Shane O'Doherty: Everyone benefits when war criminals are brought to justice

Hardly a week goes by that I don’t read in newspapers of a twenty- or thirty-year-old ‘cold case’ being solved by DNA evidence and a murderer aged 70 years or more being brought to justice.

Everyone appears to benefit by such resolutions – even the offender who often confesses at last.

At the core of civilised society’s contract with the individual citizen is the promise that – above all – murder of every citizen will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

For those citizens who were abducted, tortured and taken away to a border road to be shot in the back of the head there must have been a last hope that society – the state – would seek to identify and prosecute those who committed kidnapping, torture and murder.

For the state – for any society – to wilfully break that contract puts every citizen at risk of murder without the promise of investigation or prosecution.

Alongside the crimes of kidnapping, torture and murder the trivial legal and political difficulties Trevor outlines are matters capable of resolution where there is resolve.

For paramilitaries to have received secret amnesties, ‘letters of comfort’ and hundreds of millions of pounds in peace dividends, the authorities managed to solve all the political and legal obstacles standing in the way of rewarding paramilitaries who stopped murdering and bombing.

However, my primary problem with Trevor’s roadmap to the future is the much maligned moral hazard – a phrase I first saw in relation to bank mortgage forgiveness.

I am aware that very many people are sick sore and tired of morality references after having viewed churchmen of different cloths rubbing cheeks with paramilitary mass murderers and being regularly photographed with them beaming and glowing.

Not forgetting the inability of churchmen to deal justly with child sex offences committed by their clerical fellows.

But soap doesn’t deserve to be condemned for its lack of application.

My primary difficulty with Trevor Ringland’s views is that they damage above all the offender, whose crimes of kidnapping, murder and or bombing do not get the attention they justly deserve.

Let me explain, since I was a paramilitary bomber for five years after I was inducted into the Provisional IRA when I was 15 years young.

The single best thing to ever happen to me while I was in the IRA was that I was arrested by the RUC and later imprisoned.

Identification, arrest, imprisonment and trial brought me many benefits.

Paramilitaries who have been arrested and tried benefited as follows:

l They have been publicly identified with one or more of their crimes against their fellow citizens – maybe not with all of them.

l They have had to face justice in a partially public forum.

l Their victims or their victims’ relatives have lived to see some degree of justice done.

l The secrecy and lies of their paramilitary groupings have been breached.

l They have had the opportunity to reflect on their breaches of the human rights and civil rights of their victims as they sought defence from prisoners’ rights.

l They have learned the salutary lesson that crimes may not always go unpunished.

l They have enjoyed time to reflect on their actual contribution to society, before and after their trials and also in prison.

l Their arrest and imprisonment have probably saved their own lives, and also probably the lives of others.

l While their paramilitary cults have tried to erase any notions of guilt or shame, their arrest, trial and imprisonment have mostly likely burst through the cult brainwashing.

l They have had the opportunity to reflect on their lives – unlike their dead victims – and have had the opportunity to improve their own lives.

l They have been released back into society either “on licence” or as free to roam – a sense of freedom now better appreciated and something not given to their murdered victims.

l They get a second chance at citizenship outside of prison.

l The concept of “innocent victims” has probably entered their skulls for the first time since they were “sworn in” to their paramilitary grouping.

I have been arrested and imprisoned.

My arrest very probably saved my life and the lives of others.

Being brought to trial broke through the IRA’s refusal to recognise any guilt, blame, rights of victims, shame and all the other paramilitary denials.

Being brought before my victims was very good for the reform of my character to whatever degree you believe that may or may not have happened.

My victims certainly got a sense of justice from my trial and imprisonment, and possibly later from my writing letters of apology to them.

Being tried in public gave me the best of shame as a means of motivating me to turn toward the good, to respect victims’ rights in all circumstances and to see violence as evil and totally unnecessary.

Being tried and found guilty and publicly shamed gave me the energy to want to break free of the IRA and grow to become an individual making my own decisions – the chief achievement of my 14 years of imprisonment.

The 14 years of imprisonment added to my own character and growth and development and to those of many of my friends, both formerly republican and loyalist.

Imprisonment can be for the best – imprisonment can bring out the best in some people who need to be imprisoned for a time.

Why shouldn’t people who committed murder or mass murder be tried and, if justified, be found guilty of heinous crimes and be sentenced to an admittedly very short period of imprisonment under the Belfast Agreement?

Two years or very probably less with remission for good behaviour and a host of claimed medical conditions?

Why shouldn’t victims and their relatives get that minute crumb falling from the feast tables of the paramilitaries, now pockets filled with government sterling that bought them into a tactical peace, a peace without any ethics or moral reform?

Finally, it is a very dangerous thing to imply that persons who see the concept of justice differently should somehow be labelled as obstructions to peace or contributors to hatred.

I have known a great many IRA paramilitaries from the lowest level of the so-called “Derry Brigade of the IRA” to the highest levels of the pompously named general headquarters staff.

The great majority of IRA persons known to me in my lifetime have one thing in common now – they are all dead and dead men tell no tales.

Many of those still alive want nothing to do with anything related to the truth of their past crimes against humanity. They too will tell no tales

The government’s information recovery promotion has in reality all the user benefits of the three-card-trick.

It is hard to argue that there is insufficient money to pay for justice when there has been no difficulty finding and piping vast sums of money to paramilitaries who accepted the Queen’s shilling and the Queen’s pardon and now uphold the King’s peace for merely tactical reasons.