Do you remember when, last December, the Irish government took the United Kingdom to court over proposals for dealing with the legacy of the Troubles? They, and many domestic critics in the UK, said that plans to establish a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission – in which individuals could receive an amnesty in exchange for honest testimony – amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card for people who may have committed terrible crimes.
‘Yes, I blew him up,’ Michael Hayes said
Well, nothing quite puts that story in perspective like this week’s report that Michael Hayes, a former IRA commander now living in the Republic of Ireland, has openly boasted about being the mastermind who planned the 1979 assassination of Lord Mountbatten.
‘Yes, I blew him up. (Tom) McMahon put it on his boat…I planned everything, I am commander in chief,’ Hayes told the Mail on Sunday. ‘I blew up Earl Mountbatten in Sligo but I had a justification…He came to my country and murdered my people and I fought back. I hit them back.’
Perhaps Hayes will be swiftly arrested and prosecuted; there certainly appears to be no formal barriers to the police in Dublin at least investigating Hayes’s remarks. But it would be quite a turn-up for the books; to date, the burden of investigation into alleged historic crimes in Northern Ireland has all too often fallen disproportionately on the security forces.
The most obvious example of this was the so-called comfort letters scandal, which came to light when one such communication collapsed the trial of John Downey, the IRA member accused of carrying out the Hyde Park bombing in 1982.
Under the Belfast Agreement, prisoners serving sentences for Troubles-related terror offences were released. However, this did not apply to those who had evaded capture or not yet been charged. A formal amnesty for these suspects was opposed not only by Unionists but also Sinn Féin – because it would have included British troops.
Instead, the Blair government covertly sent the ‘on-the-runs’ – a group which by definition only included suspected terrorists, not security forces personnel – letters saying they were no longer wanted by the authorities.
Sinn Féin got exactly what it wanted: a de facto amnesty for republican suspects, but no protection for its enemies; in 2016, the Belfast Telegraph reported that ‘police have since revealed that OTRs who received letters were linked to hundreds of murders.’ Those victims will never receive justice.
Since then, this problem has persisted. Ben Lowry, a Northern Irish journalist, has written extensively about the disproportionate attention seemingly paid to allegations against military and police personnel. In 2017, it was reported that such cases made up 30 per cent of the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI’s) legacy caseload. On first glance, that might seem broadly fair, if one divides the participants of the Troubles into Republicans, Loyalists, and the security forces. But that simplistic analysis misses a couple of critical facts.
First, the Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary between them account for only around ten per cent of all killings associated with the Troubles, not a third. Second, those organisations were state actors with the legitimate right to use lethal force in the execution of their duties.
That doesn’t mean they have sovereign immunity, nor that military and police personnel did not perpetrate unlawful killings. But it does make a simple comparison of even the true bodycount misleading. Many of the deaths attributed to the security forces will have been lawful and proper; every death attributed to republican or loyalist terrorists was a crime.
Sinn Féin does not accept this, of course. For all its posturing about being an army, the IRA seems deeply averse to the idea of lawful death in combat; republicans have tried to insist that the military be investigated even for such clear-cut engagements as the 1987 Loughall ambush, in which an eight-man IRA squad was ambushed and destroyed by the SAS whilst attacking an RUC barracks.
Meanwhile, London has been remarkably lax about letting Dublin strike bold poses on the question of historic justice without posing hard questions about the Irish government’s own record, especially its chronic refusal to extradite IRA suspects to face trial. In 2019, Unionists were justly outraged when Patrick Ryan appeared on a BBC programme to boast about his work sourcing cash and munitions for the IRA; Dublin had refused to extradite him in 1988.
Hayes’ confession is a chance to start putting things right. He has admitted to orchestrating the assassination of a senior member of the royal family, and a former member of the British government. If the Irish government is so concerned about seeing justice done for historic offences, it should arrest him and hand him over.
If not, its latest posture will be exposed as communitarian special pleading, dressed up in the borrowed feathers of concern for due process.
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