Ian Ellis: Church of Ireland submissions on legacy failed to reflect the depth of concerns on the matter

A House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (NIAC) inquiry followed Secretary of State Brandon Lewis’s Commons written statement of March 18th, outlining the current government’s approach to addressing the legacy of the past.

His statement, which did not go into detail, proposed

• the formation of a single independent body to oversee information retrieval and investigation;

• a shift in focus to information retrieval as the core service for individuals and families;

• full police investigations in cases with a “realistic prospect” of prosecution due to “new compelling” evidence; and

• the closure of all other cases with a bar on future re-investigation.

NIAC Chair Simon Hoare MP said the fact that the current proposals differ from those in the December 2014 Stormont House Agreement (SHA) was “why they require scrutiny”.

The legacy provisions in the SHA have serious weaknesses. These were comprehensively highlighted in written evidence to the NIAC by lawyers Peter Smith QC and Neil Faris.

In particular, Smith and Faris drew attention to the fact that the legacy proposals in the SHA and the draft Bill of May 2018 had an almost exclusive focus on Troubles deaths as opposed injuries and other crimes.

This was a point well illustrated in the submission to the NIAC by the Methodist Church in Ireland which indicated that addition to the 3,532 people who died in the Troubles (1968-2001), almost 50,000 people were physically wounded and with over 30,000 shootings.

Smith and Faris also pointed out that the draft Bill would have conferred police powers on people who were not police officers, with the power not only to investigate certain crimes but also to issue reports criticising individuals.

They expressed particular concern about the potential in this for the “misuse of police powers” in the legacy proposals, stating: “To confer police powers on persons who are not police officers for purposes other than the investigation of crime is a perversion of cardinal democratic freedoms.”

Indeed, the SHA’s Historical Investigations Unit (HIU), given that it would have been separate from the PSNI, has been described as tantamount to a parallel police force.

Any civilian policing that needs to be done should be done by a single police force which, in Northern Ireland, means the PSNI.

Two other bodies proposed by the SHA were the Independent Commission on Information Retrieval (ICIR) and the Oral History Archive (OHA).

The problem for such bodies is that it is very difficult to rely on former terrorists of whatever organisation actually to tell the truth, as indeed was instanced in the Smithwick tribunal.

In a 2013 article, BBC political editor Mark Devenport commented that “the overarching question raised again by the Smithwick tribunal is: will witnesses tell such a body the truth, and if they do, will others believe what they are hearing?”

Unfortunately, two submissions to the NIAC inquiry with church associations failed to acknowledge the depth of the unsatisfactory nature of the SHA and draft Bill legacy provisions.

A joint submission by retired Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh Alan Harper and the Rev Dr Gary Mason actually stated that it is “a matter of regret” that the proposals in the SHA and the draft Bill have not been implemented.

Then again, the submission by the Church of Ireland’s Church and Society Commission (CASC) stated: “It seems to CASC that the SHA was a carefully calibrated way of addressing arguably the most complex problem in Northern Ireland politics but is now being replaced by something that may not be able to attract the necessary cross-community support.”

However, precisely the SHA and the draft Bill themselves have little chance of achieving such cross-community support.

Accomplished barrister Austen Morgan welcomed what he described as “new concepts” in Brandon Lewis’s March 18th statement, observing that the government had brought Northern Ireland veterans into legacy policy for the first time.

He also suggested that “a new dawn” had come with the Secretary of State’s words that “we are setting out how we propose to address the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland in a way that focuses on reconciliation, delivers for victims, and ends the cycle of reinvestigations into the Troubles…that has failed victims and veterans alike”.

There is a straightforward bottom line: it is time for all concerned to accept that there must be no rewriting of the history of the Troubles to attempt to create a moral equivalence between perpetrators of suffering on the one hand and, on the other, their victims.

What is more, the as yet unimplemented Victims’ Payment Scheme, which aims to avoid such rewriting of history, must be activated without any further delay.

Indeed, it was very striking to read testimonies of victims that appeared on July 20th in this newspaper, expressing their unwillingness to accept the scheme’s payments if those who set out to destroy lives were to be included.

• Canon Ian Ellis is a former editor of The Church of Ireland Gazette

——— ———

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

With the coronavirus lockdown having a major impact on many of our advertisers — and consequently the revenue we receive — we are more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription.

Subscribe to newsletter.co.uk and enjoy unlimited access to the best Northern Ireland and UK news and information online and on our app. With a digital subscription, you can read more than 5 articles, see fewer ads, enjoy faster load times, and get access to exclusive newsletters and content. Visit https://www.newsletter.co.uk/subscriptions now to sign up.

Our journalism costs money and we rely on advertising, print and digital revenues to help to support them. By supporting us, we are able to support you in providing trusted, fact-checked content for this website.

Alistair Bushe

Editor