Archives

Ballymurphy, the UK government’s proposals to deal with legacy issues, and the dogs on the streets. By Christopher Stanley, litigation consultant. Statute of Limitations In London today (11 May 2021), the British government set out its legislative agenda by way of the Queen’s Speech to the House of Lords. Unexpectedly, the British government remains intent on its ambitions to stop investigating Conflict-related Legacy deaths in Northern Ireland and to introduce a Statute of Limitations so that British army veterans will not face prosecution. The details of the proposals remain to be published. The British government also proposed to ‘review’ the Human Rights Act 1998 and legislate to restrict access to Judicial Review.  In Belfast today, Mrs Justice Keegan delivered her verdict in The Ballymurphy Massacre Inquest into the deaths of ten civilians shot by the British army in 1971. The judge found there had been a disproportionate use of force and the shootings violated Article 2 of the ECHR (the right to life).  She said “All the deceased were entirely innocent of any wrongdoings on the day in question”. Whilst the verdict of an inquest cannot attribute criminal responsibility or civil liability, the verdict can prompt an investigation by the prosecuting authority.  The Legacy of the Past – the Conflict – in Northern Ireland continues to shape the present and determine the future. In 2014 there was the possibility that the past could be ‘dealt with’ or ‘policed’ by way of The Stormont House Agreement and its mechanisms of investigation and truth-recovery. A mixture of Transitional Justice, Truth and Reconciliation, Hard Law and Soft Justice.  In 2021 that model was abandoned by the British government by way of its New Decade New Approach proposal. Today it is apparent that the British government wants to cease contentious investigations into contentious deaths and rely upon truth-recovery mechanisms, Hard Law trumped by Soft Justice. Truth Not all relatives of victims or survivors of the Conflict want the same thing. But access to the truth is one binding want. How the truth is achieved, if it can be, is the point of contest. Once the truth is ‘out’ what should be done with it? How can truth assist securing peace when “peace comes dropping slow” (Yeats).  In one way establishing a narrative of the Conflict which can be accepted across the communities in Northern Ireland contributes to cementing and securing the peace which was secured by way of the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement 1998 (GFA). But the truth is oft contested or denied by what Ian Cobain has described as The History Thieves. And truth has consequences: it cannot simply be archived by those very same History Thieves. It was dirty The Conflict in Northern Ireland was fought by three sides: Republicans, Loyalist and the British state. This is not a pernicious counter-narrative, as the exposure of collusion has pointed to, but rather a telling truth about the last Colonial adventure of the British Empire fought on the Narrow Ground of Ulster.  This last bloody campaign, Britain’s Dirty War as Martin Dillon described it, has left both a human-rights deficit in Northern Ireland, which the GFA seeks to address, and a Legacy of state-sponsored terror by way of collusion with both Republicans and Loyalists depending on the political temperature at a particular juncture or the security constituency policy prevailing at prevailing point in time (the two not necessarily aligned). The difficult question for Westminster politicians and Whitehall civil servants is that a Statute of Limitations for crimes committed during the Conflict before 1998 offends the letter and spirit of the GFA. Who will it apply to – To those British army veterans responsible for the Ballymurphy Massacre? To the Birmingham Pub Bombers? To Albert ‘Ginger’ Baker? To John Downey? – to paramilitaries, agents and informers, old soldiers? Not a witch-hunt The word ‘witchhunt’ has been used a lot in relation to the prosecution of British army veterans. It started to be used following the ‘persecution’ of British soldiers accused of crimes committed during the Iraq and Afghanistan ‘campaigns’. It is now extended to apply to British soldiers who served in Northern Ireland. A witchhunt implies a form of collective hysteria against a particular group – ‘hounding’ Let us be clear:  the number of prosecutions taken against former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland is low the decisions to prosecute in these cases were taken by independent law officers applying evidential thresholds. Who are the vicitms? The accused or the accusers? No hierarchy of victims In Northern Ireland there is a legislation which ensures there is no hierarchy of victims: A victim is “Someone who is or has been physically or psychologically injured as a result of or in consequence of a conflict-related incident” (The Victims and Survivors (Northern Ireland) Order 2006 Section 3(1)(a). The proposals of the British government will create a hierachy of victims (already in place regarding the eligibility criteria for the ‘Troubles’ Pension).  The Statute of Limitation proposals from the British government will create a de facto amnesty for perpetrators of Conflict-related criminality. Will this limitation also apply to state agents and informers employed by the British security forces? Will this limitation also apply to Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries who remain alive?  Whether these proposals violate the UK’s obligations under the ECHR seems of little consequence to the British government. HMG is intent on ‘reviewing’ the Human Rights Act 1998 and intends to limiting access to Judicial Review, as announced in today Queen’s Speech. Judicial Review is the legal application to challenge Executive decision-making. Judicial Review is a mechanism by which human rights concerns can be bought before the independent judiciary and which has been used extensively in Conflict-related Legacy litigation in Northern Ireland. Retribution not core demand One of the consequences of the process of truth-recovery can be a demand for retribution.  But that is only one consequence of the process and it is not a core demand for the majority of relatives of victims and survivors. Their demand is to know why and to know who – who

