This week the commission for the location of victims remains has
closed down its search in County Monaghan for the body of Gerry Evans.
The search for the remains of the disappeared has been fruitful in
some cases, hopeless in others; depending on the quality of
information passed on by the IRA.
And it is not only the families of the disappeared who have been
challenging the memory of the IRA.
Some families of those killed as informers have been talking to the
IRA and seeking information about the reasons their loved ones were
killed.
The answers are not always satisfactory here either.
I have been talking to the family of a young man shot
dead by the provisional IRA nearly 40 years ago.

As broadcast on Sunday Sequence this morning (Oct 3.2010)

The past in Northern Ireland is a clatter of unfinished stories, and the neater and more vague the official versions of events, the more suspicious and cynical we become.
Rightly or wrongly.
An early assessment of past violence was the Widgery Tribunal into the Bloody Sunday killings of January 1972. That taught us how examining the past would have to work. The government of the day and the political and military leaders would have to be shielded from any charge of murder. That’s how most of us understood the implications of the report.
Only when the main players were dead, 38 years later, could a report be published and accepted by a Prime Minister that shamed the army and the judiciary.
The past has come back to us three times this week.
An enquiry into the murder in prison of the loyalist killer at Billy Wright published its £30 million report and told us nothing we didn’t know, that Wright had been killed by a group of INLA prisoners, who had somehow acquired guns, and scaled a prison roof when a surveillance camera was conveniently switched off. But there was no government or security service involvement.
Now, some people hear a story like this and think — well, isn’t that the way of the world, you turn your back for a minute …
But most of us, hearing of the deft assassination of a man who was a major threat to the peace process, whose removal was so convenient, will sense intrigue. We can’t help it. Any novel that opened with the murder of an irrepressible killer like Wright — who was going to be back on the streets if not stopped — would have to end with a very wide circle of machination exposed.
Not in real life — yet hard not to wonder if in another 30 years, when this may be no more than just a morsel of history, a piece of paper will turn up, the connection between the assassin and — well somebody very big and safely dead.
Isn’t that what happened a few weeks ago in the report of the police ombudsman — by the way, are you counting all these reporting and investigating bodies and noting how the job of sifting the past has become so fragmented? The police ombudsman, reporting on the bombing of Claudy and the murder of nine people in 1972 found that the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, William Whitelaw, had visited the head of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Conway, and arranged for the transfer of the chief suspect in the bombing, a Catholic priest, Father James Chesney.
Now that couldn’t have come out when Whitelaw was alive.
Certainly not when he was in Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet, as Home Secretary. Unthinkable.
But years later and the new Tory top tier in government has no problem dumping on the reputation of a predecessor, any more than on the soldiers who slaughtered innocents on Bloody Sunday.
Time makes every embarrassment bearable.
And what did people think, at the very start of the peace process, when a helicopter crashed on the Mull of Kintyre, killing 29 people including 25 of the most senior military and police intelligence operatives monitoring the Northern Irish paramilitaries?
Brilliant material for a novel. Only one way for the story to go. Could anything so dramatic — so relevant to the big political story — have only been an accident? Well not in the movies.
The findings: that the pilots were to blame.
The lingering suspicion: that the software controlling the ‘copter was faulty. Not a pointer to clandestine devilment in high places but to negligence further up the line.
This week we hear there is to be yet another enquiry.
And when things don’t smell right and the drama and horror and relevance awakens cynicism and suspicion, these drive our curiosity and our demand for better answers.
And, if we are sometimes cynical in the wrong, that is a safer position to be in than never being cynical at all.
One bit of the past did go away this week.
Bones found in a Co Monaghan bog last month were finally confirmed as those of 57-year-old Charlie Armstrong — one of the Disappeared — killed, almost certainly, by the IRA, nearly 30 years ago.
Charlie goes into his grave this morning, a Christian burial at last in Crossmaglen. And that is the end of it.
The IRA has not owned up to the murder.
The family will not demand to know who the killer was or the circumstances. That was the undertaking they gave when they pleaded for help to find the body.
And the Commission for Victim’s Remains — another past-filtering body — does not gather forensic evidence — that’s the trade-off for paramilitary assistance.
But what was so significant about the murder of Charlie Armstrong that the IRA still has to disown the killing?
Perhaps merely the pedestrian likelihood of the killer having been a neighbour.
Perhaps a connection to someone whose political career is in need of careful protection?
Cynicism, conspiracy theories or plain common sense?
We’ll never know. We are left, as with the murder of Wright, and the carnage on the Mull of Kintyre, with an aching sense that there is more to the story that we cannot be allowed to know.
And maybe there is.
And maybe there isn’t.
Catching Up With The Past

Judging by the rapturous applause from the crowd, most were as surprised as I was by the frankness of the statement. I have always understood that, whatever the lip service paid to law and order, the army was effectively immune. So this contradicted that understanding.

