Letter: Innocent victims must be heard in ICRIR review and hopefully the reform process will reaffirm the principles of openness and accountability

The secretary of state wishes to change the current investigatory body, the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR), into a Legacy Commission, in line with his Troubles Bill.

There is uncertainty as to what those changes will look like because the report by a senior civil servant on the ICRIR has not been published.

The fear is that the changes will not only continue to ignore the role that Dublin played in the Troubles (a broader topic), but will substitute accountability and the possibility of justice for victims for a process based on civil litigation of allegations of state ‘collusion’ or putative oversights by the security forces.

Given that the ICRIR is premised on accountability and openness and the need to foreground victims and survivors in a trauma-aware model, it is difficult to draw any other conclusions from the civil servant’s claims of a problematic ‘culture’ in the ICRIR ‘at senior levels’ than the ‘problem’ being an attachment to investigating terrorists’ crimes.

The alternative to the ICRIR is the model of state-centred civil cases focusing on allegations of ‘collusion’ and putative failings by the security forces. This seems to be the vision of the Committee for the Administration of Justice (CAJ), which has been influential in Irish political circles and academia, and which has a long history of anti-state lobbying. CAJ, for instance, has also called for ‘a substantive root and branch reform process of the ICRIR’.

There are currently over 1,200 civil cases live or pending. It is of course the right of individuals and families to pursue justice, however, folding this model into an investigatory one risks muddying the historical record and alienating not only the innocent victims of terrorism but the vast majority of the population who wanted nothing to do with paramilitary violence. Individuals also have a right to seek their own representation, but holding law firms to a religiously balanced case load – as per nearly every other area of Northern Ireland – might help to offset the perception that legacy cases work to push a republicanisation of society. The ICRIR offers an alternative to that model and the secretary of state might wish to consider reform of drawing down of public money first.

We do not yet know whether the senior civil servant had the civil litigation model in mind – though it is difficult to see any other. Mr Benn has rightly pointed out that legislation cannot create reconciliation. Lawyering hasn’t much of a track record in that regard either. Hopefully, Mr Benn’s reformation process will focus on keeping lawyers as far away as possible from the historical reality of the 2,151 republican murders and avoid placing that traumatic history in the quagmire of the civil case anti-state landscape.

Mr Benn has stated that the review will be carried out by the Northern Ireland Office and the ICRIR. Hopefully both groups will remain aware of the pitfalls of the ahistorical and anti-state model; hopefully innocent victims and voices from across the community will be heard; and hopefully the reform process will reaffirm the principles of openness and accountability inherent in the ICRIR’s victim-centric ethos.

Dr Cillian McGrattan, a member of the Malone House Group, writing in a personal capacity