Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, it has been said on a number of occasions in quoting the Saville report today that Bloody Sunday was a personal tragedy for the victims and indeed for their friends and families, a social and political catastrophe for all the people of Northern Ireland and a military and political disaster for the British Army. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville of Newdigate, has rightly made that crystal clear. I am not at all convinced, though, that had his report come out and been greeted or responded to by the Prime Minister with a carefully crafted response pointing up all the difficulties of the time, the pressures that the Army was under and so on, there would have been any transformational outcome from the expenditure of this enormous amount of money and long period of time.

As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, said, as did my noble friend Lord Macdonald of River Glaven in a wonderful maiden speech, it was the Prime Minister’s speech that was transformational for the people in Derry. As I listened to it myself, I was reminded very much of the remarkable speech that Barack Obama made on racism during his presidential campaign, where he tore up his carefully crafted speech and wrote something that was passionate, human and engaging with the problem. That is what the Prime Minister did: he engaged passionately in a committed way, understanding quite deeply the pain that was involved for all concerned, and he gave a complete, total and absolute apology. To me, that is what was transformational.

To say that the Saville report was crucial and positive is not to say that the inquiry is the only way that things could have been done, nor is it to say that expenditure of almost £200 million over 12 years was necessary to reach such an outcome. I find it difficult to see how it was necessary to spend a great deal more than South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was dealing with the pain of the whole period of apartheid. Whether that was the only and absolutely necessary way of dealing with the problem is the issue that I wish to address this evening. Frankly, I do not believe that the expenditure was necessary and I think that we need to learn from our experience. However, that is not to say that what we have gone through has not been importantly transformational or that the outcome of the Saville inquiry—the report itself and the judgments on it—was not absolutely right, crystal clear and extremely important. For me, that is not the issue.

As has been pointed out already, there are limitations to any such judicial inquiry. Let me give just one example without referring at all to the wider political context. On 9 June this year, the historical inquiries team published another of its many reports. The report investigates the killing of 41 year-old William McGreanery, who was shot by a British solider in September 1971, substantially in advance of Bloody Sunday. Although the RUC’s Chief Superintendent Frank Lagan in Londonderry had advised that the British soldier involved should be prosecuted for murder, the then Attorney-General for Northern Ireland, Sir Basil Kelly—indeed, he was the last such Attorney-General until the recent appointment—said no. It was said:

“If soldier A was guilty of any crime in this case, it would be manslaughter and not murder. Soldier A whether he acted wrongly or not, was at all times acting in the course of his duty and I cannot see how the malice, express or implied, necessary to constitute murder could be applied to his conduct”.

There is a case to be made that that ruling—entirely inadvertently, I am sure—might have created a sense among young British soldiers at the time that they enjoyed an element of impunity if they were acting in the course of their duty. Such a case could be made. All I want to point out is that that would have been outwith the remit of the Saville inquiry, yet wholly relevant to understanding how the events of the time came about.

The key to understanding the importance of Bloody Sunday and the greater need for an inquiry into those events than into many other circumstances is the profound symbolic significance of Bloody Sunday. Next year, we will recall the tragedy of the sinking of the “Titanic”, with the loss of many hundreds of lives. The fact that we will not remember many other ships that sank with terrible loss of life means not that those who died on the “Titanic” were more important than those who died on other ships but that that tragedy was, in the words of my noble friend and countryman Lord Mawhinney, iconic. To give a perhaps more relevant example, those who died in the Sharpeville massacre were not somehow more important than others who died, but there was an iconic or symbolic significance to their deaths that somehow came to embody all sorts of other things. That kind of significance is by no means unique. Indeed, my friend Professor Vamik Volkan, who has looked at many areas of trouble and conflict throughout the world, has observed that, in almost every situation where such conflict goes on for a long period, there is what he calls a “chosen trauma”. He does not mean that the trauma is chosen in a conscious way but that there is some traumatic experience that comes to sum up and express, almost in a couple of words, the awfulness of people’s experience.

