Rundale

By Rory Rowan

In September 2023 the ‘Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill’ (the ‘Legacy Act’) was passed into law by the Westminster government. With the Legacy Act the British state seeks to cover up its complicity in crimes committed during the ‘Troubles’ in the North of Ireland. It brings to an end all existing criminal investigations, inquests, and complaints about police conduct during the 30-year conflict, blocks any further civil claims for compensation, and hands over any unsolved cases to a newly established investigative body, the Independent Commission on Reconciliation and Recovery (ICRIR). These new legislative arrangements shield all perpetrators – whether state forces or paramilitaries – from prosecution in exchange for cooperation with the ICRIR.

The Act marks a fundamental shift in how the legacies of the conflict in the North are approached, denying accountability, justice, and legal redress for the victims of violence and their loved ones. Further, it runs counter to the multi-party framework the Good Friday Agreement established for governing the North. Unlike the 2014 Stormont House Agreement negotiated between the British and Irish governments and the main political parties in the Northern Assembly, these unjust arrangements have been unilaterally imposed from Westminster.

This is far from a marginal concern for communities in the North. Shortly before the Legacy Act came into force the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry noted 46 inquests were making their way through the coroner’s courts, and the Police Ombudsman’s office had at least 430 open files. These were only a portion of thousands of conflict-related cases awaiting investigation before the Legacy Act came into effect in May.

The Act has been roundly condemned by all political parties in Ireland (marking a rare moment of political unity in the North), as well as the Irish Government, victims and survivor groups, and international human rights organisations including the Council of Europe, Amnesty international, and United Nations experts. All have pointed out that the legislation is in contravention of the European Convention of Human Rights upon which the Good Friday Agreement is grounded. 

Despite this almost universal opposition the Westminster government pressed ahead, imposing the legislation at a time when the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended. Hence, those most directly impacted by the conflict were denied any democratic oversight of this process via their elected representatives.

The Legacy Act is currently being challenged in Belfast’s High Court by victims groups and the Irish government has taken a case against the British government in the European Court of Human Rights. Keir Starmer has promised to “repeal and replace” the law if elected Prime Minister after July 4^th. Indeed, the Labour Party manifesto notes that “the Legacy Act denies justice to the families and victims of the Troubles” and pledges a return to legal processes which have “the support of all communities in Northern Ireland.” A landslide victory for Labour is predicted but it remains to be seen whether Starmer would keep his promise as Prime Minister.

Whilst the rights of those denied justice must be paramount in considering the Legacy Act there has been relatively little comment on its wider stakes regarding British state power. Indeed, this absence has been particularly pronounced amongst Left media in both Ireland and Britain, with the London Review of Books one of the few publications to engage with the issue. The consequences of the Legacy Act go beyond the victims of violence in the conflict and it should be of concern to all opposed to unaccountable state violence and imperialism.

Laundering State Violence

Given the political diversity of the parties and organisations opposed to the Legacy Act, it seems clear that its primary purpose is to shield the British state from accountability for its role in the conflict. In conventional accounts the British state was directly responsible for about 10% of the roughly 3,600 people killed during the conflict, but this figure has increasingly come into question given mounting evidence that the extensive use of torture and systematic state collusion with Loyalist paramilitary groups resulted in hundreds of deaths.

However, focusing on questions of ‘proportionality’ in accounting for the state’s activities during the conflict risks obscuring the fundamental structural violence of British imperialism and the determining role it played throughout. During the conflict and the ensuing peace process the British State has sought to present itself as a neutral broker attempting to manage a sectarian conflict between rival religious communities. Such framings obscure the colonial foundations of the supremacist statelet established through partition and the geostrategic interests served by Britain’s military intervention from 1969. Such narratives continue to launder the reputation of the British state as an institution committed to human rights and democracy, and eligible for international moral leadership.

Patriotism Unchained

Necessarily much of the critical commentary on the Legacy Act has focused on the profound injustice it does to the victims of state violence. However, it is also crucial to locate this piece of retroactive lawfare in the context of Britain’s volatile domestic politics and the state’s global manoeuvring. The Legacy Act is the legislative effluent of the extreme right wing faction of the Tory party that has dominated British politics for the last decade, first pushing for the Brexit referendum and then capitalising on its passage to control a succession of catastrophic cabinets.

The Brexit vote and its aftermath forcefully underlined the profound democratic shortcomings of the power-sharing institutions established by the Good Friday Agreement. The results of the poll made it abundantly clear that the constitutional and economic fundamentals of the North remain dictated by voters in Britain and Westminster governments – unelected by people in the North. The democratic deficit in the North was exacerbated by the fact that after the 2017 general election the Tory government was propped up by DUP MPs in Westminster – who had campaigned for Brexit – whilst the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended. Successive Tory administrations have shown blatant disregard for the stability of the North’s already fragile democratic structures and have wilfully ignored the express will of the people. 

However, it is not only a cavalier attitude to democracy and disregard for the governance of the six counties that has characterised the Britannia Unchained generation of Tory leaders. They have also been defined by their ideological commitment to fighting ‘culture-wars’ through legislation. Part and parcel of this has been a growing emphasis on ‘patriotism’. Government rhetoric in the realm of defence has been particularly distinguished by an increasingly unhinged jingoism under Tory rule. This tendency has significantly ramped up since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, reaching a menacingly comic peak with Rishi Sunak’s recent promise to reintroduce national service if elected Prime Minister.

