This week’s news that Ireland is taking the United Kingdom to the European Court of Human Rights shows, once again, how successive governments’ stubborn refusal to go on the (metaphorical) offensive on Northern Ireland never pays off.
At the centre of the row is the newly-enacted Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act, a South Africa-style truth-and-reconciliation process for Ulster. Section 19 of the Act provides that the new body can grant amnesty to someone accused of historic offences if they offer complete and honest testimony for the historical record.
Such amnesties would be open to anyone, in principle. But politically, the key concern on the Government’s side is finding a way to stop former soldiers and police officers being hounded through the courts.
This concern is not unfounded, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the existing process for historic investigations scrutinises the security forces to an extent wildly out of proportion to their share of Troubles deaths.
According to Ben Lowry, a Belfast journalist, such cases made up 30% of the Northern Irish police’s legacy caseload in 2018, and 40% of prosecutions brought by the Public Prosecution Service in 2019. Yet the Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary were responsible only for 10% of Troubles killings, versus 60% for republican terrorists.
Even that statistic can be misleading, too, because the overwhelming majority of kills by the security forces were lawful (they were legitimate state actors fighting armed terrorists) whereas every republican and loyalist killing was a crime.
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