Opinion

Denis Bradley: Better to offer a truthful apology than let victims live in false hope

Denis Bradley

Denis Bradley

Denis Bradley is a columnist for The Irish News and former vice-chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board.

Gary Haggarty was a Special Branch informer for 11 years
Gary Haggarty was a Special Branch informer for 11 years Gary Haggarty was a Special Branch informer for 11 years

‘The families who feel they have been denied justice should at least be given the truth’.

That sentence is from an editorial in this newspaper during the week.

It is in reference to Gary Haggarty, the UVF killer and Special Branch informer who was given a very reduced sentence by Belfast Crown Court.

That type of wording nearly always evokes the follow-on sentence; ‘what is truth’?

That families should be given truth pertains to knowing what and why a death or injury happened during the four decades of the troubles.

But there is something out and beyond that, a truth based on honesty and sensitivity and decency.

A truth that stops playing with people’s hopes and dreams.

A truth that faces people with the probable rather than the hoped for or the desired. In therapy it is called tough love. That time may well be upon us.

Politically, it is looking less and less likely that either justice or truth about the past is going to be delivered.

The signs are that the British government is going to respond to the demands of their own soldiers and will introduce a statute of limitation.

If that be true it means they will pass a law that sets down the maximum time after an event within which legal proceedings may be started.

Crudely, if it happened a few years back, it can’t be brought to court.

All our troubles events happened a few years back, so no soldiers in the dock.

The weakness of such an act is that it would be contested in a very senior court of law and would most probably be thrown out on the grounds that it is selective and unfair.

So, the government will take away the unfairness by widening the law to include everyone who could or might be charged with troubles-related offences.

All the protagonists will be included within the statute of limitation. It is an amnesty by another name.

Amnesties are no longer legal in international law.

That will not deter the government greatly because the mood in the country and most particularly in the Conservative Party is to take all law making back into Westminster.

The other thing the government knows is that the political parties here will jump up and down and cry foul while quietly breathing a sigh of relief.

Truthfulness has not been a shining shield among some of our political parties here in confronting their own role in our twisted past and even less truthful in their connections with the diverse victims of the past.

Most of civic society will offer condolence and sympathy to the victims while feeling a great burden has been lifted from its shoulder.

It will be slow to assert that it too has needs and it has a right to desire a future free from obsession with the past.

It has a right to judge it wrong that enormous sums of money are pumped into the criminal justice system to deal with this issue while current problems suffer from lack of resources.

Others in civic society will crudely urge that it would be far better to forget it all together, arguing that what has been done cannot be undone.

If this is an accurate reading of the signs of the times, it would be better to begin grasping the ramifications rather than let people live in false hope or allow them to keep battering their heads against a wall that has no intention of shifting.

Better that politicians and civic society offer a truthful apology to victims that they have been failed in their request for truth and justice. But also, to realise that truth and justice are not the only requirements from the past.

There are needs and services that can still be met; therapies, pensions, recognition payments, story telling facilities and memorials that remember the dead with respect.

There are many in the victims and survivors community who always believed that the governments and the politicians would stretch this issue until most of them were dead.

They may have had the most accurate insight. If they are right, then a great injustice has been done to those who suffered most. It would add to that injustice if the sole concentration on truth and justice were to obscure the need to tackle depression, addiction, trauma, suicide, financial imbursement.

And the final and gross injustice would be if even those decent responses were prevented because politicians and victims alike continued to fight over the definition of a victim.