A new year is usually a time of hope. Personally, I struggle with it as it’s an annual reminder of a great hurt in my life.
Nearly 50 years on and I still feel it acutely. For good or ill, it chartered my course in life.
So, when I learned that the British government, on New Year’s Eve, had lodged an appeal of the High Court ruling in favour of establishing a public inquiry into the murder of Sean Brown, I was incandescent with rage, not just at the timing but at the needless cruelty and insult to Bridie, the 87-year-old widow of Mr Brown.
It’s hard to evaluate the full impact or injury for the Brown family.
Adding to the hurt, a Northern Ireland Office spokesperson said: “We have enormous sympathy for Mrs Brown and her family who have suffered so much since Sean Brown’s murder.”
To the anonymous NIO spokesperson, let me been quite blunt: those words are completely meaningless. The Brown family have had their fill of tea and sympathy. They deserve justice.
“Hope,” we are told, “does not glimmer; it burns”.
Mrs Brown has kept such hope burning for answers since the cold and callous murder of her husband in 1997 by the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), ably assisted by state agents.
The extensive levels of collusion/infiltration between state agents and the senior ranks of loyalist and republican paramilitaries has been well proven and never in doubt.
Sinn Féin and the DUP are content not to expose the dirty past of many within the ranks of loyalism and militant republicanism.
Victims get plenty of platitudes and pennies, whilst former paramilitaries get pardons and millions in so called “transitioning” support.
But the great calumny is the British Government’s cruel intent to oppose the one shed of light victims and their families have yearned for, by smoke-screening the pathway to truth by citing “national security”. (While in the Netherlands, they have just published the names of nearly 400,000 Dutch citizens who collaborated with the Nazis).
Whether in Amsterdam or Armagh, the public has a right to know what their parents did during war. There should be no glossing over the truth or the extent of collusion.
It is time for this British government to come clean.
Until they do so, the cries for justice will echo in the heavens until victims have their day.
Since the Good Friday Agreement, victims and their families have been treated atrociously by both the British and Irish Governments.
In the words of one now aged victim, who survived one of the worst atrocities in the north, “it’s as if they are just waiting for us to die out”.
And with their deaths the government believe their stories will die too. But they won’t.
Unfortunately for the British Government, the victims, their families and justice campaigners will always be an inconvenient truth and an inescapable reminder of the blood on the hands of successive administrations throughout the Troubles.
The NIO has spent its entire existence since 1973 covering up and obstructing the truth. Apparently the GFA brought no new dispensation, compassion or openness to that department.
The Legacy Act brought forward by the previous Tory government was an iniquitous and shabby piece of legislation. Labour promised to repeal the Act.
There will be some victims' families who will look to the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) for answers. And that may suffice for them. But not all victims share their confidence.
So there is an onus on the Secretary of State, Hilary Benn, to expedite meaningful reforms if the ICRIR is to win hearts and minds. Actions, not words, matter.
As Martin Luther King said: “We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope.”
The Browns and others will keep the flame of hope burning.