Opinion

Claire Simpson: Gregory Campbell's call for 'accurate picture' of the Troubles a pipe-dream

Seamus Bradley was shot dead by the British army in 1972
Seamus Bradley was shot dead by the British army in 1972 Seamus Bradley was shot dead by the British army in 1972

Three years after the Battle of the Bogside in 1969, 19-year-old IRA man Seamus Bradley was shot and killed in Derry’s Creggan.

It took almost 50 years for a coroner to rule that the the teenager’s killing by the British Army was unjustified. But last week that finally happened.

Coroner Judge Patrick Kinney told Belfast Coroner's Court the teenager was killed in July 1972, during the army’s Operation Motorman, even though he was unarmed and posed no threat to army personnel in a Saracen vehicle.

Yet DUP MP Gregory Campbell took a different angle on the case.

In an extraordinary statement just hours after the judge announced his findings, the East Derry MP claimed the ruling had added to a “distorted narrative” of the Troubles.

He claimed it was yet another case which probed the activities of the security forces "whilst the actions of terrorists continue to have very few investigations" and did not take into account the wider context of the time including that the British army was attempting “to ensure that communities were not overrun by terrorists”.

"We need to have a more accurate picture of what was unfolding at the time or we will see a distorted narrative, increased polarisation in our community and the carrying forward of problems from Northern Ireland’s past into our present and future," he said.

It begs the question - whose picture is accurate? Writing in The Irish News last week about the three days of violence in August 1969 which culminated in the army being deployed on our streets, Dr Eamon Phoenix said that historians can’t even agree on when the Troubles actually began. Did the conflict start in August 1969 or in October the previous year when a civil rights march in Derry was batoned by the RUC? Fifty years on, academics are still debating this question.

The notion of a neat agreed narrative would certainly solve some of the legacy issues which have continued to plague our society and have affected young people who weren’t even born during the conflict.

The DUP MP is correct when he says that the problems of our past are being carried into the future. But wasn’t it ever thus? And isn’t Mr Campbell exactly one of those who refuse to give any quarter when asserting his version of past events?

We are about as likely to agree an “accurate picture” of the Troubles as Mr Campbell is to play in the All-Ireland football final at Croke Park.

Even the facts in the Bradley case remain disputed.

Judge Kinney found that the soldiers did not give the teenager even basic first aid, but, contrary to what his family asserted, he also found that the army did not assault the IRA man.

The teenager’s family alleged he sustained fatal injuries under interrogation. The judge rejected this.

Mr Campbell’s notion that we can create an “accurate picture” of the Troubles seems at odds, not just with our lived experience of the Troubles, but with human behaviour in general.

In Julian Barnes’s novel The Only Story, the narrator Paul looks back on a long love affair he had with a much older married woman Susan Macleod.

All the way through the book, he tries to make sense of that first love. He tries to write down what love is, then, coming back to those lines months or years later, crosses them out and writes new ones, only to later agree with some of the old sentences.

The painful thing about his story is that he can’t really grasp what it meant, only that it was the most significant thing in his life. He can’t even decide on a consistent narrative, even though everything which happened in the novel happened to him.

A judge has ruled on the Bradley case but no one ruling can tell the whole story. Mr Campbell is right to say that all deaths during the Troubles have to be seen in the wider context of the time. Yet that context is itself open to debate.

What is certain is that, in the absence of a proper legacy strategy, grieving families have the right to get answers through the coroners’ courts. Those findings may not please everyone, including Mr Campbell, but they must be made.