However, my prejudices about the army are grounded in experience during the early Troubles of witnessing the bullying manner and thuggery of the Parachute Regiment in particular and other regiments too.

I never had any doubt that the dead of Bloody Sunday were murdered, and I believe that many civilians were murdered by soldiers in Ballymurphy and Springhill and other areas.

Mr Cameron was conceding that the paras who killed on Bloody Sunday had disgraced the army and their country but insisting there would be no other open ended enquiries and that he believed the record of the army in Northern Ireland was a proud one. His concession is limited.

Perhaps he is allowing that the killers of Bloody Sunday will be the scapegoats for Britain’s excesses during the Troubles. And if the Republican community is of a mind to offer similar scapegoats, he appears to be hinting that the head of Martin McGuinness would be welcome.

Tim Brannigan’s new book, Where Are You Really From? recounts the life of a black boy born in Belfast who became a Republican activist.

Is having two identities a freedom or a burden? That’s a question I explored with him and others in similar double identity situations.

This one won’t be on the wall for so long. You have to be up early to catch graffiti that targets the MP for West Belfast, but it was still on the wall at the corner of the Grosvenor Road and Falls Road this morning at 8.30.

And here is the paint-out job, this afternoon:

Kiri Barker has more of this kind of thing.

The British prime minister, Gordon Brown was back at work in London
last night, with his mind focussed again on crucial global affairs.
British soldiers are still dying in Afghanistan, the civilian death
toll there is in the tens of thousands and the shaky president of that
country, Mohammed Karzai, is in London today for a conference with
sixty foreign mnisters.
It wouldn’t be surprising if, in the midst of such a gathering, Gordon
Brown wasn’t to ask himself just how important his fruitless daliiance
in Hillsborough had really been.
The Taoiseach Brian Cowen was similarly getting back into his stride
in dealing with a crime wave whose death toll is nearly as bad as the
troubles were here and an economy in crisis.

It is hard to be sure whether it would have been even more
embarrassing if they had succeeded, for that would have confirmed,
symbolically and in the eyes of the world, that we are in our
political infancy. As it is, our disgrace is that our intercommunal
intransigence has survived a 20 year peace process and looks as if it
might to define us in perpetuity.
Perhaps the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown and Taoiseach, Brian
Cowen have learnt a lesson from the experience and will not indulge us
as lavishly again.
More likely the idea has become ingrained in British and Irish
political culture that pandering to our petulant divisions is one of
the first responsibilities of governments.
We are very tempted this morning to urge them to place Northern
Ireland, in a more realistic ordering of their concerns, much closer
to the bottom.
The experiences of their predecessors should tell them that the type
of high wire summitry which they engaged in this week often goes awry.
Remember the repeated efforts to resolve the decommissioning deadlock,
the Hillsborough talks session which has gone down in history as ‘the
April Fools’ Day talks’, or the ‘ seismic shift’ talks at which the
earth did not move. The governments have over and over again trusted
that the moral pressure which prime ministers can apply, by
withdrawing themselves from urgent work elsewhere, would be sufficient
to dislodge local political party leaders from fixed positions and
they have been wrong. They have several times spun their efforts as
far more creative and productive than they have turned out to be.
If the parties here are going to continue pleading with the Prime
Minister and the Taoiseach, and even with the president of the United
States, to do their jobs for them, then perhaps it behoves civil
society here to speak over the heads of political leaders about the
embarrassment of our helplessness.
Ordinary countries can not summon outsiders to solve their problems,
unless they are torn apart by calamitous warfare or a natural
disaster.
And the irony is that among the concerns which Gordon Brown had also
to address this week, and from which we deflected his attention, were
Haiti and Afghanistan.
Of course, Northern Ireland is not an autonomous polity and the agreed
devolution of powers is not complete. Britain and Ireland do have
responsibilities here. But we are supposed to have been long passed
the point at which we could reasonably confess ourselves helpless to
solve our problems.
Brian Cowen leads a country which is suffering appalling economic
setbacks and the threat of industrial action. He would have been
perfectly entitled to say that he could not come to Hillsborough
because he had other things on his mind. To think that he was summoned
here by Martin McGuinness, an officer in a political party which has
virtually no traction left in his jurisdiction!