The need for an inquiry into Bloody Sunday was not because there needed to be an individual inquiry into every other case to achieve what was necessary but rather because the inquiry emblemised something. However, the inquiry could emblemise that only if the British Government then responded with true regret and deep apology for what happened. This is why it is not only the inquiry that we need to understand, but the response that it evinced.

Then there is the question of whether this inquiry is of the kind that should be embarked on. There has been almost a suggestion that if the Government say that there should be no more open-ended inquiries, there should be no more inquiries of any kind. It seems to me that that is not the question. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, has pointed out that there are at least four institutions that undertake inquiries: the HET, the PSNI, the ombudsman and the coroner. There is no proposition to get rid of the investigative capacity of the PSNI, the ombudsman or the coroner, so of course investigations will continue to take place. The question is: how do we deal with the legacy of the past, which we all desperately hope will not return under the pressure from dissident republicans? How we deal with the legacy of the past is no easy matter.

The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, has experience of how difficult it is, no matter how much time you allow and how much you consult, to come up with a mechanism or device that deals with the past. First, it is not always possible to cure and redeem all of the past. As a psychiatrist, I found it frustrating at times that people seemed to accept that if someone had been physically damaged by having lost a leg, it was not replaceable, but if there was a psychological problem, there must be some way of resolving it. That is not true. Some people are emotionally destroyed and it is not possible to repair the damage. That can be true of communities as well. We should not always assume that everything can be resolved.

Secondly, in trying to resolve things we should be a little modest about what we can do. That something needs to be done does not necessarily mean that the Government should be doing it. There are already investigative agencies that need the resources to continue to investigate the past. They are continuing to do so, as has been made clear. However, when we talk about the victims and the need for closure, how much resource has been given to assist the emotional and support needs of individuals and their families? I tabled a Question in your Lordships’ House for the previous Government, to ask whether they had looked at the financial consequences of giving help and succour—psychologically and emotionally—to the victims of the Troubles. Had they looked at any other part of the world where this had been necessary? Had they looked at the financial consequences of dealing with these things for the health service in Northern Ireland? The answer was no, they had not looked at it at all. They had focused entirely on legal devices for addressing these problems. I am in no way against legal devices; I just do not think they are the only way of dealing with our problems. There are human, psychological, relational and emotional ways of dealing with these things that have been hugely under-resourced in Northern Ireland.

Thirdly, we should not underestimate the importance of the political process in helping people to get over the experiences of the past. It really does make a difference to many people to see former enemies working together for the benefit of the community. Many people then feel that whatever the pain they suffered, at least the community has somehow moved on. That responsibility is a heavy and burdensome one on those who are currently Ministers in the devolved Assembly. They must show that political progress can work, and that relationships built now from the ashes of the past 30 years in some fashion redeem all the misery that was created. I hope they appreciate and understand that.

I have already mentioned that there are other institutions that can undertake inquiries. The noble Lord, Lord Bew, has pointed out that in other countries they do not depend solely on lawyers to assist them when it comes to inquiring into the past. There are others, which have other contributions to make. Perhaps we have pushed it too far. I am still, though perhaps not for much longer, a member of the Independent Monitoring Commission. Why was it created? It was created precisely because we discovered the limits of the judicial process in resolving problems. It was given powers quite outwith the normal powers to address some of the questions that needed to be dealt with.

[Lord Tebbit]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Does he not recognise the extraordinary disproportionality between the size and the sheer resources devoted to the Londonderry inquiry as opposed to the paucity of resources devoted to inquiries where the victims are on the other side of the political divide?

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, I entirely understand that. I also appreciate that even in comparison with the paucity of the money devoted to those legal inquiries, the amount of money devoted to caring for victims’ emotional needs is pitiable in my experience of working with some of these people. My concern is precisely that we focus too much on judicial inquiries of any kind.

I have noticed in the recent past that people in Northern Ireland—former journalists, academics, victims on all sides, former paramilitaries, those who have lost loved ones, former security force members—have started to come together to tell each other their stories away from the limelight and reporting and with no support from government at all. I am rather more hopeful that that kind of rebuilding and knitting together of relationships among ordinary people in Northern Ireland may do more to heal our broken society than any further major government interventions other than the normal, proper due process of the administration of law done with a human face and a human heart.