Boris Johnson’s handling of the troubled Anglo-Irish past is reckless 

A carelessness has crept into the British Government’s approach to Northern Ireland, uncharacteristic of previous administrations.

First came the NI Protocol, putting a border down the Irish Sea. That turned out to be a way of  reminding unionists that when the Conservative and Unionist party has other fish to fry — in this case, Brexit — it’s quite prepared to chuck unionists under a bus.

So far, the Protocol has provoked street violence in mostly loyalist areas, alienated soft unionists amongst the Catholic middle class and generally increased popular support for Irish unity. It may well also see Edwin Poots, a hardline unionist who is also a Young Earth Creationist, replacing Arlene Foster as DUP leader. Apart from his commitment to creationism, another indication of Poots’ unusual political views, which are idiosyncratic even in Northern Ireland, is that he says that Arlene Foster’s most important job is to be a “wife, mother and daughter” — not a politician.

Brexit and the Protocol have provoked yet more unionist splintering. At next year’s Stormont assembly elections this may cost the DUP the right to choose the power-sharing executive’s First Minister, leaving the way clear for Sinn Fein to take the post.

Wiser predecessors to the Johnson Government learned there was only one way of managing the tribal vicissitudes of Northern Ireland and that was by London and Dublin acting like responsible parents trying to manage a troublesome teenager. The first rule is that the teenager’s parents must speak with one voice.

So it was careless of the Secretary of State, Brandon Lewis, to meet the Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney in Dublin last Wednesday for talks about the Protocol and rioting, whilst in London, his officials were simultaneously briefing the Times and Telegraph about another change with the potential to further divide and destabilise the province: namely Number 10’s plans for dealing with the legacy of the 30 year armed conflict.

That conflict is still being fought out every day in the Belfast newspapers and increasingly in the civil courts, with applications for discovery of state papers by relatives of those killed by the state or suspected of being killed as a consequence of state agents colluding in some way with their killers. The number of civil cases now stands at around 1000, with 42 separate judicial reviews. The former Northern Ireland DPP Barra McGrory QC has warned that if the growth of “lawfare” continues, the civil courts risk being paralysed.

Even though the British state was responsible for under 10 per cent of deaths in the Troubles, ever since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 it has been the role of the state that has increasingly become the focus of the legacy debate.

To some extent this was inevitable. Unlike the state, republican and loyalist armed groups don’t keep records of their murderous activities. And even if they did, there are obviously no checks and balances to ensure that they hand them over. Unlike these terror groups, the state at least strives to live up to the standards it rightly sets for itself. This may seem blindingly obvious, but it needs pointing out because republicans have successfully spun the yarn that it was the British state that was more murderous than the IRA. This is deeply frustrating to unionists and the longer this fiction continues, the more it undermines prospects of a meaningful shared future.

Republicans respond that they’ve done their legacy bit. To the extent that thousands have been made accountable for their actions by spending many thousands of years in jail, that is true. So, even when army veterans are being brought before the courts, albeit rarely, republicans see a one-sided criminal justice system – especially when the prosecution collapses, as it did last week against soldiers A&C, accused of delivering the coup de grace to an unarmed IRA man lying wounded on the ground.

Moreover, many of the 300 deaths caused by the army remain unresolved, while those which the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s Legacy Investigation Branch (LIB) have tried to resolve, have progressed at a glacial pace. The LIB and its predecessors has talked a good talk for victims, but by and large it’s been a failure. The experience of Patricia McVeigh is a case in point. In May 1972, her father Patrick was gunned down by undercover soldiers for no reason other than that he was chatting to friends by a dismantled barricade en route home from the pub.  In 2006, the forerunner to the LIB, called the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) promised Patricia they’d have answers to her questions in twelve weeks. That turned into months, then years.

Fresh impetus to her case came in November 2013, triggered by my investigation for BBC Panorama into the unit that shot her father. It was called the Military Reaction Force. Three ex-MRF soldiers admitted on camera that they shot on sight people they suspected of being in the IRA, whether or not they were armed, ignoring the British Army’s live-fire rules of engagement. Patrick McVeigh had nothing whatever to do with the IRA.

