Opinion

Tom Kelly: Digging up the past has uncovered inconvenient truths

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly is an Irish News columnist with a background in politics and public relations. He is also a former member of the Policing Board.

Loyalist Willie Frazer
Loyalist Willie Frazer Loyalist Willie Frazer

Willie Frazer is dead. In normal circumstances, as I have written before about Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley, I tend to leave the dead six feet under with their deeds interred with them.

Frankly, we have enough shenanigans in current politics to worry about.

My initial scepticism about BBC Spotlight has moderated over the past three weeks. My reservations about the hurt (which much of the imagery causes) doesn’t make it any less compelling viewing.

Digging up the past is also throwing up some inconvenient truths. In particular the role of those running national security. The tenacity of Geraldine Finucane and her family in continuing to speak truth onto power is inspiring.

However the illuminating ‘news’ from the Spotlight team was about the late Willie Frazer.

The Spotlight investigative team alleged Frazer was involved in gunrunning, supplying arms to loyalist paramilitaries. His family deny the allegations.

Frazer in life was a pitiful character, flawed, angry, uncompromising, bigoted but also damaged.

Patrick Ryan, the former priest and IRA volunteer appears to share many of those characteristics. In some ways Ryan is worse. To some, he has lost more than his way. Ryan betrayed his vocation.

If the Spotlight allegations are true, then Frazer betrayed the very victims he claimed to represent.

A fringe loyalist wannabe attempted to defend Frazer's alleged involvement with paramilitaries with a biblical simplicity. It was pathetic.

A young Willie Frazer lost his father. Murdered by the IRA in a cowardly attack. That was an unjust tragedy.

The reaction of most victims’ families throughout the Troubles is to seek no revenge for their loss. Rarely do they want the unbearable pain which they endure to be off loaded onto another family.

But there are others who seek to revenge a murder with murder. They are consumed not by loss but by hate. Revenge is not a justifiable cause for murder.

The BBC programme alleged that the Ulster Resistance weapons supplied to paramilitaries may have been involved in up to 70 murders in Northern Ireland. The UDA and UVF were not noted for their selectiveness when it came to choosing victims - any Catholic seemed to do. If Frazer is guilty of the claims, then he will account for that before his God, not a court.

Ryan, however is not dead. Though aged and decrepit he showed no remorse for his actions. In fact the twisted one time pastor appeared to gloat. Though he did strike this writer as being a more sinister version of Walter Mitty.

But if the police have evidence then Ryan should be brought to trial. He has no more right to escape due process than Soldier F. Both are entitled to a fair hearing.

Soldiers who break the law are no more immune from justice than judges who break the law. Unionists need to get their minds around the fact that there is no hierarchy of immunity. (Of course, the exception is if you manage to get the Queen to issue a ‘royal prerogative of mercy’).

The sad reality in Northern Ireland is that we replay the Troubles everyday. Our proximity, in terms of space and time to events and people, some of whom were perpetrators, is still too close, too raw.

A new generation both in loyalism and within dissident republicanism are back shadow boxing over shibboleths and myths. They have learned nothing from the past or the prisons which once were filled by their predecessors.

Even the revelation that the IRA and UDA were riddled with enough informers to fill the Ulster Hall doesn’t put them off repeating the same mistakes.

Ryan and Frazer don’t deserve to be remembered at all. There was no bravery involved in their actions. There was no honesty in their lives - one hid behind a collar and the other a flag. There is no heroism in their deeds. There was simply hate. And hate is no alternative for a political strategy.