‘Living the Agreement – