Veterans of Northern Ireland face trial for decades-old crimes

A CONSERVATIVE cabinet faces anger from its own supporters, inside and outside Parliament, who say that special interests in Ireland are trumping the government’s own promises as well as the national interest. The cabinet seems divided, and it is subject to countervailing pressures, notably from Europe.

For once, this is not about Brexit. Behind this other row is the government’s perceived failure to protect ex-soldiers from being hauled before Northern Irish courts to face trial over incidents during the Troubles of 1968-98, which were once deemed to be closed matters.

Anger has crystallised around Dennis Hutchings, a man in his late 70s who faces trial over the fatal shooting of a man in Tyrone in 1974. Mr Hutchings had received promises, after earlier investigations, that the matter was settled. But a judge in Belfast rejected his contention that a trial was impossible given the time lag and the absence of surviving military witnesses. The Supreme Court will consider his case in March. In a letter circulating among Tory MPs, one of his ex-commanders deems “disgraceful” the fate of a man who, in 2015, was arrested at his home in Cornwall, flown to Northern Ireland and questioned hard for four days.

While ex-officers growl in Parliament, humbler veterans have been protesting in the street and on social media. Alan Barry, once a soldier in the Grenadier Guards, says he quickly found 25,000 members for an internet campaign called Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans. He is crowd-funding a film that would narrate the “great betrayal” of the conflict’s military veterans. Several times, the government has faced the embarrassing sight of grizzled old soldiers marching the streets in anger rather than solemn remembrance.

The Hutchings story heralds a cascade of cases. For the Irish republicans of Sinn Fein, the priorities include bringing judicial redress for the death of 11 civilians in the Ballymurphy district of Belfast in 1971. Relatives of the victims last month launched a documentary about the episode; they want it to get the same attention as the killing of 14 civilians in Derry-Londonderry on “Bloody Sunday” in 1972.

With Northern Ireland’s power-sharing executive suspended, the Westminster government seems paralysed, too. Its consultation over “legacy” issues, launched in May, has been extended to October. But its terms exclude the possibility of introducing a statute of limitations, which many Tories want. Pressed on this, Theresa May has agreed that current probes focus too much on the security forces and not enough on their enemies. But she has not said how she hopes to change this.

“I have been left genuinely stunned…I am furious,” tweeted Johnny Mercer, an ex-captain who fought in Afghanistan, on September 12th after he and some fellow Tory MPs spoke to a cabinet member about the issue. He says the government is breaking a manifesto promise to protect soldiers from vexatious legal claims.

But as Karen Bradley, the Northern Ireland secretary, has noted, a simple statute of limitations designed to shield veterans in Britain from Northern Irish courts would flout European human-rights law. There is also resistance from local politicians. For Sinn Fein, prosecuting soldiers is crucial to establishing its narrative of the conflict. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), meanwhile, opposes any amnesty that might quash the remote possibility of bringing ex-paramilitaries to trial.

Proposals have been mooted for a statute of limitations covering British veterans of all conflicts. That could be marginally less provocative. More realistically, the attorney-general could issue guidelines advising against the reopening of cases where evidence has already been considered. That would not cross the red line of excluding prosecutions in the event of entirely fresh evidence emerging.

Coming back to haunt the government are some unusual features of the peace process that began in 1994. It rested on a virtual amnesty, but not a formal one. Hundreds of people jailed for violent acts were freed under a law which limited to two years the term such deeds could incur. The government also sent secret promises to fugitive republican fighters that, on the basis of existing evidence, they did not face prosecution. Neither of these steps completely precludes the reopening, in the light of new facts, of old cases against those who shot soldiers or policemen, and the DUP is protective of that possibility.

As a result, an even broader principle hangs in the balance, and anything the government now does could further disrupt the equilibrium. Northern Ireland’s peace has rested on the bold idea that everyday administration can be shared by politicians who disagree viscerally about both the future and the past. Brexit has made discord about the future harder to manage. An innocent-sounding word like “legacy” may yet have the same inflammatory effect on arguments about the past.