The DPP directed the PSNI to “investigate the activities” of the MRF.  The task went to the Serious Crimes Review Team (SCRT) who seem to have limited their “investigation” merely to a review of any usable admissions in the programme. Since the MRF interviewees had been careful not to incriminate themselves, the PSNI appear not to have looked any further.

In January 2015, the case was handed over to the newly established LIB – again, with no evident enthusiasm. I am told the SCRT’s instruction to their LIB colleagues was: “Have a look at this MRF shit, would you?”

For their part, the LIB promised Patricia that “no stone would be left unturned”, that the “truth” would be “pursued no matter where it takes us” and that they were in this “for the long haul.” On average, most LIB officers were only in it for about a year.  The next five years would see a regular churn of detectives in charge of the case, each one having to familiarise themselves anew – and with varying degrees of appetite to pursue their former colleagues.

Digging back into The Past is not every detective’s cup of tea and Patricia found some detectives were hungrier sleuths than others. A notable breakthrough was LIB’s 2016 decision to exhume the body of another unarmed victim of a marauding MRF patrol. In the coffin of 19-year-old Daniel Rooney, was a 9mm round. Both MRF soldiers were armed with 9mm guns, one a sub-machine gun, the other a pistol. Four years have now passed with no word of whether the round can be matched to either weapon. Perhaps a record of the ballistic signatures of their weapons no longer exists.

The LIB has been assisted by a handful of ex-MRF soldiers who disapproved of the unit’s cowboy elements. One told me that the soldier who opened fire on Patrick McVeigh sometimes carried a “kill bag” containing a claw hammer and cheese wire. Although that soldier now lives in Australia, Patricia had high hopes he might be extradited. “I’m looking forward to interviewing him across a table,” one LIB detective told her in 2017.  That moment has also come and gone. While making arrangements for the interview, news came that he’d had had a stroke. Unless he makes a “miraculous recovery”, Patricia has been advised that it’s doubtful whether he’ll ever be questioned.

Earlier this year, the LIB sent the fruits of 13 years of police work to the DPP. “It’s a large and complex case,” the DPP has told Patricia’s lawyer. Now that the Government is about to grant all soldiers involved in the Troubles what amounts to an amnesty, even if the DPP decides there is sufficient evidence for a trial, presumably there won’t be one anyway.

The McVeighs are just one of hundreds of families who have been let down by the absence of a coherent legacy process over the past 23 years since the Good Friday Agreement. The failure to address legacy grievances on both sides has injected more poison into Northern Ireland’s political bloodstream than any other single issue. Mutual mistrust over legacy has contributed in one way or another to practically every collapse of the devolved power-sharing government in Stormont. 

So, when it comes to legacy, there is a premium on unity between the UK and the Republic. Acting unilaterally in this area has always turned out to be a mistake. Because the Johnson Government has often acted unilaterally, trust between London and Dublin has declined to a level not seen for many years. None of this was necessary, since the Johnson Government inherited a mechanism for dealing with legacy that, under David Cameron, had already been agreed both with Dublin and all five of Northern Ireland’s political parties. The Stormont House Agreement was an ingenious, if complex, mix of criminal investigation, truth recovery, and reconciliation.  However, it was never implemented, and the Johnson Government scrapped it.

Instead, whilst keeping Dublin in the dark, the British Government has unilaterally decided to introduce what it briefed last week will be a “statute of limitations” for crimes committed by former members of the security forces up to 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

The Government insists that this statute does not amount to an amnesty. Professor Kieran McEvoy, of the School of Law at Queen’s University, Belfast, says the distinction is Jesuitical. Any measure seeking to “bar criminal prosecutions and/or civil liability with regard to the Northern Ireland Troubles against individuals or categories of individuals by reference to the time passed since the offence was committed (or to when an original investigation was completed), would be an amnesty by another name.”

This “amnesty” will also be extended to all former members of republican and loyalist terror groups, but only because granting the state exclusive protection from criminal liability arising from a conflict would be against international law.

The Government insists that its new approach to legacy puts the needs of victims first, because its ban on prosecutions will be offset by “recovery of information for loved ones and efforts towards lasting reconciliation for all communities”.  Yet nothing can disguise the fact that the amnesty only came about at the behest of the military wing of the Conservative Party. That wing was determined to spare army veterans from criminal investigation. Indeed, it was briefed to newspapers within hours of last week’s collapse of the trial of Soldiers A and C.

