When they found Jean McConville’s body, in its shallow grave on a Co Louth beach almost two years ago, there was a rusted safety pin still attached to the rags that remained of her blouse. It was one of the few identifiable features to evoke the 30-year-old skeleton’s lost humanity, a brittle token of the everyday cares and concerns of a widowed woman in her thirties with 10 young children to raise in Belfast in the early 1970s.
It was a reminder of all the time that had passed since that group of brave warriors turned up at her small flat and dragged her from the terrified clutches of little children who tried their best to hold onto her. If science was unable to date her long- missing remains, the nappy pin would surely have done it.
As a relic of an era before disposable nappies or washing machines, it served as a reminder of all the labour- saving household advances she never got to see and indeed of all the nappies that still had to be changed for her babies after she was bundled out of her home just before Christmas 1972.
Last week Mitchel McLaughlin, the Sinn Fein chairman, told us that the abduction and murder of McConville was not a crime. It was wrong, he said, but it nevertheless did not constitute a crime. It was not a crime, evidently, because it was a legitimate act of worthy soldiers fighting a just war. It was a legitimate act of war because it was believed at the time that McConville, who had very recently been widowed, was an informer. If she was an informer, then she was an ally of the hated British security forces and deserved to be exterminated. And, given she was a legitimate casualty of the cause of Irish freedom, then her killing couldn’t be a crime.
All of which makes you wonder why on earth McLaughlin considers her killing wrong at all. Because, according to that reasoning, it wasn’t just the right thing to do — it was an act of heroism.
As it happens, it has emerged since McConville’s death that she was not an informer. Sinn Fein sources have admitted that it was highly unlikely that she had, as alleged, been furnished with a transmitting device by the security forces in order to grass on the boys. Why a world-class intelligence unit would trust a depressed, impoverished widow and mother of 10 with a transmitting device in the middle of a cramped flat block is not a question that appears to have detained our heroes for long.
In all probability, McConville was executed on foot of hysterical rumours that began after she went to the aid of a young British soldier who was dying on her doorstep. So presumably it was wrong, then, simply because of an intelligence hiccup.
But the killing fails to meet the standard of a crime even now, because her executioners believed they were dispatching an enemy agent, and the integrity of that belief cannot be invalidated retrospectively.
And this, after all, was what we subscribed to when we voted for the Good Friday agreement and, specifically, approved those terms that provided for the release of prisoners on both sides. We accepted that they had done the things they had done in the honest belief that it was necessary for their particular causes, that if civilians died it was as unfortunate collateral damage, and that the killings for which they had been jailed should henceforth be scoured of the taint of base criminality.
If the killers of McConville had been in custody in 1998, they would have been perfectly entitled to have the slate wiped clean and their liberty restored. And so McLaughlin is right — under the Good Friday agreement that most of us endorsed, the killing of McConville is not considered a crime. It is classified as a regrettable act of war.
The question of whether or not the killers of Jerry McCabe qualify for freedom under the same agreement is one that has given rise to much public debate and disquiet. Even though it is difficult to see how the detective garda was abetting 800 years of English oppression by sitting in an unmarked police car in Adare in 1996, it looks increasingly likely that his killers’ liberty will turn out to have been sealed by the agreement.
And if, in time, it turns out that the IRA was, indeed, behind the Northern Bank raid last month, you can bet that an obscure clause will be found to justify the work of the freedom fighters involved in abducting and terrorising the bank staff. If we are to work the deal that we supported in such numbers, perhaps these are unpalatable side effects we are just going to have to live with in future.
The Good Friday agreement clearly means never having to say you are sorry. It is increasingly beginning to seem that it was simply a mandate to redefine ongoing criminality as peace, and past criminality as justice.
The alternative, the consequence of disputing Sinn Fein’s definitions of peace and justice, will be more of the same but without the reassuring labels. It’s a bit like that old Monty Python inquisitor’s line: “If you don’t confess you’ll be tortured with unimaginable cruelty — if you do confess, imaginable cruelty.”
By even considering returning to talks with Sinn Fein in the aftermath of the bank raid and McLaughlin’s dismissal of McConville’s murder, by planning to release Jerry McCabe’s killers to sustain the process, our government is interpreting our mandate to go much further than meeting Sinn Fein half way. That is certainly not what was envisaged by a very trusting public back in 1998. We did expect that concessions would be made, but we were entitled to imagine that some would be reciprocated, and so far they have not been.
If Sinn Fein has any genuine interest in advancing the peace process from here, it will con-cede that the killers of McCabe were cold-blooded criminals who deserve to stay in jail. It will clearly state that the Northern Bank raiders, even if they do turn out to be fellow travellers in disguise, should be locked away for a very long time. It will accept that the Colombia Three were not hapless ornithologists in need of a good map. And it will lay aside obtuse semantics and admit that the murder of McConville was not just wrong, not just a crime against common law but a crime against humanity, against the fractured and still grieving family she left behind, and, for those who still set some store by terms like this, a mortal sin.
Unless this happens, then we are required to accept that, along with the elastic definitions for terms like peace and justice, we also endorsed the retrospective validation of the abduction and murder of a defenceless widow when we endorsed the agreement. And that, at least in my view, was never the case.
