Neil McCarthy: One-eyed anti-state narrative is nihilist and serves no section of the community

Indeed, victims could be forgiven for feeling that their anguish and pain, and desire for justice, are to be swept under the carpet. For does the ‘peace process’ not place the emotional needs of ‘combatants’ above the needs of those they murdered and maimed?

There is also some good news for victims in the Starmer government’s decision to retain the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery element from the previous government’s legacy legislation (which they are otherwise so keen to repeal).

The retired judge in charge of the commission - Sir Declan Morgan - appears determined to get some accountability from former terrorists on both sides, even if he lacks the bait of amnesty to tempt them into coming forward.

Sir Declan has made it clear however that he sees that there is no balance between terrorists of either side and the forces of the state in that the former “were designed to hide a great deal of what they were doing and therefore the availability of information directly from them is inevitably limited as a result”.

Despite his sincere intentions, then, it is inevitable that the forces of the state will once again be disproportionately targeted for investigation, and the terrorists left to continue skulking in the shadows.

This disproportionate focus on the activities of the state continues with the Omagh Inquiry itself. It is not an inquiry into the actions and motivations of the terrorists who carried out the bombing but an inquiry into whether the UK state could in any way have prevented the bombing from taking place.

The fact that the Irish state has successfully and deliberately evaded any scrutiny whatsoever only makes this fatal imbalance all the more egregious: it is the gift that keeps on giving for those whose overarching political purpose is to destroy Northern Ireland by draining it of any moral authority and seeking to cast it as an irredeemable political entity.

That political purpose belongs to so-called Irish republicanism in Northern Ireland.

So-called because there is nothing ‘republican’ about seeking to destroy state authority in a territory where there is no exercise of absolutist monarchical power, but rather an imperfect but nonetheless very real system of locally accountable administration elected by universal suffrage.

There is also nothing ‘republican’ about a movement members of which slaughtered Robert McCartney in a bar in Belfast two decades ago on January 30.

Such a movement - in its belief that it has the right to decide who lives and who dies according to its own caprices - is fundamentally élitist.

Likewise there is nothing ‘loyal’ about a movement members of which abducted 14-year-old child Philip Rafferty 52 years ago on January 31 whilst he was walking home from a band practice in Belfast and then hooded him with his own coat and shot him through the head.

So-called ‘loyalists’ may not sanitise and weaponise their gruesome deeds in the same way republicans do. Nevertheless they too benefit from one-sided legacy mechanisms: their crimes are characterised as being dependent upon the collusion of the state and so their own agency is magically removed; and Northern Ireland is again sullied - in this case as being innately responsible for the murders of entirely innocent catholic civilians.

This one-eyed anti-state narrative is at heart a deeply nihilist one and does not serve any section of the community in Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland itself was a product of Britain’s determination to come to terms with the demand for Irish self-determination in the aftermath of the Home Rule Crisis and 1916.

Walter Long, chairman of the Irish Convention 0f 1916-1917, and a staunch unionist, nevertheless saw the settlement which gave rise to the Government of Ireland Act 1920 as one which detached ALL of Ireland from direct British rule, albeit initially with two Home Rule parliaments.

Indeed he boasted that under this scheme “no nationalists would be retained under British rule”.

The history of Ireland and Ulster is complex and unamenable to the tragically limited visions of republicans and loyalists.

Yet the armed ethnic cleansers of both ideologies remain to this day protected by a political consensus which blames the British government for everything.

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l Neil McCarthy is a writer and a teacher based in Dublin and London