Former IRA members involved in choosing the chief constable is cited by the head of a legacy investigation body in defence of hiring former members of the RUC and army.
Sir Declan Morgan, the ICRIR chief commissioner, was responding after an Irish News report that 17 one time RUC members and up to nine former soldiers are working for the body tasked by the UK government to investigate killings committed during the Troubles.
Declan Morgan: Reconciliation requires inclusion and rights
While the Labour government has vowed to scrap provisions of the the legacy act, it has said the ICRIR will remain in place.
Relatives of victims and activist groups oppose the commission, with the family of murdered GAA official Sean Brown stating it is “infrastructurally prohibited” from finding the truth.
All new criminal cases, inquests, civil actions and Police Ombudsman investigations were halted following the enactment of the Legacy Act.
Critics suggest the new body lacks the independence or powers to properly investigate, particularly in relation to state killings.
Sir Declan, writing in The Irish News on Thursday, argues inclusion is at the foundation of the power-sharing structures as he noted the Rev Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, both former inmates of the Belfast jail, first led a power-sharing Executive in 2007.
He adds: “Three years later, policing and justice powers were devolved from Westminster to Stormont, and some people – formerly active with the IRA – were soon on the recruitment panels selecting PSNI chief constables.”
The Policing Board is involved in recruitment.
These facts, he says, are “pertinent” in relation to The Irish News story and a follow up editorial, which argued that the commission is “heavily staffed” with ex-RUC or soldiers.
“That’s akin to claiming that the pre-Agreement RUC of 1998 was ‘heavily staffed’ by Catholics (then at 8%) or by women (then at 12.6%). This comparison is important,” Sir Declan argues, before revealing the total number employed is around 200 “and growing”.
“If peace in Northern Ireland had required perfect histories and moral certainties, where a person’s past disqualified them from improving society’s future, or where one sector had a veto over another sector’s participation, then we would never have had the Agreement – nor the power-sharing Executive,” he writes.
Critics of the ICRIR, which began work following the introduction of the Legacy Act last year, believe it lacks independence from the state, with provisions also in the act that include giving the secretary of state veto power over the disclosure of documents.
The Court of Appeal ruled last year this power was too broad but left open allowing information to be withheld in individual cases.
Sir Declan, in his defence of staff make up, reveals around “90% of the ICRIR’s employees have never worked for the RUC or army”. He adds that 30 of the commission’s current investigators served in Operation Kenova, and “several others also worked in the Office of the Police Ombudsman”.
He notes: “We recognise that there are people who will not want their cases investigated by former RUC officers.”
“Once we begin singling out for exclusion anyone (in this case, ex-police officers), we risk opening the door to wider practices of exclusion. Who next? And who decides?” Sir Declan argues.
“If we disqualify individuals based on associations or perceptions, this could become a slippery slope that may well pick apart the whole fragile flowering of inclusion that made our peace possible in the first place.”
