The contrast in setting, in language, in mood, could not have been more different. None of the personalities were the same but most shared a common if diverse background.
But there was no doubting the issue. In all three locations across Belfast it was exactly the same – the legacy of the conflict.
Over the last two weeks the failure to resolve the legacy of the conflict in terms of a truth process, a pension for the disabled and the status of former political prisoners, played itself out in Belfast’s courts and in a debate at Queen’s University. A debate which attracted leading opinion makers from all sides of the conflict and those who helped make peace possible.
The unresolved legacy of the conflict runs the risk of generating a mood of despair and detachment among tens of thousands of people affected by the loss of a relative, an injured and disabled person or a former political prisoner.
The human cost in terms of lives lost, people disabled and imprisonment, for a society as small as the north is massive.
People talk, and rightly so, about their feelings and disappointment, their experience of an incomplete peace to the peace the rest of us enjoy.
A life-long friend of mine, severely disabled when he was 16 in a loyalist bomb attack on a bar he was in, asked me recently if I had forgotten about people like him who were disabled.
He read in this paper my review of Barney Rowan’s book, ‘Unfinished Peace’ in which I had referred to friends of mine. IRA friends who had died, or gone to prison or lived in exile whereas I made no reference to him and his grievous loss, his disability and his and his family’s decades’ long struggle in dealing with it.
Of course I had not forgotten him. How could I? Our life-long friendship is testament to that but his point about the conflict’s disabled is well-founded.
I witnessed an amazing act of generosity at the Queen’s University debate. Paul Crawford, whose father was killed by loyalists, said he held no animosity towards his killer and wished him well.
George Hamilton, the chief constable, spoke of the silence of police families who lost loved ones or were disabled; republican Eibhlin Glenholmes spoke about the injustice nationalists experienced being overlooked and the loyalist Winston ‘Winky’ Irvine spoke about the loss inside the loyalist community also being ignored; Kim Mawhinney from the Ulster Museum referred to the role art can play in remembering the past. Over 100,000 people recently visited two conflict-related exhibitions at the museum.
The mood at the Queen’s meeting was thoughtful, polite, serious and focused on how to resolve the truth aspect of legacy.
The journalist Barney Rowan suggested “quiet conversations” in private with the relevant people.
Sean ‘Spike’ Murray, one of Sinn Fein’s negotiators, outlined the efforts the party had made to deal with the British government’s ‘concerns’ about its ‘national security’, including a proposal that the Irish and British governments appoint a panel of three judges to adjudicate on sensitive information. The British have rejected this.
It was anything but ‘quiet conversations’ in Justice Weir’s court room over the last week during a review into 56 delayed legacy inquests into the deaths 96 people.
It was ‘trench warfare’, as an exasperated and angry judge harried lawyers for the police and British Ministry of Defence. Weir sought the truth. The police and MoD sought to block it by protecting the history of the RUC and British Army and delaying disclosure of their files into these killings.
The judge dismissed out of hand the claim the delay was due to a lack of resources and promised a ‘row’ until his instructions were positively responded to.
Blocking the truth in a Belfast court room reverberates way beyond those chambers. The integrity of the police and its chief constable are being damaged. Support for the police is being undermined.
It has to stop.
So too discrimination against former political prisoners as was evidenced in another courtroom battle where Martin Neeson challenged being sacked from his job because he was a former political prisoner.
The legacy logjam rests primarily at the British government’s door. To resolve it requires an end to its fortress mindset.
