There is an account on Twitter exclusively dedicated to naming victims of the IRA during the conflict that was waged from the late 1960s through to the 1990s.
Recalling the names and lives of victims is an important part of remembering for friends and relatives of those deceased.
Every life taken in conflict leaves a legacy of pain and hurt that endures. The father of a child murdered during the Troubles, Jack Kennedy, once remarked that the bullets that killed his son didn’t just travel in distance, but also in time.
The Twitter account is popular with many unionist politicians and former RUC/British Army combatants precisely because it retains a narrow focus exclusively on the actions of republicans.
It affirms the simplicity of a world view and narrative that once was uniformly reflected by the state and its institutions.
Life in the north of Ireland has changed utterly in so many ways since then, and the failure of many within unionism to come to terms with those changes is a recurring theme hindering our capacity to progress as a post-conflict society.
On August 14 this year, the account recorded tweets acknowledging the deaths of two individuals, Charles McNeill and William Meaklim, both killed by the IRA in 1974 and 1975 respectively. The dreadful circumstances in which their lives ended was recorded on a date that will forever be of great significance to their families.
What was not recorded were the names, faces and stories of seven Catholics killed in seven different incidents across the years from 1969 to 1994 by the RUC, B Specials, British Army and loyalist paramilitaries on that very same date (August 14). Those not deemed worthy of record included a twelve-year-old girl murdered by a British soldier on her way to confession, and a 20-year-old man brutally murdered by loyalists after he had escaped from captivity and sought refuge with strangers so poisoned by sectarian hatred that they betrayed an innocent man delivering him to the arms of his killers.
The decision by the British government to not hold a public inquiry into Pat Finucane’s murder was entirely predictable in spite of the UK Supreme Court ruling last year that none of the previous investigations had been adequate and were not human rights compliant.
It has long been apparent that the British state will do everything in its power to avoid the truth surrounding Pat Finucane’s murder emerging into public view for fear of what it will confirm about both the extent of collusion and how it was operated as state policy directly from the corridors of power in London.
The responses of unionist politicians to Brandon Lewis’s announcement betrayed the utter contempt too many continue to have for families of victims not fitting into their simplistic and wholly inadequate narrative of ‘the Past’. A few even sought fit to warn that a public inquiry into the murder would confirm the existence of a hierarchy of victims.
The truth is that there has always been a hierarchy of victims in Northern Ireland.
The British Army and RUC were permitted to murder with impunity throughout the conflict, from those early days in August 1969 onwards. Their victims were routinely defamed, the suffering of their relatives prolonged and exacerbated by deliberate falsehoods peddled by the state and its mouthpieces. No other group of relatives have had to accept knowing from the moment their loved ones were murdered to the present day that there is virtually no prospect of the killers ever facing time in prison.
Many victims of the British state and its forces were not even provided with the public space to tell their stories until well into the peace process, including the families of the Ballymurphy Massacre and those bereaved by the murderous actions of the Glenanne Gang.
Narratives of the past will remain contested, but the lives and stories of all victims deserve to be afforded the dignity of space and to be tactfully addressed, regardless of how inconvenient that may be to political parties. On this note, the manner in which Mary Lou McDonald appropriately intervened to compel her party colleague, Brian Stanley, to apologise and delete an insensitive tweet about the Narrow Water bombing last week contrasted markedly with Arlene Foster’s attempt to weasel out of reprimanding her party colleagues, Paul Frew and Sammy Wilson, for similarly provocative and insensitive comments about the Loughgall killings and the Finucane family respectively.
Anyone proclaiming themselves to be ‘relieved’ at the British state denying Geraldine Finucane the right to truth about her husband’s murder cannot credibly claim to be interested in truth, justice nor a genuinely shared and reconciled existence in this contested land.
