Don't deprive the dead of their truth
Brian Feeney, Irish News, December 24, 2003
The last woman to be hanged in Britain, Ruth Ellis, died in July 1955. Last
September people campaigning to have her death sentence overturned managed
at last to have her case reviewed by the Court of Appeal, unsuccessfully as
it turned out. Forty-eight years after? Nothing.
Descendants of soldiers in the First World War 'shot at dawn' for cowardice,
as the sentence prescribed, are still campaigning for inquiries into the
circumstances surrounding their deaths and demanding the sentences be
overturned.
That's nearly 90 years ago.
This whole page could be filled with a list of ongoing inquiries and demands
for inquiries into accidents at sea, rail accidents, air accidents, car
accidents, most famously the one Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed died in.
However, according to Hugh Orde chief constable for the time being, Ireland
is different.
He's opposed to holding public inquiries into individual murders perpetrated
during the Troubles. It “won't solve anything” he says.
He says, pointlessly, that the state wasn't the main killer, rather the IRA
and loyalist paramilitaries were.
Now, Mr Orde needs to be very careful here on two counts.
First, the stance of opposing inquiries strays into political territory,
unionist territory.
All nationalist politicians want inquiries into state killings. Unionist
politicians don't, even when it's clear the security forces were complicit
in some killings. After all, they were their security forces. Along with the
British administration here, unionists aren't even keen on inquests.
Disgracefully, even more than 20 years after some killings, inquests haven't
been completed.
In 2001, when nationalists had won the argument on inquiries, David Trimble
came up with his tit-for-tat inquiry demand, implying Garda collusion with
the IRA in certain murders.
The price for any inquiry into the misdemeanours of security forces in the
north would be one in the south too which unionists hope will embarrass the
Irish government, the unspoken admission being that inquiries here will
embarrass the British. Treacherous territory for Hugh Orde to blunder into.
This brings us to the second and more important issue which unionists
understandably seek to avoid but which seems eternally beyond Hugh Orde's
grasp.
There is a fundamental difference between state killings and IRA killings.
It is this: the state's primary function is to preserve life. The whole
point of the IRA was to take the lives of security force members and
loyalists. There's no point whatsoever having inquiries into IRA murders
when the finding will be 'the IRA dunnit'. Yes, well we know that, thank
you. That's what the IRA was for. And what?
It's an entirely different matter when someone like Sir John Stevens stands
up and says that the state conspired with loyalist paramilitaries to kill
its own citizens. That's the opposite of what the state is supposed to do.
Even worse, the British government was not just complicit in killing its own
citizens willy-nilly, but allowed targeting of members of one community,
northern nationalists, some of whom had no involvement in any political or
paramilitary activity at all.
Hugh Orde needs to realise that the demand for inquiries is not just from
relatives of victims of five or six murders as he says dismissively but it
comes from the whole nationalist community who not only want to find out
what the British security apparatus was up to here for 35 years, but also
have a right to find out. Nationalists know the British will never concede
an inquiry with the scope necessary to uncover the full extent of the
skulduggery Stevens looked at.
However, they believe inquiries into four killings Judge Cory was asked to
look at may shed some light on a broader scene. That's why inquiries are
important to the wider nationalist community beyond the relations of the
victims.
It's true too that for some people there's a political agenda behind the
demand for inquiries and that agenda is to discredit the British security
forces here, to show that an armed struggle against a corrupt and rotten
system was justified.
There's an understandable resistance on the part of the British to allow
that agenda to succeed but there's a political agenda behind that resistance
too, an agenda which supports whatever the security forces did, in the
arrogant belief they did it for the best motives.
It was that stupid, unthinking belief which allowed free rein to the sort of
casual collusion and corruption described in the Barron report which began
in the 1970s and the continuance of which has made Hugh Orde's job of
gaining nationalist support for a police force so difficult.
It was Voltaire who said: “We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe
only truth.”
Wholehearted support for the search for truth would help Hugh Orde's task
enormously.