The comments from Archbishops Eamon Martin and John McDowell, along with those from Lord Hain, in Wednesday’s Irish News, reminded me of the closing paragraph of my column on May 20.
‘Huge amounts of time and money will be pumped into this latest venture. Throwing money at this sort of project is something we’re particularly good at. It fuels the pretence that we’re serious about the truth when, instead, we just want to convey the impression we’re serious. One thing is certain. Whatever actually emerges at the end of this process there’ll be nothing resembling consensus or an agreed truth.’
I was writing a couple of days after Brandon Lewis (one of the Lucky Dip collection of secretaries of state we have had this year) had introduced the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill in the House of Commons. As ever, I was pointing out that reconciliation, in the traditional meaning of the word, is only possible when the post-conflict resolution stage has been reached. It wasn’t reached when the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was signed in April 1998. It wasn’t reached when the GFA was endorsed in a referendum a few weeks later. It wasn’t reached when the first executive was formed in December 1999. It wasn’t reached when the DUP and Sinn Féin concluded their own arrangements in May 2007.
We are no nearer to that stage now than we were at any of those four previous moments. Indeed, I would argue that we are probably further away, because most of the hope that underpinned those moments has been crushed under the weight of unpleasant realities: most notable of which is that a majority of voters (around 80 per cent, in fact) still vote for us-and-them parties, especially the big two champions of a polar opposites executive.
As Lord Hain notes (and he was writing on the day of the bill being debated in the Lords), ‘It is a shameful piece of legislation and I cannot see how anyone who has a thought for Northern Ireland and the impact of its violent past on victims and survivors can possibly support it.’
He’s right, of course. Every political party here, along with the victims groups and the Irish government opposes the legislation. So, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that one of the main reasons the UK government supports a bill that goes out of its way to shut down the legal pathways to justice and accountability, is that it doesn’t care all that much one way or the other.
Truth and reconciliation must go hand in hand. You cannot have one without the other. Crucially, if the government puts in place legislation which will make it almost impossible to even search for truth, let alone find it at some point, it will actually hinder the opportunity to agree on common narratives and provide the keystones required for reconciliation. Even more worrying, the proposed Independent Commission for Reconciliation replaces the much firmer approach of investigation with the ‘review’ approach; and as everybody knows (particularly those who have most to benefit from a change of approach), a review is, in essence, no more than a linguistic confection.
Ironically, the archbishops are more brutal in their assessment of the bill than I have been: ‘Reconciliation in both the religious and civil sense involves the restoration of relationships; it requires patience, the slow building of trust leading to courageous truth telling, and immense forbearance. Nothing in this bill goes anywhere near providing the environment for that to take place. Perhaps the very opposite…On the contrary, it will deepen division and further demoralise all but a tiny minority of those it purports to help. It seems as though it has been designed to fail.’
And people accuse me of pessimism! But John and Eamon are right. When I first read the bill and then wrote about it in the Irish News six months ago my conclusion was that it was doomed to failure—even if it made its way through the parliamentary process. It was entirely the wrong way to address legacy and reconciliation and I refuse to believe that those who prepared it and made it a government priority could not see the stupidity of what they were doing. Even the briefest of conversations with the parties and the victims groups should have impressed upon them the folly of this legislation.
But no: they pushed ahead regardless. In so doing they have conveyed the very clear impression that a legislative and linguistic confection is good enough for the tens of thousands of victims and their families: and that amnesties, which are, to all intents and purposes, on offer, are a perfectly acceptable way of bringing closure. On both counts they are wrong. Rather than improving an already exceedingly difficult situation they are in the process of making matters very much worse. And no, I don’t think they either understand or care about the consequences of their actions.
If they did, the NIO would not have been so unthinking as to issue this statement on Tuesday: ‘The legacy bill seeks to address the legacy of Northern Ireland’s past by implementing an effective information recovery process that will provide answers for families and help society to look forward.’
They know that’s not true. But truth, along with legacy and reconciliation, doesn’t appear to matter to the government right now.
