A character in George Orwell’s 1984 called O’Brien sounds as if he has relatives in Sinn Fein. Conducting an interrogation deep in the bowels of the Ministry of Love, O’Brien explains patiently: “Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except looking through the eyes of the Party.”
1984 is a work of fiction, but bear with me. In it a party leadership develops doublethink — the ability to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time and control the future shape of society through the systematic fabrication of the past.
The party slogan — “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” — is put into practice by burning historical records.
It’s hard to imagine that only this month Sinn Fein made a series of demands that displays a frightening capacity for doublethink and a disturbing ambition to rewrite recent history.
Sinn Fein demanded that the criminal records of the 15,000 people convicted of “politically motivated offences” during the Northern Ireland Troubles be destroyed and forgotten. Just a week later the party demanded that the Maze prison, where most of these convicts served time, should be preserved as a museum. Sinn Fein compared it to Auschwitz, turning logic and history on its head and sparking outrage from Helen Lewis, Northern Ireland’s best known Holocaust survivor.
There is an argument for looking at criminal records realistically. Where released prisoners are unlikely to reoffend, it is in society’s interests to cut them some slack. Some could be allowed into the civil service or teaching, professions from which they are currently barred, but it’s hard to say it should be an automatic entitlement in the light of the considerable evidence of intelligence gathering and racketeering by former prisoners.
Republican doublethink goes further than that. At a rally in Belfast this month, Gerry Adams accused the British state of systematic collusion in the murder of the innocent, called for a string of public inquiries, and insisted that the full truth be told and the guilty held to account.
A further demand was for James Fisher and Mark Wright, two Scots Guardsmen who murdered a Belfast teenager called Peter McBride in 1992, to be thrown out of the army. I believe Sinn Fein is correct in this instance. Fisher and Wright, convicted murderers who the judge found had lied to cover up their crime, should not be allowed back on the streets with guns as if nothing had happened.
But how can a party which demands that IRA and loyalist terrorists’ records be wiped clean justify applying a different standard to the British army and to those suspected of collusion? In making a case for prison records to be expunged, Cathy Staunton of Sinn Fein argues: “If there had not been a political conflict, there would not have been political prisoners.” Could not the same point be made in favour of Wright and Fisher? Would they have come to Belfast, searched out Peter McBride and shot him as he ran away if there had not been an IRA campaign? Could the same argument not be made in favour of the Bloody Sunday Paras and the member of British Military Intelligence’s Force Research Unit and the RUC officers who, Sir John Stevens has found, colluded with paramilitaries? Did they not so act because they believed there was a “political struggle”? And, if the argument is not made for these rogue agents of the state, how can it be made for the IRA? Alban Maginness, the former SDLP lord mayor of Belfast, caught the hypocrisy when he said of Sinn Fein: “On the one hand they want the state to be exposed for human rights abuses. On the other, they want their own people to be applauded.”
Doublethink goes deeper that mere hypocrisy. It corrupts standards of evidence to allow Sinn Fein to believe what it wants. When newspaper stories accuse republicans of crimes or of acting as informers, those who write them are denounced as the “yellow press” and condemned for gullibly relying on faceless securocrats for information. Yet when the same anonymous sources, often former police or army officers who can’t speak openly for fear of prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, expose official wrongdoing in the same papers, Sinn Fein reprints their allegations in Republican News and reports them as fact.
So far, the British government’s tactic for dealing with the past has been dictated by political expediency. If Sinn Fein and nationalists in general mount enough pressure, there is an inquiry. That is why we may spend anything up to £300m (¤434m) on the Bloody Sunday inquiry, setting a standard which cannot possibly be followed in other cases. That’s why we have relentlessly pursued journalists and former army and police personnel who attempted to expose the secret history of the Troubles at no cost to the taxpayer.
There must be a better strategy for dealing with the legacy of the past. If it is to work, it must involve telling as much of the truth as possible about what actually happened. Neither the Official Secrets Act, nor the desire of the IRA’s retrospective justification of its failed campaign can stand in the way. The suffering of victims must be acknowledged as must the responsibility of perpetrators for what they have done.
Meetings between victims and perpetrators could be helpful. That occurred with Pat Magee, the Brighton bomber, and Jo Berry, the daughter of one of his victims.
Dealing with the past must be an exercise in realism, not doublethink and selective memory. But history should not swamp us with endless inquiries in which long-dead battles are endlessly refought by lawyers. We need to achieve closure, not increased bitterness and suspicion.
Peter deCarteret Cory, a retired Canadian judge, has until October to decide whether there should be inquiries into six murder attacks in which collusion by the garda and northern security forces is alleged, including the cases of the lawyers Rosemary Nelson and Pat Finucane.
The state has a good deal of information on all these cases which it has not placed in the public domain. In the case of Finucane, Sir John Stevens conducted the most extensive criminal investigation in British legal history and filled a room with documentation. Yet British law officers would allow him to publish only 20 pages.
A first step might be for Cory, as an independent outsider, to recommend that much wider sections of the report be published. He could recommend the setting up of a tribunal of inquiry to look again at other cases and to hold whatever hearings they could in public.
Such a tribunal would include the judiciary but it should also draw on foreign law-enforcement officials capable of assessing security considerations in a less restrictive way than the British Treasury solicitors, victims’ representatives, religious figures and academics.
