Boris Johnson’s Ballymurphy blunder shows need for reconciliation

This week 10 years ago there was much basking in the glory of the successful visit to Ireland of Queen Elizabeth II and what the British government referred to as “the building of a whole new approach” to Anglo-Irish relations. The BBC suggested the queen had “left her mark on a once-hostile land. Anglo-Irish relations have been rejuvenated. The grip of the past loosened”.

There was a feast of similar heady assertions as various shoulders felt the hand of history. The engagements the queen fulfilled, including her presence on the hallowed nationalist turf of Croke Park, were largely silent but highly charged confrontations with the difficult past. There had been some far-fetched speculation in advance of the visit that the queen might “apologise” for historic crimes associated with British rule in Ireland. What she did instead, when she spoke at Dublin Castle, was to maintain it is “impossible to ignore the weight of history” and acknowledged, “with the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all”.

'I'd like to say sorry to their families for how the investigations were handled, for the pain they've endured since their campaign began almost five decades ago'

A decade on, the gulf between those polished words of diplomacy and the continuing raw hurt of those impacted by the era of conflict is striking. The visit was understandably presented, in the words of then president Mary McAleese, as “a culmination of the success of the peace process”, but that assertion really only related to the realm of high politics.

A year before the royal visit the Saville Report into the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972 vindicated the complete innocence of those killed. In response, British prime minister David Cameron directly addressed the victims’ families: “What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong . . . On behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry”.

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That apology came on the back of a campaign of almost 40 years by the families. The recent conclusion of the inquest in to the 1971 Ballymurphy atrocities was also the result of a marathon campaign by relatives, and a weasel-worded, incomplete apology to the families was finally dragged out of British prime minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday after his previous two pathetic efforts: “On behalf of successive governments . . . I’d like to say sorry to their families for how the investigations were handled, for the pain they’ve endured since their campaign began almost five decades ago.”

Many other victims will never be the subject of high-profile investigations or see their claims for justice vindicated. During talk of a new dawn in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, Presbyterian minister Terence McCaughey, in reflecting on the dilemma of the survivors and victims of the violence of the Troubles, quoted Dr Alex Boraine, the deputy chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa: “the lack of official verification of former events leaves room for doubts and scepticism about the stories told . . . it leaves both the survivors and the dead in a kind of historical no-man’s land”.

There was a strong sense this month 10 years ago that we were dividing a traumatic past from a positive future

Too many are still there. When compiling the 1999 landmark Lost Lives book detailing the deaths of the Troubles, one of its four editors, David McKittrick, noted that when they began the project in 1992 “there was little or no appreciation of the needs of the bereaved” and “officialdom was of little help”. It was pressure from the Women’s Coalition in 1998 that led to three paragraphs being included in the final text of the Belfast Agreement “to acknowledge and address the suffering of the victims of violence as a necessary element of reconciliation”. But it was hardly much of a priority; if it mattered, why, more than 20 years on, is the British ambassador to Ireland Paul Johnston writing of the need to “find a way forward . . . in a discreet, inclusive and respectful way”?

What does discreet mean in this context? It needs to be spelt out and a robust response is required to the well worked out proposals of John Green and Pádraig Yeates for bodies aimed at “truth recovery” and “justice facilitation” rather than court proceedings, “to take us out of the minefield of legacy politics”. Discretion would not be the better part of valour during such a process, but it could do more to constructively confront various traumas for a lot more people than more official inquiries and legal proceedings. Earlier this year Geoffrey Corry, who chaired the Glencree Centre for Reconciliation in the 1980s, noted of such traumas “much of that remains buried as an unhealed undercurrent that nobody wants to talk about, yet it continues to drive sectarianism”.

There was a strong sense this month 10 years ago that we were dividing a traumatic past from a positive future. Conflict resolution does not lend itself to such neat divisions; rather than just “loosening the grip of the past” what is needed are the political impulses and extrajudicial structures to face that past honestly.