The tradition of Taoiseachs and prime ministers dropping everything
and rushing to Belfast to save the assembly from yet another imminent
breakdown grew out of the fear that political deadlock would reverse
the peace process into a resumption of the Troubles. Tony Blair and
Bertie Ahern, in their day, believed they were saving lives when they
came over and called Republicans and Unionists to the talks table, and
they may well have been right.
We must hope that Brian Cowen and Gordon Brown at least trust now that
most of us want our politics to function without blackmail and the
threat of violence and would rather see the Assembly fall than be
sustained by fear.
The principle that they must respond with such urgency to fears of
institutional collapse and an assembly election, is grounded on the
assumption that we are basketcase political entity, and that in itself
is demeaning to the many people here, both in politics and in civic
society, who order their priorities pragmatically and in the interests
of the whole community.
And there has to be a realistic fear that if political party leaders
here feel that the Prime Minister and the Taoiseach are at their beck
and call, then they will be routinely tempted to turn disputes into
crises and party positions into threats of disaster.
There is an awful sense abroad that the political careers of some who
are prominent in the executive here were nurtured in the global gaze
and that these people still need the attention of the whole world
before they can function. There was a hint of that last week when
Martin McGuinness was asked for a comment on the allegations made
against Gerry Adams, that he had mismanaged complaints made to him
about the sexual predations of members of his party. McGuinness’s
answer was shocking in its naivete. He said it appalled him that the
media locally were attacking a man who had created one of the best
peace processes in the world.
We have to learn to live with the fact that we are not very important.
We are a region of one and a half million people.
We have been indulging an unwarranted self-aggrandisement. Academics
study us and international journalists write about us and wherever we
go on our own travels we encounter the sense among others that we are
one of the crucial conflict zones on the planet. Yet our conflict
barely rates against an ordinary gangland dispute in an American city.
Yet the peace process which delivered us into perpetual tetchiness is
held up as a model to the world.
We have to ask ourselves now if the political arrangements which we
have established are fit for purpose.
One of the problems is that we cannot legislate for amity or even
civility between parties locked into coalition. Jim Allister makes the
case that mandatory coalition is an unviable and unjust political
arrangement. But the dream that people in Northern Ireland had when
they voted for it, by a great majority, was not that it would be
‘conflict by other means’ or, as foretold by Peter Robinson, ‘a battle
a day’. They wanted it to be a co-operative partnership between
parties with a past history of animosity, and they wanted to see the
old bad feeling and suspicion put aside. They hoped that parties which
had inherited an oppositional mindset from decades of protest, might
learn to co-operate to the practical advantage of their people. They
hoped that when the DUP and Sinn Fein took responsibility for the
everyday governance of the whole region, they would be too busy to
rehearse old hatreds.
It has to be acknowledged that there are some in the Executive who
have confirmed our hopes and expectations. One cannot point the finger
at Michelle Gildernew or Arlene Foster or a few others and indict them
of mischief and dissension.
But Sinn Fein played the education portfolio as an irritant.
Similarly, the DUP has conducted the culture portfolio as if it was
the front line in an historic grievance.
Martin McGuinness clearly loves the position he holds and perhaps has
less of an appetite for stand-off than his party leader. On the other
side, the most irascible and smug provocations from the DUP have not
come from Peter Robinson. But both Robinson and McGuinness have played
bad hands in the long wrangle over when policing and justice powers
would be devolved to Northern Ireland.
Mr Robinson procrastinated until the European election arrived,
apparently fearing that his party candidate Diane Dodds would be
seriously wounded if he had conceded a date. Then, when she was
wounded anyway, he appears to have drawn the dispute out even further
and more slowly, making little concession to the inevitability that
there will always be another election to fear. And if he had at any
time conceded a date for policing and justice, he would have killed
the issue. Jim Allister’s only hope was that he could force Robinson
to delay it; he was never going to have a chance of reversing it.
There is no better argument against a staller than to show that the
deed is done.
Mr McGuinness lost two earlier opportunities to force his hand. One
was when Peter Robinson was installed as First Minister, and he might
have refused to put himself for nomination until a clear price was
paid. Later, after the money was agreed and the DUP linked the parades
issue to the devolution of policing and justice, he could have stormed
out with more credibility, if that was what he was inclined to do. The
old street warrior wasn’t as sharp as he might have been, and now the
ground has shifted under him. He missed opportunities to play it hard
and he waived the opportunity to play it soft.
He might reasonably have hoped that when, last March, he stood with
Peter Robinson and damned the dissident republicans as ‘traitors to
the island of Ireland’ that Robinson might have said then that the
confidence in Sinn Fein that he sought, was now clearly warranted.
Both parties drew out the dispute.The question many will ask, looking
back on that, is whether either or both of them did so on the
understanding that two governments would provide a safety net and
rush, in the end, to save them from themselves.
They would prove themselves better fit to govern Northern Ireland if
they would accept that they are stuck with each other, will still be
stuck with each other after an election, and got on with the jobs we
have entrusted to them.