In a deeply divided society like Northern Ireland, this approach to legacy was not smart politics – if that is, the Government is serious about selling a credible new legacy process to all sides, having rejected the old one, even though that had been jointly agreed.  This sort of cavalier behaviour suggests they are not serious about it. In his approach to Brexit and the border issue, the Prime Minister has also shown himself to be tone deaf to Irish sensibilities.  Whether he is serious will depend on the credibility of the “information recovery” process, and as always, the devil will be in the detail.

Responding to the amnesty proposal, republicans have already accused the state of letting itself off the hook. Mary Lou McDonald, the President of Sinn Fein, has said any move to give an “amnesty to their troops” would be “disgraceful”. For their part, loyalists protest they’ve lost any prospect of ever bringing IRA godfathers to book.  

In fact, these tribal protestations may not ultimately matter too much – but only so long as the Government’s proposals for “recovery of information” command sufficient cross community support. During the 30 year conflict, many families were told next to nothing by the police about the circumstances of the death of a loved one. The test of Johnson’s “information recovery” process will be how much information is now shared with families.

Of the conflict’s almost 4,000 deaths, some 1,000 remain unresolved. Intelligence reports identifying the prime suspects behind many of these killings have been retained in a massive vault outside Belfast containing literally millions of PSNI documents. If this vast repository can be interrogated efficiently, neither the IRA nor loyalist groups should get a free ride. And even though soldiers and police officers will also be beneficiaries of an amnesty, the state will still be required to conduct an “effective, independent and transparent”  investigation into each unresolved state killing in order to comply with Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Government has said only that a “legacy commission” will meet its Article 2 obligations, but hasn’t said how.  Almost certainly this will require a new investigative unit staffed by detectives independent of the PSNI, who will have to do more than just a quick rummage through yellowing statements in old CID boxes. If this unit is not seen to have pursued all available lines of inquiry, the British Government can expect to find itself back in the civil courts being challenged by relatives. Legacy will revert to its present paralysing lawfare, with the Belfast front pages dripping poison back into the political process. As for army veterans, although they won’t be going to court, an Article 2 compliant investigation will mean that some will not escape unscathed.

An obvious candidate to ensure that this job is done to an Article 2 standard is Jon Boutcher. The former Bedfordshire Chief Constable is now leading Operation Kenova, an investigation into the alleged involvement of the state agent known as Stakeknife in kidnap, torture and murder by the Provisional IRA, and whether any of these crimes were preventable. 

Unofficially, the Government has made it clear that they are no fan of Boutcher’s deep trawls into the subterranean state, probably because what he’s been unearthing is messy. The 20 odd files Boutcher has submitted to the PPS (more are to follow) raise new and searching questions and risk an official rewriting of history about the ultimate benefit of the intelligence-led policing model that dominated the UK’s counter insurgency strategy from 1980. It was this approach that prioritised intelligence picture building through a prolific informer network over exploiting intelligence more fully for the benefit of the criminal justice system. Sometimes preserving that informer network also cost lives.

Tiresome though raking over the coals from up to 50 years ago must be to an English nationalist Prime Minister who seems largely indifferent to Anglo-Irish history and believes a bit of boosterism can sort out knotty problems, there is nonetheless a salutary lesson to be learned from South Africa’s post-apartheid experience. Simply urging everyone to move on, without agreement by all sides about how to achieve this, is a fallacy.  By not dealing with The Past, it “then emerges as being more difficult, more contested, more violent, and leads to greater forms of extremism” says Paul van Zyl, Executive Secretary of  South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “The past will always come back to haunt you if you don’t have a constructive proactive process.”

We’ll find out how constructive Boris Johnson’s approach to legacy will be in tomorrow’s Queen’s Speech, when the Government delivers its legislative agenda for the year ahead. The timing is unfortunate. Also published on Tuesday will be the findings of the inquest into the shooting dead of ten people by the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment in Ballymurphy, West Belfast, in August 1971 – the same unit that shot dead 14 unarmed civilians in Londonderry five months later on “Bloody Sunday”.

That’s another Irish history lesson for the Prime Minister. The legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict has a long tail, but with the right kind of leadership it can be shortened so that everyone can move on.

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