Opinion

Brian Feeney: We need to draw a line under the past, though many won't agree

Brian Feeney

Brian Feeney

Historian and political commentator Brian Feeney has been a columnist with The Irish News for three decades. He is a former SDLP councillor in Belfast and co-author of the award-winning book Lost Lives

Barra McGrory, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, has said the latest proposals on dealing with the past won't work. Picture by Hugh Russell
Barra McGrory, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, has said the latest proposals on dealing with the past won't work. Picture by Hugh Russell Barra McGrory, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, has said the latest proposals on dealing with the past won't work. Picture by Hugh Russell

IT is a pity Barra McGrory chose to publicise his views on dealing with the past when he did.

They were instantly buried under the avalanche frothing down the Long Walk at Windsor Castle and the noise of the conflicting shouts about the abortion referendum.

McGrory is surely right. The British government's 'Addressing the Legacy of Northern Ireland's Past' will not work, not least because the British have taken possession of the deal worked out at Stormont in 2014 and 2015.

The consultation includes not only the Stormont House Agreement but, ominously, 'the government's manifesto for Northern Ireland 2017'.

The most important factor ensuring failure is the diametrically opposed aims of Sinn Féin and the DUP for addressing the past.

For the DUP, the aim is to ensure that republicans are blamed for everything that happened whereas the RUC, the British army and their local proxies, the UDR, are recognised as heroes defending 'our wee country' against an evil conspiracy.

For Sinn Féin the aim is to demonstrate that the British state engaged in illegal activity to support unionism, British forces and police conspiring with pseudo-gangs, the UVF and UDA, supplying them with weapons to kill not only IRA members but innocent nationalist civilians.

As you see, there is no meeting point for these two views of the past. The extent to which they are irreconcilable is compounded by the British government, a major contributor to the Troubles, supporting the DUP world view and thereby denying its own culpability.

Therefore the plans won't work. The British will conceal anything they want as they have done in other arenas, most notably Kenya, as exposed by Ian Cobain's brilliant journalism in his book The History Thieves. In that instance they destroyed tons of documents which illustrated their savagery.

The proposals will fail not just because of the biased approach this dreadful shambolic British government is adopting but because of the practical points McGrory makes about their legal feasibility.

Any proposals that include prosecutions will go nowhere because no one will reveal any material to the so-called Information Retrieval Commission for fear of prosecution.

Most prosecutions will fail for the reasons McGrory gave, blurred memories, lack of evidence.

Remember, even during the Troubles many prosecutions succeeded only because they were in single judge Diplock courts which often - incredible as it may seem to you if you're under 40 - accepted unsigned 'confessions', not to mention 'confessions' that defendants claimed had been beaten out of them.

The British have allocated £150 million over five years for the Historical Investigations Unit to examine 1,700 cases.

Leaving aside the fact that that's impossible, what happens after five years? Amnesty? End of prosecutions?

In the meantime, any inquests into the same cases will be halted. Previously concluded inquests can't be reopened.

If you remember the Eames-Bradley report of 2009, the most comprehensive attempt to address the past, some of that will be familiar to you but you probably won't remember because the Conservative government ran away from it in 2010.

Eames-Bradley also looked at ways 'to draw a line' and suggested five years, then stop. If their report had been implemented that would have happened three years ago.

There has to be a way to draw a line. Anything else is too expensive, too hypocritical, too dishonest. People will not get what they're looking for.

Not enough attention is paid to other places torn apart. In Spain, for example, when Franco died in 1975 both main parties agreed a Pact of Forgetting, formalised by an Amnesty Law in 1977.

That was 30 years after the Spanish Civil War. According to one Spanish historian this meant "suppressing painful memories derived from the post-civil war division of the population into 'victors' and 'vanquished'", or in our case, into goodies and baddies. The idea of all parties was to concentrate on the future.

It still didn't stop repeated efforts to resurrect the past. In 2007 the Spanish government passed the Historical Memory Law nullifying all the political trials held under Franco.

Since 2010 there have been unsuccessful attempts to overturn the Pact of Forgetting. It is 43 years since Franco died and 80 years since the Spanish Civil War.

You have to draw a line, though many won't agree.