The fight for Northern Ireland's past

The way that Northern Ireland’s past has been allowed to become a political battleground is an ongoing scandal that seems only to get worse.

Currently, a pension for victims of the Troubles is delayed because Sinn Fein says that it should cover injured terrorists, even if they were injured as a result of their own bombs. The party describes this demand as an insistence on “equality” and, if it gets its way, one potential claimant is the Shankill bomber, Sean Kelly, who lost an eye when the device he planted in a fish shop went off prematurely, killing nine innocent people.

Just weeks before, the Supreme Court quashed Gerry Adams’s convictions for trying to escape from prison in the 1970s, on the grounds that his internment was not signed off personally by the Secretary of State at the time, William Whitelaw. The judgement opens up the possibility that 230 former internees may seek compensation.

Over and over again, through the courts, through the so-called “legacy process” and through political avenues, the republican movement is allowed to cast the security forces as aggressors in the Northern Ireland Troubles, while the IRA’s campaign of murder is portrayed as justified and necessary. And for the most part, this distortion is allowed to go unchallenged.

In a column in the Belfast News Letter, the solicitor and former Ireland rugby international, Trevor Ringland, estimates that four former republican paramilitaries are holding up pension payments for over four hundred genuine victims of violence. He points out that they, “were part of a very wealthy movement which is more than capable of providing for them.” According to the Irish Times, Sinn Fein is “the richest party in Ireland”, with an extensive property portfolio, as well as a lucrative fund-raising operation in North America.

Its president, Mary-Lou McDonald, whose leadership is commonly depicted as a break from the party’s bloodstained past, recently described the IRA’s campaign as “not just justified but inevitable”. If she had been old enough, she claimed, there was “every chance” she would have joined the organisation.

Ms. McDonald acknowledges that there is a difference between “combatants and civilian victims”, but insists that they must all be included in the pension scheme, so that the criteria do not reflect “judgements as to who was right and who was wrong.” Republicans like to talk about “combatants” in the Troubles to suggest an equivalence between terrorists and members of the armed forces who tried to prevent them from murdering and maiming.

Currently, the pension’s draft guidelines exclude prisoners who spent more than two and a half years in prison, unless an assessment panel deems that there are mitigating circumstances. As a result, Sinn Fein has refused to nominate one of Northern Ireland’s devolved departments to administer the scheme.

Meanwhile, Lord Justice Kerr’s Supreme Court ruling that Gerry Adams’s detention was unlawful has been subjected to increasing scrutiny, with a growing chorus of legal and political voices suggesting that the judge misinterpreted the law and failed to grasp the complexities of government.

In a paper commissioned by the think tank Policy Exchange, Professor Richard Ekins and Sir Stephen Laws criticised the decision to allow Adams to appeal his conviction “out of time”, in the first place. They also pointed out that the Carltona Principle, which allows officials to act in the name of the secretary of state, is “fundamental to government”. Lord Kerr was wrong to disregard the principle and, contrary to the judge’s assertions, the Detention of Terrorist (Northern Ireland) Order was drafted specifically to allow a minister of state or under minister of state to sign an interim custody order (ICO) of the type that jailed Adams.

This assessment has been endorsed by former head of the civil service, Lord Butler, and former attorney general Geoffrey Cox.

In another extraordinary intervention, Lord Howell, who was a minister of state in Northern Ireland at the time of Adams’s detention, flatly contradicted the notion that Whitelaw did not personally consider the ICO. “One can be absolutely sure that it would have been discussed most fully and confirmed by the secretary of state before the ICO was made.” Howell believes that Lord Kerr’s judgement, “badly misunderstood the nature and the practicalities of government,” and he claims that the Supreme Court, “misinterpreted the nature and scope of the 1972 (Detention of Terrorist) Order.”

It’s unusual for such high-profile figures to critique a judgement so directly, and, if their criticisms are well-founded, it is highly significant. It means that, in effect, the courts have wrongfully handed republicans another weapon to use in their campaign against the state. Critics have come to describe this continuation of Sinn Fein’s “struggle” through legal channels as “lawfare”.

The IRA and other Irish separatist paramilitaries killed over 2,100 people during Northern Ireland’s Troubles and seventy per cent of those murders remain unsolved. The “peace process” was nudged along by granting former terrorists pardons and “letters of comfort”, while the resources that are devoted to “policing the past” are directed disproportionately at investigating a comparatively small number of killings that involved members of the security forces.

In March, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Brandon Lewis, outlined new proposals for dealing with the legacy of the Troubles. His statement represented progress from previous plans, placing a greater emphasis on ending the “cycle of reinvestigations for the families of victims and veterans alike.”

Republican politicians will attack this announcement, just as they will continue to insist that former terrorists should be treated as if they were victims of the Troubles. Undoubtedly, there will be enormous pressure to draft the final legislation in a way that appeases Sinn Fein’s incessant demands. It’s long past time that the government stood up to attempts to demonise the security forces and the appalling campaign to dress IRA terrorism up as a justifiable “war”.