“It seems that Starmer and Benn are committed to excusing, even boasting about past British crimes in Ireland or, through the ICRIR, covering them up. This will be part of their Irish legacy.”
By Geoff Bell
The Labour Government’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Hilary Benn, wrote in the Irish nationalist Irish News on 18 January, “I am determined to deal with the past”. He admitted, “I know that are those rightly angry about the previous UK government’s legacy act. In Opposition we stated we would repeal and replace the act… That work is well underway.”
This is camouflage, badly disguised. The centrepiece of the Tories’ legacy legislation is the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR), and a boycott of this by many who had relatives killed by British security forces was why Benn was forced to try and defend it. Because defend it he did, reiterating it would stay, despite being widely condemned, not just by affected families but by human rights organisations in Ireland and elsewhere. For example, the London-based Rights and Security International said, “It lacks sufficient powers to provide truth and justice to families, lacks independence from the government and only has limited accountability mechanisms… It will not obtain the confidence of victims, survivors and families”.
One of those families is Sean Brown’s.
Sean was kidnapped on 12 May 1997, after locking the gates of a County Derry Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) sports club. He was subsequently murdered. The GAA is associated with the North of Ireland’s Catholic and Irish nationalist community. When the pro-British paramilitaries of the Loyalist Volunteer Force claimed the murder, it was assumed their warped sectarianism was the sole explanation of this dreadful deed.
Then other suspicions arose. First, there was a 25 year delay in holding an inquest. Next, when this eventually began last year, the coroner and High Court judge, Justice Kinney, stopped it mid-stream. He could not continue, he said, because the British government was withholding evidence, including from the Ministry of Defence and MI5.
It emerged that 25 people were involved in the murder; that a chief suspect was a member of the British Army’s Royal Irish Regiment; that security intelligence had revealed that other “state agents” were involved; and that police surveillance of the sports club had been lifted the day before the kidnapping. It was not surprising that the police ombudsman found the police investigation into the murder inadequate.
Thus, Sean Brown’s murder and the subsequent cover-up became yet another example of British state collusion with loyalists.
Two Northern Ireland High Court judges said separately that there should be a public inquiry into the killing. One was Kinney, who made the call to the then-Tory Secretary of State. Then, in December, Justice Humphreys ordered Benn to initiate one. Like his Tory predecessor, Benn rejected this, contesting the instruction in the Supreme Court, whose verdict is awaited. He insists that instead of a public inquiry, that the ICRIR should investigate Sean’s murder. His family has rejected this: They said, “The ICRIR will not help our family. There are concerns with their approach to sensitive material, and a lack of involvement with families”.
The family also pointed out that “ultimately the Secretary of State will have the final say” on what documentation is released to the ICRIR. So, “the family is not going to engage with the ICRIR.”
The same stance has been taken by the family of a man shot dead by the British Army in January 1976. He was Patrick Quail who was murdered on a Belfast street. After a tip-off, five serving and former British soldiers were interviewed by the police about the murder. But their arrests were never followed up and, as with similar cases, documentation was “lost” by state forces.
Again, the idea that the ICRIR could deliver justice has been ridiculed by the family of this victim. As the Irish News explained, “many people affected by the Troubles strongly oppose the ICRIR, believing it is part of British government attempts to protect state participants from accountability.”
To exacerbate matters, in an extraordinary intervention in the House of Commons, Keir Starmer gave striking evidence of why he and his government’s thoughts on the “Legacy” issues in the North of Ireland are judged partisan and bankrupt by nationalist Ireland. On 14 January, he discussed the changes in the legacy policies. In particular, he was asked about the consequences of a ruling from the Supreme Court in 2020 that the policy of internment without trial introduced by the Tory government in 1969 and carried on in the 1970s was unlawful; and that by implication those interned would be entitled to compensation.
Tories and the DUP pointed out that one of those internees would be Gerry Adams, still a public enemy in their eyes. Starmer sided with their protests, saying. “We will look at every conceivable way to prevent these types of cases claiming damages.”
This, in effect, was to justify interment, a policy judged by the rest of the world as unjustifiable, an obvious breach of international human rights, and something that contributed massively to the Troubles.
Thus, it seems that Starmer and Benn are committed to excusing, even boasting about past British crimes in Ireland or, through the ICRIR, covering them up.
This will be part of their Irish legacy.
- Geoff Bell is an executive member of Labour for Irish Unity and a regular columnist for Labour Outlook. His latest book is The Twilight of Unionism – you can order a copy from Verso book here.
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