Ben Lowry: Men like Ronnie Appleton and Alan McQuillan helped prevent civil war in Northern Ireland, yet their generation is passing and with it goes the truth of what happened

(To read Ben Lowry’s column on wanting Djokovic to win aged 39, click on this link here)

​Peter McCormack was killed in the atrocious 1992 shooting. It is the latest damages award in an attack in which collusion with loyalists is alleged, such as the £400,000 paid recently to Eugene Reavey, whose brothers were murdered in 1976.

While victims deserve truth and justice, I share the concern of the former Ireland rugby international and reconciliation activist Trevor Ringland that there is now a compensation fund that is only open for one category of victims – those who have claims against the security forces. By far the largest category of victims, those of republican violence, have little prospect of redress.

Setting aside the vast cost of these legacy settlements when the UK faces huge financial problems, they cement the lie that the UK was murderously in hock with loyalists when a glance at the statistics shows that such terrorists in fact had poor intelligence. They rarely killed IRA members and went for an easier target, Catholic civilians.

It is ten years since I said that London should rebalance legacy probes by launching inquiries into Irish culpability for the past, such as the Republic’s extradition policy (103 out of 110 extradition requests between 1973 and 1997 were refused). We need formal estimates into how many people were killed on the border as a result.

But each year much of the knowledge of what actually happened in the long years of IRA-led terror is lost as the people who kept society functioning die. If you were aged 30 at the height of the Troubles in 1972 you would now be 84.

Last year the prosecutor Ronald Appleton died aged 97, then the RUC deputy chief constable Blair Wallace, 87, followed by the civil service head Sir Ken Bloomfield, 94, and later the former PSNI assistant chief constable Alan McQuillan, 70. I knew Appleton and Bloomfield through family connections, and later talked to them and McQuillan as a journalist. Unless such personalities write a memoir, they tend to say little in public about the past. Discretion was part of their career.

The new legacy push to justify IRA violence retrospectively is emerging alongside overblown republican claims of past sectarianism in Ulster. Only a few commentators, such as the economist Graham Gudgin, have challenged the exaggeration of anti-Catholic discrimination in housing in the 1960s.

Ronnie Appleton, who was chief prosecutor during some of the worst years in the Troubles, was a remarkable and cosmopolitan man, who became president of the Belfast Hebrew Congregation. As a child I was intrigued that he had bodyguards and asked to see their weapons. Now, when I think of the lawyers and judges murdered by the IRA, I shudder at the risk that he faced by taking on such a vital role. One of his sons has said Ronnie saw taking on such work as his duty in a time of turmoil. Another son said he saw his father not as a prosecutor but a defender – of family and society.

Shamefully, Ronnie Appleton never became a judge. In 2024 we reported a claim in historic Irish cabinet papers, released years later, that this was because the then lord chief justice Robert Lowry (no relative of mine) “disliked Jews as much as he did Catholics”. I have seen Irish cabinet papers do this before – report conversations (in this a 1985 conversation between the late lawyer PJ McGrory and an Irish official) that then seem to become part of the historical record. Lord Lowry is not alive to defend himself. On the specific claim of anti-semitism, I have met people who knew Ronnie Appleton much better than I did who think such prejudices did hold him back, and others who are outraged by the claim.

One thing I believe, however, is that as a Jew he lost out to the determination to appoint Catholics to the bench. I spoke to him about this after an article I wrote 20+ years ago when I was covering newly released Stormont papers.

They had an exchange of letters dating to 1968, just before the Troubles, in which the prime minister of NI, Terence O’Neill and his most senior Stormont cabinet colleagues, were absolutely determined to appoint a Catholic judge, Eoin Higgins, over a better qualified Protestant barrister, Maurice Gibson. The unionist leaders were unanimous that this must happen, because they would be accused of sectarianism if it did not. Incredibly, the Labour UK prime minister, Harold Wilson, stepped in to order that the best qualified candidate – Gibson, later murdered by the IRA – be appointed. See below for more on that extraordinary story.

No-one paid attention when McQuillan wrote in this paper that legacy investigators might face “political pressure, not least from the two governments, not to pursue those whose arrest might ‘destabilise the peace process’”. Or when he said that things such as On The Run letters to IRA men were among decisions made in “the peace process [that] have utterly undermined, indeed destroyed, our real ability to deliver for victims”.

• THE 1968 CABINET PAPER REVELATIONS SHOWING A DETERMINATION TO PROMOTE CATHOLIC JUDGES The then Labour prime minister Harold Wilson blocked Terence O'Neill's efforts in 1968 to find a Catholic judge for the High Court, because the most qualified candidate was a Protestant — Maurice Gibson, who was later murdered by the Provisional IRA.

In 2003, then newly declassified Cabinet papers showed that Captain O'Neill, the Ulster Unionist premier of Northern Ireland, failed to convince Downing Street that a Catholic should get the vacancy.

A remarkable exchange of letters suggested that overtly political factors were considered before the post was given to Maurice White Gibson QC, whose 1987 murder was examined by Judge Cory for evidence of Garda collusion.

The frank correspondence began in October 1968 when the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, wrote to the Captain O'Neill (later Lord O'Neill) to say that he had "no doubt" that Mr Gibson was the right candidate.

In Mr O'Neill's reply, which he copied to Mr Wilson, he acknowledged the "high standing" of Mr Gibson, but added: "It is distasteful to me to have to mention considerations which, in an ideal world, would be irrelevant but we have learned from hard experience here that appointments made on merit alone are frequently criticised if they do not result in a balance between the two sections of our community.

"If Justice Sheil is now replaced by a Protestant, I have no doubt that it would be insinuated, if not actually alleged, that it is the Northern Ireland Government which has brought its influence to bear to ensure the appointment of a Protestant."

Mr O'Neill added: "I do want to make it absolutely clear that we would be perfectly happy to see a qualified Roman Catholic appointed to this vacancy."

And in a covering note to Prime Minister Wilson, Mr O'Neill wrote: "I have no doubt that the past appointments and the one now proposed have been eminently justified on merit, but I can only say that when we state precisely the same thing about other appointments which we make on the same basis, out motives are at once impugned, not least by members of your own party at Westminster."

Lord Gardiner replied: "I need hardly say that these are considerations to which I gave anxious thought before I wrote to you."

But despite considering the elevation of leading Catholic silks and a Catholic county court judge, Lord Gardiner had "no doubt at all" that Mr Gibson was most qualified.

He had reached this conclusion with "very considerable regret" but he was sure there would be stronger criticism if he failed to recommend the best qualified man.

Mr Wilson also replied to say that the promotion of Mr Gibson had his "full support" because the appointment should be made "strictly" on merit.

He added: "But if the appointment is criticised in the House of Commons, I should certainly wish to make it clear that the Government here take full responsibility for the appointment and that it was made entirely on the merits without pressure of any kind."

Mr Gibson was appointed, but some eighteen months later, in 1971, the political situation was such that the new Conservative Government seemed to be as keen to find a Catholic judge as Captain O'Neill had been [see side story].

And a Catholic judge who was appointed some years after Mr Justice Gibson, Eoin Higgins, narrowly avoided the same deadly fate. In July 1988 Mr Justice Higgins and his wife were crossing the border when a bomb attack aimed at their car hit the wrong target, instead murdering three members of the Hanna family.

The Gibsons were killed in a bomb attack at the same spot the previous year.

Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor