Uneasy Reconciliation

“If there is £300m to be spent, let it be spent on practical reconciliation/integration projects in communities all over Northern Ireland”


Denise Horan

THERE were widely varying responses to the publication last week of the 190-page Report of the Consultative Group on the Past, which sought to set out a way forward for investigating the past and bringing about reconciliation in the future, in Northern Ireland.
Presided over jointly by Robin Eames and Denis Bardley, the report made some 30 recommendations in total but, as with many works of this nature, one proposal stood out – and it was to it, rather than to the overall report, that most people reacted. It was, of course, the proposal that a £12,000 ‘recognition payment’ be made to the closest relative of every victim of the Troubles, Protestant and Catholic alike, innocent bystander and active terrorist alike.
It is difficult to disagree with the anger and revulsion this proposal provoked. What would £12,000 be to any of those relatives except blood money, and an insult to the memory of their loved ones. No, well-intentioned though Robin Eames and Denis Bradley were in proposing such a payment, all it did was prove how ignorant they are of the depth and nature of the hurt that exists. Proposing a monetary gesture was ill-judged in itself, but how they could have countenanced a positive response to a proposal to accord parity of esteem to innocent victims and terrorists is unfathomable.
In the newspapers and on news websites there has been much in-depth reaction to and analysis of the report in the days since its publication. All commentators have condemned the‘recognition payment’, but most have tried to look beyond that and offer an overall assessment of the report. Of all the pieces I read, I was most taken with Noel Whelan’s contribution in last Saturday’s Irish Times, in which he questioned the timing of the examination of the Northern Ireland Troubles. He wasn’t questioning the timing of the report itself, rather he was querying the haste with which the wounds of the Troubles are being sought to be healed. “Maybe Northern Ireland should just stand still for a while,” he wrote, contending that there was still too much rawness about all that had happened there in the last 40 years.
I tended to concur. Then, while perusing the BBC website, I read the reaction of a man called John Burns from Belfast. “My father was shot dead by the British Army in July 1972, leaving my mum with four children aged between three and eleven years. What chance of justice have we? Sure the army nor the government will never admit blame or remorse for such events,” he said.
And I began to think differently.
In a way, his honest summation exposes the futility of the entire exercise. Maybe it’s not that the time is not right for an exploration of Northern Ireland’s past, nor that Bradley and Eames were the wrong men to undertake this project. Maybe it is simply that spending hundreds of millions of pounds on further inquiries and commissions and reviews, no matter how ‘independently’ carried out, will achieve nothing. Legal investigations into unsolved murders should continue, and the report of the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday should be analysed and acted upon in whatever way appropriate – when it is finally published – but establishing further such entities will achieve nothing. Neither side will ever admit or accept blame, neither side will ever cooperate fully, and neither side will ever be happy with the outcomes of ‘independent’ commissions or inquiries.
If there is £300m to be spent, let it be spent on practical reconciliation/integration projects in communities all over Northern Ireland. Imagine how far such a sum could stretch in these times, and imagine how much progress could be made if these projects were well-thought-out.
Some day both communities will have to hold a mirror up to themselves and their past actions, but let them do that in their own time. Right now, they need to get to know the citizens of Northern Ireland from the other side of the divide. They need to learn to live with them in the present, instead of dwelling on the hatred and bitterness of the past. It won’t be easy, but it will almost certainly offer a more realistic hope of reconciliation, in time.