Speakers from: Healing Through Remembering (Belfast), Justice for the Forgotten (Dublin/Monaghan), West Tyrone Voice and other groups
Chaired by Most Rev. Dr. Richard Clarke (Bishop of Meath and Kildare)

Summary report:

‘With signs of a more peaceful and stable future for the people of Northern Ireland, the latest Meath Peace Group public talk focused on one of the unresolved issues of the conflict: i.e. how to deal with the past in such a way as to help build a better future, and how to address the needs of victims to learn the truth about what happened to their loved ones.

The range of speakers included Margaret Urwin of the ‘Justice for the Forgotten’ group (representing the Dublin and Monaghan bombings), Dr Hazlett Lynch of the West Tyrone Voice victims group (representing security force families), and four members of the Healing Through Remembering group whose recent report ‘Making Peace with the Past – options for truth recovery’ provided the central focus for the talk. The discussion, which was held in St Columban’s College, Dalgan Park, was chaired by Most Rev. Dr Richard Clarke, bishop of Meath and Kildare and introduced by John Clancy (Batterstown).

Speaking on behalf of the Healing Through Remembering group based in Belfast, Irwin Turbitt (a retired assistant chief constable with the PSNI) described the diverse group of people who debated and drew up the report: from loyalist, republican, British Army, and police backgrounds, as well as individuals from different faith backgrounds, victims groups, academics and community activists. Pat Conway (director of the Northern Ireland Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders) explained the five options for truth recovery which were identified and assessed in the report: 1) Drawing a line under the past, 2) Internal organisational investigations, 3) Community-based ‘bottom-up’ truth recovery, 4) A truth recovery commission, and 5) A commission of historical clarification. Alan Wardle (from the Shankill Stress and Trauma Group) emphasised the need for political generosity in looking at the past. “There is an immense amount of mistrust between the political parties and also between the primary communities that were involved in the conflict in the North. What we have seen in the last few months is a shift in that. With those two political parties showing this amount of leadership, it has informed the rest of our communities and the rest of our society in the possibilities for the future.” Kate Turner, coordinator of Healing Through Remembering explained that “the report is not designed to offer a definitive view on how or whether Northern Ireland should have some form of truth recovery process, it’s meant as a tool to aid, facilitate and open an honest debate on realistic options for the future. We hope that this will start to generate some real possibilities for dealing with the past and that whatever happens any decision made should be done in order to build a better future for everyone.”

Responding to the report, Hazlett Lynch said that for many of the families in the West Tyrone Voice group, “the issue is not merely about making peace with the past, it is now about making peace with the present”. “People are asking with some justification, what were the last 40 years all about? Why were so many good people allowed to die? If the current political arrangement had been secured during Captain Terence O’Neill’s prime ministership in the late 1960s, these lives would have been saved. How then can the many innocent victims of subsequent years be aided in making peace with the past?” He criticised the use of politically correct language in this and other reports: “why was the debate over the definition of ‘terrorist’ not even mentioned in the report? Terms such as ‘perpetrator’ and ‘paramilitary’ were used instead. There seems to be a concerted effort being made by the various establishment bodies in Northern Ireland to airbrush the fact that there was a terrorist campaign in the province at all, and that those who died or were murdered lost their lives by some other means than terrorism.” Victims, he said, are being encouraged not to remember the real cause of their pain but they are being encouraged to remember a sanitised cause. “From a recovery aspect this erects a massive barrier for the many victims who are made to feel that what was visited upon them was a figment of their over-active imaginations, or they brought it on themselves. This does nothing to promote healing. “Take the 302 civilian police officers, my youngest brother was one of them, and the many off-duty UDR soldiers who were murdered by terrorists. Of what were they guilty? Of trying to keep their country from plunging into outright civil war. These were all civilians, together with all the other civilians who died at the hands of terrorist murderers. Now tell me, what kind of logic is prepared to twist the facts so grossly that they end up by making the people who died the reason for their own murders?”

Welcoming the report on behalf of the Dublin and Monaghan victims, Margaret Urwin said it was very timely: “there is a window of opportunity that we can look at all of this in a more calm manner than we have been able to do in the past.” Outlining the Dublin and Monaghan victims’ campaign to find the truth over many years she concluded: “We have tried to get some way of finding truth, of recovering the truth, and, despite all our efforts, although we have achieved a lot, we still haven’t got to where we want to be. We are not looking for recrimination, even though nobody ever went to jail for these bombings, nobody was ever charged even for these bombings. What we are looking for, and what the families have looked for since 1993, is the truth as to what happened. And I think it may well be that we have explored so many different options for truth recovery that really it seems as if there may be no other way other than to have a form of truth commission, and that that truth commission should have a very important input from all victims. And it’s not just the paramilitaries that have to be involved, both governments have to be involved in it, because it’s not only the British Government that has questions to answer, it’s also the Irish Government.”

Anne Gallagher from the Seeds of Hope group said she was very pleased to be at the talk and especially to hear Hazlett’s contribution: “I sensed your anger and frustration, and I appreciate deeply where you are coming from. My mother used to say that it is easy to listen to the people who speak your language, it’s nice to sit in those kind of groups, but for me it was so good to listen to your pain, and that sounds like rhetoric, but until we are prepared to listen and address where you are coming from I don’t think we have any future. You have to be part of the healing process. So I am just so pleased that I am here.”

Closing the discussion, Bishop Clarke said that he agreed there was no need to use politically correct language. “Anyone who has studied modern warfare and modern politics knows that terrorism is a specific mode of political method. It is heartless, it is inhumane, but what it is doing is trying to do three things: first of all, at the most gut level, trying to wreak vengeance whether on the right target or not. Whether it’s a month old child doesn’t greatly matter, you have managed to wreak vengeance. But we have to think of terrorism as doing two other things. The first is the cold bloodless intention to terrorise another group into surrendering their own legitimate aspirations. They will become so fearful that they will do anything in order to try and stop the hurt and stop the death, and so they might even surrender what are their own aspirations. And it doesn’t matter whatever side it comes from, that is the cold intention and so often it works. And the other thing of course, and this is what we see again and again, is to provoke over-reaction so that with the over-reaction you gain support for your cause because people have been murdered by the other side whom you deliberately tried to provoke into over-reaction. Now what we have seen in Northern Ireland is being replicated today in Iraq, precisely the same cold, inhumane logic of terrorism can be applied anywhere.

“The last thing that I want to say is that although in many ways I hate the idea and the term ‘moving on’, so often it is just a shallow superficiality, but for everybody, somehow we all have to move beyond the place we are. Whether it is through retribution which is what some people want, whether it is through just drawing a line under things which other people temperamentally are able to do sometimes remarkably, whether it is by getting truth, exposing truth, and then just by truth itself being exposed, being able to move beyond it, but for everyone, whatever we are looking for - retribution, the peace that we find ourselves, or just simply peace that comes from finding the truth – we really have no choice but to move beyond the horrors of where we have been, the horrors of pain, the horrors of witnessing, suffering the death of those around us.”