It was in this ‘patriotic’ environment that a concern with protecting the British military from scrutiny came to the fore. In her first speech as Prime Minister in October 2016 Theresa May declared that “we will never again – in any future conflict – let those activist left-wing human rights lawyers harangue and harass the bravest of the brave – the men and women of Britain’s armed forces.” Likewise, during the 2019 Tory leadership race Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt both signed a so-called ‘Veteran’s Pledge’ promising to protect military personnel from “vexatious investigations into historical allegations of misconduct while on duty.”

This was the ideological backdrop against which The Legacy Act took shape. Indeed, it emerged as a reactionary companion piece to the earlier ‘The Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act’ (2021), which protects British military personnel from prosecution for war crimes and human rights abuses carried out on overseas missions. Taken together these two pieces of legislation indicate that the unaccountability of the British military has been a key priority for the current crop of Tory ultras and marks one of their key legislative imprints on the state.

‘Official Histories’

One of the stated aims of the Legacy Act is to control the historical narrative of Britain’s role in ‘the Troubles’. As Brandon Lewis – who, as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, lubricated the passage of the Legacy Bill through Parliament – said, the Act aims to “halt the rewriting of history.”  If the image of the British state as a ‘neutral’ agent brokering peace was to be maintained then the possibility of more embarrassing evidence about historic crimes leaking out of victim-centred legal proceedings had to be plugged.

The Act contains its own provisions for state-sanctioned historical projects, including an ‘Oral History Archive’, that will produce an ‘official’ narrative of ‘The Troubles’. However, just days before the law came into effect a ‘Public History’ project on ‘British Policy During the Northern Ireland Conflict’ was announced by the Westminster government. Although formally distinct from the Legacy Act this ‘Public History’ is very much part of the same whitewashing project.

The historians tasked with carrying out this research are to be selected by an ‘independent’ expert advisory panel led by Emeritus Professor of Politics at Queens University Belfast, ‘Lord’ Paul Bew – former advisor to the Ulster Unionist Party and Chairman of the Anglo-Israel Association. The expert advisory panel contains not a single historian from a Catholic/Nationalist/Republican background nor anyone currently working in a University in the North. Those asked apparently declined. This should have been indication enough of its lack of credibility amongst those most directly impacted by said British policy.

This ‘official’ history of ‘the Troubles’ has been roundly criticised by leading Irish academics, notably the historian Marie Coleman of Queens University, who has criticised its lack of independence from the state – answering as it does to the Secretary of State and the Cabinet Office. Coleman and others have also condemned its unethical premise: that a group of historians, selected under state supervision, be given privileged access to government archives that are closed to legal review by the victims of state violence since the Legacy Act. In denying the communities afflicted by state violence an appropriate role in narrating their own histories this project sustains centuries of epistemic violence suffered as a result of colonialism.

Despite denials from ‘Lord’ Bew and his co-Chair Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid that this ‘Public History’ bears any connection to the Legacy Act, its mission and the makeup of its expert panel render plain its complicity in intellectually laundering British state crimes. The high table school of historical revisionism has long sought to relativise critiques of Britain’s imperial past, and in so doing helped legitimise the imperial present. There has scarcely been a more blatant case than this historians’ quango.

The Imperial Present

Although these attempts to guard the British military from accountability centre around historic crimes they take on a different significance when seen in the context of Britain’s attempt to secure a leading position in international affairs post-Brexit. One reason the British state is so concerned with controlling narratives around its imperial past is to protect its aspirations for future power projection. 

These ambitions perhaps find their clearest expressions in Global Britain, a 2021 strategic review of British defence and security policy commissioned by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The document’s lead author was the Belfast-born historian John Bew (son of Paul Bew), who has been Special Advisor to the three most recent Tory Prime Ministers. Global Britain laid out the state’s geopolitical priorities post-Brexit and reflected the Atlanticist world view of Bew and the neoconservatives gathered around the Henry Jackson Society, a right wing foreign policy think tank. Central to the geopolitical vision laid out in Global Britain is a robust commitment to interventionism. It of course stands to reason that if Britain is to take a more interventionist role on the world stage its armed forces should not be mired in damaging public hearings concerning targeted killings, torture, collusion with paramilitary murder gangs, and government cover ups.

Located in this wider context the Legacy Act can be understood as one of a number of measures introduced to ensure that ‘Global Britain’ can intervene wherever and whenever is politically expedient without the risk of troublesome legal questions about the conduct of its military.

Future Legacies

Locating these attempts to whitewash the state’s imperial past within the context of Britain’s geopolitical ambitions reveals their significance beyond the revanchist whims of recent Tory governments. A Labour government may certainly signal a welcome shift in the tone and tenor of Britain’s relationship to Ireland. Yet, a willingness to hold the state accountable for crimes committed during the conflict in the North is likely to remain wanting without concerted pressure from civic organisations and the Irish government, if for no other reason than a deep cross-party consensus on the need to maintain Britain’s ‘great power’ heritage act.  It’s worth remembering the pivotal role questions of ‘patriotism’ played in Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral defeat in 2019. Starmer has grown red-cheeked proving his patriotic credentials as Party leader, and recently declared Labour the “party of national security”. The British state will seek to protect its own reputation regardless of who occupies Downing Street.

As Global Britain made clear, the British state is seeking to maintain a leading role within the structures of Western imperial power. The principal purpose of its attempts to whitewash past imperial crimes is to maximise leeway for future imperial projects. Such projects should be of particular concern to the Irish public, not least because the North is yet to enjoy even the debutante’s ball of formal decolonisation. It is of paramount importance that attempts to whitewash Britain’s imperial record in Ireland are not only challenged in the courtrooms of Belfast and Strasbourg but in our spaces of political organising, knowledge production, and cultural creation. Future wars will be the legacy of our failure to do so.