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.