On an island still tormented by the Troubles, Britain’s Legacy Act is making things worse | Fintan O’Toole

Wellfifty years ago on May 17 1974 my father, a bus conductor, was on strike. That day the Troubles arrived with a vengeance in my hometown of Dublin. Three bombs exploded at different locations in the city center during rush hour. Since the buses were not running, there were more people walking these streets than usual. Twenty-three of them were killed, and another three later died of their injuries. Another bomb that went off 90 minutes later in Monaghan, on the southern side of the border, killed seven people.

In 1984, when I was trying to write material for the 10th anniversary of the bombings, I called the houses of some of the bereaved families. Nobody wanted to talk to me. They felt betrayed, abandoned, already forgotten. They didn’t trust anyone. Marie Sherry, who was wounded but survived, later described how in the weeks and months after the massacre she would ask her mother, “Mom, is there any news about those people who did the bombing? Was anyone charged? There was never any news. There were no names. No one was charged. I lived my life thinking, “These guys are walking around. They might be sitting next to me in the cinema. They might be on the bus.

This torture continues to haunt tens of thousands of people who lost loved ones or were themselves maimed in atrocities during the Troubled Times. Writing in 2021John Butcher, now Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, noted how anniversaries mark not only moments of death but also the unbearable passing of years of ignorance: “Anniversaries of such horrific events as the devastating attacks in Dublin and Monaghan will continue to be an unbearably painful reminder of the mistrust and disharmony that existed then and sadly, without answers for families, remains today.

Mistrust and disharmony remain because impunity runs deep. Figures obtained by the investigative website The Detail in 2018 showed 1,186 out of 3,200 murders in Northern Ireland (which does not include those in the Republic of Ireland or Great Britain) remain unresolved. Of these, 46% were attributed to republican paramilitaries, 23% to loyalist paramilitaries and 29% to security forces. The last figure is telling: the British state is not a neutral presence in all this. There is a lot of skin, bones and blood in the game.

It is worth remembering that paramilitaries, including the IRA, whose political wing was Sinn Fein, remain deeply rooted in this culture of impunity. Just last month, the investigation in the sectarian killings of 10 Protestant workers at Kingsmills in County Armagh in 1976 noted that the IRA continued to lie about carrying out the massacre. The coroner also recorded that the IRA had refused to commit to the inquiry and that there had been “no acknowledgment by the IRA of the total wrongfulness of the atrocity, its impact on the bereaved or the damage caused to the whole community”.

This harm continues to be inflicted through selective outrage. Some of those who require accountability from the British state are exempted from the same restrictions. In the absence of a comprehensive truth and reconciliation process, the basic right of all bereaved to know what happened to their loved ones is being used as a weapon for partial and biased stories. The truth is laced with selective silence. Whatever reigns.

Yet democracies should be held to higher standards than paramilitary killers. As Boutcher, then an investigator multiple murders attributed to Freddie Scappaticci, who doubled as an IRA insider and a British agent, put it in 2021: “Transparency and honesty is what distinguishes democracies from those who committed these crimes. It is central to our values ​​as individuals, organizations, elected representatives and governments that we provide families with the truth.”

The truth about the involvement of British civil servants in many murders remains murky. In the case of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, for example, there have long been doubts about whether the Ulster Volunteer Force, which took over in 1993, could carry out such a complex and carefully coordinated operation on their own. An official inquiry in the Republic concluded that although there was no direct evidence of the involvement of members of the British security forces, it was “neither fantastic nor absurd” to believe it had happened. Similar suspicions have been linked to dozens of other murders committed by Glennan’s gang which operated within the UVF and certainly contained many members of the security forces.

The British government – ​​against the opposition of every single political party in both parts of Ireland – has already used the Northern Ireland Troubles (Succession and Reconciliation) Act to end not only criminal investigations into the murders of distressed people, but also investigations and civil cases brought by relatives and survivors and to establish instead independent commission for reconciliation and recovery of information. It also separately announced it would order an official history of the problems as recorded in state files.

Some highly respected people are involved in these initiatives: Sir Declan Morgan, who is chief commissioner of the independent commission, is a former Lord Chief Justice of the Northern Ireland and the history project’s co-chairs, Lord Paul Bew and Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, are distinguished academic historians.

But the lifeblood of such institutional efforts is public trust, a trust that is extremely difficult to establish in a context where the British state has such a deplorable history of confusion. Why should historians have access to government files that are not available to grieving families? Why, even if we were to accept that criminal trials are now extremely unlikely in most unsolved murder cases, should coroner’s inquests be canceled as well?

Keir Starmer has promised to revise the Inheritance Act. If and when he has the power to do so, he should begin with three basic propositions. First, the rights of bereaved families and survivors are paramount. Second, any truth recovery process must be jointly devised by the Northern Ireland Executive and the UK and Irish governments – it must be trusted by all. Third, and perhaps most painfully for a future Labor government, Britain must drop the pretense of being merely an honest broker in all this. The state – including under the Labor administration – was a party to the conflict. It has a historical obligation to subject its actions to independent judgment. Until he accepts this responsibility wholeheartedly, the poison of the past will continue to seep into the future.