December 22, 2023 - 7:00am
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.
The second, related, factor is that a de facto amnesty is already in place — and it is extremely one-sided. Hundreds of convicted terrorists were released following the Belfast Agreement. Then, when Tony Blair couldn’t get a full amnesty for IRA “on-the-runs” (OTRs) through Parliament, his government quietly issued scores of so-called “comfort letters”.
This scandalous policy only came to public attention in 2014, when one such letter collapsed the criminal prosecution of John Downey, the man alleged to have perpetrated the 1982 Hyde Park bombing (despite the letter having been sent to him in error). In 2016, the Belfast Telegraph reported that “police have since revealed that OTRs who received letters were linked to hundreds of murders.”
Today, ex-IRA terrorists like Patrick Ryan talk freely and unrepentantly about their terrorist activities without any apparent fear of prosecution. Meanwhile, one former RUC officer has been investigated over one incident — the 1991 shooting of an IRA commander — five times.
More galling still, given Dublin’s moral grandstanding today, is the major role that successive Irish governments played in helping republican terrorists evade justice.
In 1979, Jack Lynch ruled out any extradition of IRA suspects and refused permission for British security forces to cross the border in “hot pursuit” of suspected terrorists. This must have been a boon to the IRA, which was waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Protestants in border areas.
In 1984, Margaret Thatcher’s government got tired of Ireland saying it couldn’t locate Downey (then the UK’s most-wanted man), so hired a private investigator, who promptly secured his address and exact location by calling the Irish benefits office.
Even after the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, Thatcher later complained that Ireland never delivered “the level of security co-operation we had the right to expect”. In total, Lowry says that between 1973 and 1997 Dublin refused 102 extradition requests for wanted terrorist suspects, and granted only eight.
Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland Secretary, has finally started making this case, asking Dublin to “urgently clarify the number of criminal prosecutions brought in Ireland since 1998” and saying its current posturing “is inconsistent and hard to reconcile with its own record” on legacy issues.
But after letting the issue slide for decades, ministers have little hope of cutting through now. There is a perfectly good case to make against Ireland’s retrospective attitude towards the Troubles. But it should have been made years ago.
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SubscribeI made this point in a comment on The Spectator in a similar article, stating that the Republic of Ireland is the spoilt golden child of the United States and European Union. I see Biden has no issues coming out to support his tame pet in Dublin, and I think the EU is happy to throw bread crumbs to them for their role in trying to screw the UK over for Brexit.
The Irish state is a leech both to its peers and its own citizens. It never brings anything to the table beyond an overrated stout. Its neighbour (UK) is responsible for the defence of its airspace and waters, yet it also has an official policy of irredentism against said neighbour and makes no effort of hiding it while continuously b**hing about the UK in public.
If the Irish state took the form of a person and it was attending a meal with friends, it would order a T-bone steak with the most expensive champagne, only to claim they had “forgotten” their wallet when the bill arrives. They are not a friend to the UK, we should stop treating them as one.
We are blessed with a profusion of Col Blimp types on Unherd.
If one looks at South Korea in 1953 it was poorer than Ghana. Singapore in 1965 was in a very bad way with violent conflicts between communities. Ireland could have put the past behind them and created a thriving prosperous self reliant country which would have been attractive to the Protestant middle classes in the North.
There is an old saying about the competition between the wind and the sun who cause a human to remove the coat. The wind blew and blew but the human only held the coat more tightly. The sun shone and the human took the coat off.
Eire avoided paying for war in WW2. It could have agreed to fight under American control and would have obtained Marshal Aid. Instead post 1922 Ireland installed a Vichy like government under de Valera. Ireland promoting high level of technical education and training could have promoted advanced light manufacturing such as Singapore and Switzerland.
Ireland did not have heavy industry like Switzerland ) but in some ways that that was an advantage as only Germany has been able to move a country from un and semi skilled heavy engineering into light advanced manufacturing.
Ireland would be the mid 1980s be a prosperous nation and could have said to the North join us if you like.
Does one chose the method of the wind or the sun?
I think what upsets a lot of people is the double standard.
No problem with security forces being held to account if it can be proven that they acted unlawfully, but only if terrorists are treated equivalently.
We will of course leave the ECHR in due course. This adds another reason to do so and will hopefully speed up the process. So you could say that the soldiers that served in Ulster and defeated the IRA are providing another service to their countrymen.
Random thought: could it be that Ireland has chosen this point to pursue legal action against the UK because it has seen just how much sympathy there is for Hamas, including among the higher echelons of society, including (the people we have been instructed to think of as) intellectuals?
