Excellent article in the Times by Dean Godson on Eames-Bradley folly
15 January 2008
A past full of monsters
The attempt to redefine The Troubles in Northern Ireland as a “war” is a preposterous idea to all right-thinking people.
Dean Godson
The Consultative Group on the Past - set up by the Government last year to determine how best to deal with the legacy of Northern Ireland's Troubles - seems to be turning into a veritable Frankenstein's Monster. Far from laying the past to rest, its cack-handed and morally flawed approach risks envenoming Ulster's political process all over again.
The latest leak to emerge from this body is the dotty notion that it might ask the Government to admit that the British State was engaged in fighting a “war” against the IRA for more than 30 years. The Troubles were, of course, never a “war” - unless you subscribe to the Provisionals' preposterous conceit that they are the legitimate government of the Republic.
The British State sought to prevent the violent overthrow of the legitimate constitutional order. A minority within the minority nationalist community sought to coerce the Province's pro-British majority, and successive governments sought to contain them. If the British State had really been fighting a “war”, few of the Sinn Fein/IRA godfathers would have survived to tell the tale.
The proposal from this body could grant the IRA and its pathetic loyalist counterparts the respectability and moral equivalence they have always sought - allowing them to argue that while terrible things were done, they were done by all sides.
The modus operandi of the consultative group is strange indeed. Oddly, for a body meant to deal with the past, no professional historians sit on it. Instead, its approach seems heavily conditioned by academic experts in “transitional justice” and “conflict resolution” - whose framework of analysis is governed by international analogies such as South Africa's emergence from apartheid.
Concepts such as “transitional justice” may be suitable for describing events in South Africa, Guatemala or Argentina, where state forces committed the lion's share of the atrocities. They have no place in Northern Ireland where the lion's share of the atrocities was committed by terrorists.
The leaks from the consultative group suggest that its focus will be on British state crimes. Why? Surely the role of elements of the Irish State in setting up the Provisionals in 1970 is at least as worthwhile a subject of inquiry. Why are there never inquiries into the IRA's campaign of ethnic cleansing in Fermanagh?
Even if all parties were to be treated in the same way, the outcomes would still be inequitable. Just consider the potential disparity between subpoenaed records of the British Army and those of the IRA. Besides which, how can one have any kind of serious historical reckoning when Gerry Adams still denies that he was ever a member of the IRA?
