconciled with Britain’s intelligence services?
By putting reconciliation in the commission’s title, the British government claimed the moral high ground in managing the past. It was also calculating in including “information recovery”. Information can be selective, but truth is absolute. If Britain had wanted us to discover the truth of what happened during the Troubles, it would have established The Truth Commission.
Secretary of State Hilary Benn says that the ICRIR is here to stay, even though the Court of Appeal last week ruled that his veto over what can be disclosed to bereaved families by the commission is unlawful. Mr Benn controls the present, so Mr Benn controls the past.
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin supports “all families to get access to truth and justice”. So will it now call on the IRA to tell us who was responsible for the deaths of the 1,700 people killed by that organisation, including almost 500 civilians?
It has quite rightly criticised the ICRIR, but it has failed to clearly state that the IRA also has a responsibility to tell the truth about its activities.
Its main comment on the past has been that the violence was inevitable. So the IRA did not kill anyone. Its victims were killed by inevitability.
Supporters of the IRA’s war for Irish freedom (that’s what they called it) argue that because the British government used unionist paramilitaries to carry out killings, it should be held accountable. However, since Stakeknife was working for the British government inside the IRA, should we not also know the truth about the state’s (and the IRA’s) role in his killings?
Some reports suggest that one in five IRA members were British agents by the time of the ceasefire. Surely Sinn Féin’s campaign for “truth and justice” should include their activities? However, as Orwell wrote: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted.”
Finally there are the unionist paramilitaries, who were often given a free hand to kill by the British government. Their wholesale infiltration by British intelligence means that any “information recovery” from those groups will be highly selective. By allowing them to evolve into drug-dealing gangs, Britain has effectively bought their silence.
Their shameful history will be hidden behind what Hilary Benn calls “national security”. National security might reasonably be defined as anything which a government does not want you to know. (If you are wondering what sort of thing I mean, I can’t tell you, because that would be a breach of national security.)
So we will never know the truth of what went on during the Troubles. Truth is the only form of justice which the relatives of the dead can hope to expect, so denial of the truth is a denial of justice.
There was no justice in our sordid war and it is now clear that there will be no justice in what we call peace.