Maybe it is betting that the ECHR is also going to lean that way, meaning that the IRA would be viewed leniently and as freedom fighters rather than terrorists. Meanwhile, the UK will be viewed as the coloniser against whom any action was/is justified.
I’m all for people who acted unlawfully being brought to account – but this just smells of opportunism on ROI’s part.
It is times like that I am glad Ireland will get demographically replaced faster than Great Britain.
This polemical and one-sided contribution is hopeless. HMG’s proposals can be better advanced by careful argument than by blind vituperation.
There is no recognition here of the lives (police and soldiers) and money that the Republic of Ireland sacrificed in fighting the IRA, INLA etc to shore up the political slum and dubious security practices – remember John Stalker? – that the UK operated north of the Irish border.
Nor is there any recognition that the Irish government’s consistent diagnosis of the Troubles – that they were a political conflict – was correct while HMG’s diagnosis – that they represented a security problem – was inadequate.
Please, stop the fatuous whinging, “Ireland has no right to challenge … ” Do you really think the ECHR accepts cases that are without legal grounding? Clearly, Ireland has a right to raise cases at the ECHR. If you really mean “Ireland has no justification to challenge … “, please say that rather than something else.
The strongest argument against the Irish government’s stance doesn’t appear here. It is that its 1920s predecessor pushed through an amnesty for actions carried out by both sides in the Irish Civil War (1922-1923). That helped grass to grow over the graves of the fallen rather than have them endlessly dug up by fresh legal actions.
Beyond a certain point, it may be better to let sleeping dogs lie and to focus on the future rather than to obsess over the past.
Remind me what Charlie Haughey’s (former Eire PM) contribution to fighting the IRA was.
The “Comfort Letters” are a disgrace. Many of the people who received these letters and are excused from prosecution and accountability are precisely the sort of psycopathic criminals that “freedom fighting” organisations attract as they internalise criminality as part of their fundraising. In this respect, I’m not certain the IRA is that much different from former bankrobber Josef Stalin and his mates. Or the corresponding people on the extreme Unionist side. These are not the sort of people you want to have freely walking the streets. And a government that allows this (Blair’s) is simply not doing its job #1 and protecting the secutiry of its citizens.
Frankly, I don’t care whether the Irish government has a “right” to challenge the UK government here – nor what the human rights theoreticians in the EHCR say. Time the UK government started prioritising the rights and security of its own law-abiding citizens over anyone else.
“Beyond a certain point, it may be better to let sleeping dogs lie and to focus on the future rather than to obsess over the past.”
I think that would be the best solution, and is what the whole point of the Legacy Bill is about. The Irish government have simply turned a blind eye to pre ceasefire Republican violence and are being a bit hypocritical regarding the UK stance as they are effectively doing the same thing.
This is what losing a war looks like. A war over somewhere that almost no one in Britain ever wanted. Even the Right in Britain cares more about the Elgin Marbles.
We won the war. That’s why the IRA were prepared to negotiate. Blair gave away the peace.
If this is winning a war, then heaven knows what losing would look like. But it depends who you mean by “we”. Few people in Great Britain have ever wanted Northern Ireland, even fewer have ever felt any affinity with the Orange side (far more would have done with the other lot, although that would still have been a small minority), and next to no one would now. Britain and the Irish Republic are very alike, whereas both tribes in Northern Ireland are bizarre. If the Republic wants the place so badly, then it can have it, with all the luck in the world, which it would need.
I’m not sure the Republic of Ireland really does want it – or certainly not that strongly. Too many problems. And they’re doing fine without it (until the EU wakes up to Ireland’s tax arbitrage ripping it off).
It’s been more than a hundred years since Edward Carson, and his Orangeman, UVF militias, destroyed even the possibility for the peaceful, gradual, civilized solution to the “Irish Question”, namely Home Rule as preparation for eventual independence within the Commonwealth.
It’s been more than a hundred yesrs since the Easter Rising, more than a century after the Anglo-Irish Treaty. It’s time for Britain to let go, not only of Ireland (all of Ireland), but also let go of the mistaken, misguided, harmful, anti-historical, Jacobinical, and Un-English, notions of British nationhood and populistic civic nationalism.
Clueless. Ignorant. Deluded.
If you knew any history, you would be aware that the Easter Rising was deeply unpopular amongst the Irish in 1916. Until the British government over-reacted. And that Irish citizens from the 26 counties that formed Eire fought and continued to fight for the UK in WWI. And some even in WWII.
And you would know equally that there is really no strong appetite in England to retain Northern Ireland.
Do some research and educate yourself beyond this cartoon history.