All sides need to answer hard questions and admit difficult truths

In September 1997, shortly after the DUP and UKUP had left the talks process because Tony Blair and David Trimble had agreed to Sinn Fein's inclusion, I wrote this: 'Peace doesn't just depend on Blair, Ahern, Trimble, Hume, Adams and others cutting a deal.
Alex KaneAlex Kane
Alex Kane

“It depends on a point being reached at which all sides are able to tell the unvarnished truth about our collective past. That means ruthless, unedited honesty. It means admitting to mistakes.

“It means owning up to wrongdoing. It means accepting that things could and should have been done differently. It means – and this is the most difficult bit of all – acknowledging that there were faults on both sides, stupidities on both sides, horror from both sides and a tendency to see everything from an us-and-them-you-started-it-first-ya-boo-sucks perspective.”

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Almost 20 years on and I wouldn’t change a word of that. We still haven’t reached the point at which any of us are ready for the unvarnished truth. And even if all the surviving key political/government/military/intelligence players from the 1960s were pumped full of a truth serum and put in rooms with cameras and microphones, I’m pretty sure that all we would get is what they did to each other and why they did it, rather than something which could be described and understood as a collective truth.

Collective truth involves collective agreement about what shaped Northern Ireland from 1921 onwards; how we were governed, how our citizens were treated, why a civil rights campaign began in the mid-1960s, why a new IRA emerged in 1969/70, why the Stormont Parliament was closed in March 1972, the levels of collusion, the levels of infiltration, British policy towards the IRA (my personal belief was that they chose political engagement rather than military destruction), the relationship between unionism and some elements of the UDA and UVF, the relationship between successive Irish governments and the IRA and so on and so on.

A lot of that truth is going to make for some very unpleasant realities for all sides. They are not going to like what they hear. They won’t want to hear it: because hearing it may change their view of everything that has happened here since the 1960s.

I have argued before that in most conflict situations people tend to believe “what they want to believe or what they need to believe. That makes things easier for them.” And Northern Ireland has failed to move into a post-conflict phase precisely because we are still happier to believe what suits us.

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Let’s take Martin McGuinness, for example. He seems to be indicating that he is willing to talk about his past, but only if the British government is prepared to put in the public domain everything it did or sanctioned here from the late 1960s onwards. He knows that the government won’t do that because no government can give the details of its counter terror operations; particularly if there are dissident republican movements still armed and active. But he also knows that his supporters will say, “Martin is prepared to talk about what he did, but the Brits are afraid to let the truth of what they did be made known.”

Some unionists have pooh-poohed McGuinness’s response and said that he should tell the truth anyway. Yet all they actually want him to do is say something like: “Yes, I was in the IRA. Yes, I was a commanding officer. Yes, I gave the nod to terror. Yes, the IRA was very bad. Yes, the IRA was a wicked terrorist organisation. Yes, if it hadn’t been for the IRA Northern Ireland would be a lovely place. Yes, almost everything was our fault. Yes, I’m not fit to be in government.” None of which he is going to do, of course.

I would prefer to ask him some other questions.

What precisely was it that made you conclude that terrorism was the only solution to the ‘problems’ in Northern Ireland?

With the collapse of Stormont in 1972, the subsequent Green Paper on power-sharing and the Irish dimension, and the raft of new legislation under direct rule, why did the IRA decide to step up the campaign?

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Back channels were open between the IRA and the British from early 1972, so was it at that point that the IRA accepted they weren’t going to win a terror campaign?

Do you think that the IRA actually damaged the argument for Irish unity, undermined the SDLP and made it much more difficult for liberal unionism?

Do you ever wake up in the small hours and sweat your regrets?

Is Northern Ireland a better place because of the IRA’s actions?

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Are you serious about building a better Northern Ireland for all, or is Sinn Fein merely in a holding pattern until the demographics shift in their favour?

Given your own past in the IRA how would you accommodate unionism and unionists within the united Ireland you want to create: and why would they believe you?

My own view – and maybe I’m just stupid – is that truth is more likely to emerge from this sort of questioning (to all of the key figures) than to the ‘when did you start beating your wife’ approach which seems to be favoured by too many: an approach which means that nobody wants to discuss anything to do with them.

Parking the truth is always the biggest hindrance to progress. And parking the truth also ensures that the mistakes, bloodshed and instabilities of the past are more likely to be repeated.