Legacy inquests a key part of the scandal of how past is examined

News Letter editorial on Tuesday March 23 2022:
News Letter editorialNews Letter editorial
News Letter editorial

Even the oft-used phrase about ‘how to handle the legacy of the past’ is misleading.

It implies that the Troubles was a complicated period in which all ‘actors’ were roughly equally to blame.

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While it is of course fair to say that the history of Northern Ireland, and the centuries before there was an NI, was indeed complex, the Troubles was much less so.

When republican terrorists upped the ante in the early 1970s, their violence became the dominant feature of the three decades of disorder. The Official IRA realised this by 1972, and called off their campaign. Almost all civil rights demands had long since been met.

But the Provisionals were allowed to come off their terrorism at their own pace, 25 years later, in the 1990s.

Republicans killed 60% of the Troubles dead, loyalists 30% and state forces 10%.

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But even that breakdown is misleading because it implies that the security force killings were all illegal and so the state had a 10% culpability. In fact the state killings were overwhelmingly legal.

Yet over the last decade investigations into the legacy of the Troubles, which should be labelled the legacy of terrorism, have been grossly lopsided against the security forces.

While the UK government’s current plan to tackle legacy is crude, and simplistic, and while it tips into an amnesty due to apparent panic at soldier prosecutions, London does deserve recognition for trying to take unilateral, radical action to end the imbalance.

It was right to pledge to end the specific scandal of legacy inquests, which have become mini inquiries, and are almost entirely into killings in which there are allegations of state wrongdoing.

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The announcement of yet another such batch of probes underlines the urgency of dealing with this specific aspect of the legacy scandal, the ongoing recourse to such inquests.

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