How I grew to see that without broad Marxism the arts and its unserious, networked and commodified lit-libs are for sale. An extract from the essay ‘Being a Marxist Poet in the Twenty-First Century’ by Kevin Higgins. More than a quarter of a century ago a man-child called Kevin retired from politics as he turned twenty seven. He had joined the then somewhat notorious Trotskyist group, the Militant Tendency[i], at the age of fifteen.  After twelve years of activism, which began in membership of Galway West Labour Youth the month the Falklands War kicked off and fizzled like the saddest of fireworks in London in the aftermath of Mrs Thatcher’s Poll Tax, against which he had been a somewhat obsessively focused campaigner, it was over. “Retirement” was the face-saving word he used to describe his departure from politics. From the inside it felt like a personal tragedy. And it was. After more than a decade as a fiercely loyal ‘comrade’, Kevin had had enough of Militant and they had had enough of him.  Dialectics being the contradictory beasts they are, a total exit from active politics may have been the best thing that could possibly have happened to him right then. But it didn’t feel like that to him. Instead of world socialist revolution, with which history had refused to oblige him, the spectres haunting the little part of Europe with which Kevin was then mostly concerned were, from his point of view, disappointing: Tony Blair and the Celtic Tiger, which got given its name the same year Blair became UK Labour leader: 1994.  Kevin sloped back to Galway from London via the Holyhead ferry that April with a mouthful of bad teeth: he wasn’t much of a one for looking after himself then.   Though he would march to defend the NHS for other people until his shoes disintegrated; he did not partake of such services himself. Kevin arrived in Galway with no particular plans, apart from a notion that he might do something artistic. Not artistic in the prettifying sense:  he had no interest in describing the rocks around Connemara and the like. Indeed, he had little interest in any kind of beauty. Or so he thought. He wanted to express things he had been unable to say during his years as a (partly-self-appointed) leader of the vanguard of the North London semi-lumpen proletariat. Mostly, this would involve going into some detail about all the people and ideas and institutions he was against. It was no small list.  High on it was his endlessly-self-sacrificing former self, who had worked himself some of the way towards a possible early grave, in an attempt to fight the political tide of the early 1990s that was, in the end, more about masochism than socialism. By “doing something artistic”, he meant stuff to do with words – songs, poems, maybe plays, novels… In the last years of his activism, when he was Chair of Enfield Against The Poll Tax in the North London Borough then represented in the House of Commons by, among others, Michael Portillo[ii],he had become increasingly focused on how best to say what needed to be said. It wasn’t enough to say it. It had to be said well. And, if possible, said wittily. He didn’t know it at the time but writing political letters with a satirical bent to the local papers in Enfield in the very early 1990s was his beginning as a poet.  This Kevin, who was of course me, hoped to escape politics via poetry but also harboured illusions that he might somehow find a way of combining the two. It is a contradiction I have been working out ever since. From the inside it has felt more to be a case of this obvious contradiction working itself out using me as a somewhat extreme public example. Of late this contradiction has grown starker and as a result perhaps been somewhat resolved. In the course of my work as a poet, I regularly meet those strange creatures, the literary liberals, who ascribe to themselves every progressive and humane value while at the same time apparently finding no place in their imaginations for even the possibility of a world not run in the interests of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Apple Inc. They are the sort of people who, if they didn’t necessarily agree with her, would at least have understood where artist Tracy Emin was coming from when she called David Cameron’s coalition of 2010-15 “the best government…that we’ve ever had”. Politically, Emin may be an ignoramus. But her incontinent mouth is useful since it makes her spell out what others in the arts are only brave enough to occasionally think.  It has been my experience that, post-2008, most established literary creatives cannot imagine as possible a world in which a substantial percentage of the populations of countries such as Ireland, Britain, and the United States don’t live in Victorian levels of poverty. Just look at the queues of homeless being fed each Friday night outside the GPO in Dublin by the charity, Muslim Sisters of Éire. Despite such images, the idea of properly taxing the super-wealthy, and making sure they don’t find a way of avoiding that tax, is seen by your average sensible member of the literary classes as a notion only seriously held by annoying teenagers and people who think it’s still 1975.  According to this broad school of thought, if it can be called thought, there never was any other possible solution to 2008 but spending less on the lower orders and using that money to bail out JP Morgan, Anglo-Irish, and the Royal Bank of Scotland in the hope that the pre-slump status quo could somehow be restored.  So your average literary stuffed jacket, or pants-suit, tends to quietly cut characters such as Varadkar, Obama, and Cameron a huge amount of slack. As long as they give them things like a side of same-sex marriage to go with all those hungry schoolchildren