How should we deal with the legacy of the troubles?
In 1969, the Army went into Northern Ireland in support of the Stormont regime that had ruled the province as an Orange State since 1921 but was now facing mass protests by Catholics and nationalists demanding civil rights. It didn’t invade. Nor did its commanders or their troops set out to murder anyone who opposed them. They did the job they were sent to do, and in the course of their duties hundreds of them were murdered by the IRA. Other were maimed for life.
At first, the troops were welcomed as liberators. But that didn’t last long. In July, 1970, in the wake of a pitched gun battle between troops and the Official IRA, the Army imposed what turned out to be an illegal curfew on the Catholic Lower Falls district of Belfast. In the 36 hours that followed, during which 20,000 residents were confined to their homes and 5,000 searches were conducted, three men were shot dead and a fourth crushed to death by an armoured car. All four victims were unarmed and found to have no terrorist connections. Another 78 civilians were wounded.
A year later, the 1st battalion of the Parachute Regiment went berserk in the nationalist Ballymurphy housing estate, in West Belfast. The newly-formed Provisional IRA had been active in the area and the Paras were sent in to deal with those responsible for the violence. Eleven civilians, including a Catholic priest, were shot dead over the next two days. No soldiers were killed or wounded. Again, none of the victims was found to have been armed. None was an IRA member. Forty years on, what has been dubbed the Ballymurphy Massacre is the subject of an inquest that many expect to echo the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday.
Over the years, there were many other, smaller incidents in which soldiers were accused of taking the law into their own hands. Most of the claims made were not addressed. Instead, the Army maintained its stance that it only opened fire on those who presented an immediate and credible threat. What is indisputable is that as time progressed, troops lost all sense of being in their own country and treated Northern Ireland like enemy territory.
What happened on Bloody Sunday on January 30, 1972, was, famously, the final straw in the breakdown of trust between the Army and Catholics. During a civil rights protest in the Bogside area of the city of Derry, the Paras opened fire again, killing 14 innocent demonstrators and wounding another 14. Fire was not returned and no soldiers were shot. After an extensive second inquiry (the first having been dismissed as a whitewash), Lord Justice Saville issued a report which found that the Paras had “lost control” and behaved “unjustifiably” towards a crowd that posed no threat. Saville also found that the soldiers responsible had subsequently concocted lies to conceal their guilt.
In 2010, David Cameron told the House of Commons that as a patriot he never wanted to believe anything bad about his country. He went on:
“I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our army, who I believe to be the finest in the world. And I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve. But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear. There is no doubt, there is nothing equivocal, there are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong.”
And there the matter rested – until March this year when Karen Bradley, the Northern Ireland Secretary, in response to charges being laid against “Soldier F” for his part in the Bloody Sunday shootings, blurted out that offences committed by serving soldiers “were not crimes”. Bradley – who had previously confessed to not knowing that Catholics and Protestants tended to vote for different parties – was quickly forced to apologise. But then, just last week, the issue came up again when the newly-appointed Defence Secretary, Penny Mordaunt, unexpectedly threw her weight behind an amnesty for soldiers, only to be told by Theresa May that there would have to be an exception for those charged with crimes while serving in Northern Ireland. Domestic crimes, we were left to understand, were of a different order to those committed overseas.
The problem for jurists, less in legal than in political terms, consists in differentiating the behaviour of the Army from that of the Provisional IRA, whose primary war aim was not to keep the peace but to kill all Crown Forces by whatever means, regardless of circumstances. Officially, 763 soldiers died while serving in Northern Ireland. More than 6,000 were wounded. Little tribute has ever been paid to those who served. A general service medal is the best that has been offered to soldiers who in many cases spent two or three tours of duty in the province. Those maimed have largely been left with their memories and the support of comrades.
The Army’s festering sense of injustice increased in 1998 when the Good Friday Agreement turned out to be, in essence, a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for Republicans. Literally hundreds of convicted terrorists were released from jail and allowed to grow old as “heroes” of the Armed Struggle. Tony Blair further inflamed opinion when he sent out “comfort letters” to terrorists on-the-run guaranteeing them immunity from subsequent arrest or harassment. Veterans were outraged, as was most of the Unionist population.
Not that perceived injustice was entirely one-way traffic – which is where the difficulty arises. Those soldiers who did engage in criminal behaviour were by and large left free to carry on as if they had done no more than their duty. Not only that, they hid behind the badge of patriotism, presenting themselves as protectors when in fact they were murderers.
As someone who covered the early years of the Troubles for the Irish Times and was once fired on by soldiers while walking up the Falls Road, I offer all due respect to the British Army as an institution. I recognise that the task it was given, over a period of some 35 years, was both thankless and necessary. But for those few in its ranks who killed for sport or out of a casual disregard for Irish lives – or because their blood was up (an offence that in wartime could result in a court-martial and the possibility of a firing squad) – I have little sympathy.
Unionists, by contrast, generally take the view that soldiers deemed guilty of even the most serious crimes while serving in NI should be issued, “in all fairness,” with their own version of comfort letters. While this could easily be construed as condoning state terrorism, it might, in fact be a solution to the problem, though with the effect of placing recipients in much the same moral category as the IRA – killers who got away with it. Is the British public ready to endorse this, or would it prefer that nothing at all be done and that all veterans should be allowed to grow old in dignity, and in death to be offered full military honours?
For most of us, I suspect, that would be Plan A.