Does Northern Ireland have a “trauma industry” that has cornered the bulk of victim-support funding by presenting natural human suffering as a medical condition? Chris Gilligan, an up-and-coming sociology lecturer at the University of Ulster, thinks so.

Noting the growth of psychiatric counselling services since the 1994 ceasefires, he said: “There are more counselling professionals than before who are encouraging people to understand their experiences as medical conditions rather than as suffering as a result of war and conflict. People have become medicalised and it blurs the distinction between severe mental health difficulties and unhappiness.”

Gilligan’s approach chimes readily with many victims who have found little practical benefit in the deep-listening methods favoured by many in the counselling profession. Michael Gallagher, the chairman of the Omagh Support and Self-Help Group, is a case in point.

He has been twice traumatised by the Troubles, the first time in June 1984 when his brother Hugh, a former UDR member working as a taxi driver, was shot by the IRA. The second time was in 1998, when his son Aidan was among 28 people killed by the Real IRA bombing of Omagh. He has been in counselling on three occasions and feels no benefit from it.

Of the effect of bereavement on him he says: “I am still the same person, just a little sadder.”

He is even harsher than Gilligan in his observations about the growth in trauma counselling groups. He says: “The one I was involved in was at the top end of the market, but there are a lot of little groups looking for grants who are like vultures feeding on the dead and injured.” He suspects a political motive in the government’s continuing funding of counselling as the key part of their victims’ strategy. “They want to give them a wee cup of tea, not deal with our problems. It is a way of neutering victims as a political or social force,” said Gallagher.

He argues that they should put the money into proper compensation to victims as they do in countries like Spain. “Then we could see how much the victims want to use to buy counselling.”

Like many other victims, Gallagher values justice and wants answers to questions about who killed his loved ones more than tea, sympathy and a listening ear. The same approach is taken by many other groups of victims like the Bloody Sunday relatives, the family of Pat Finucane, Relatives for Justice and Families Acting for Innocent Relatives.

They may value medical help but their primary focus is in finding meaning in their suffering and holding the perpetrators to account. Some 1,800 out of the more than 3,000 Troubles murders are unsolved and the feeling that the guilty walk free cuts many victims to the quick.

Undoubtedly, counselling is cheaper than the quest for justice. That may make us suspicious of the government’s motives but it does not rule it out on grounds of cost.

Gilligan’s paper finds that more than £20m is put into victims’ support services, much of it for physiotherapy and practical support rather than counselling. This pales into insignificance beside the £104m and rising devoted to the Bloody Sunday tribunal, the £9m in extra funding given to the PSNI to review unsolved Troubles murders, the amount spent by the police ombudsman’s office reviewing cold cases and the cost of the Stevens and Cory inquiries.

Scores more millions will soon have to be spent on public inquiries into the deaths of Finucane, Rosemary Nelson, Robert Hamill, Billy Wright, Harry Breen and Bob Buchanan, which the British and Irish governments have promised to carry out. The Omagh families have received nearly £1m in public funding to allow them to pursue a civil case against those believed to have carried out the bombing.

The amount of money flowing to police and legal coffers does put some perspective on talk of a “multi-million-pound industry” run for the benefit of counsellors. The comparison also brings home the fact that no strategy for dealing with the sort of trauma that Northern Ireland has endured is cheap, easy or guaranteed success. Counselling may not work, but neither do public inquiries. The challenge is to improve the success rate.

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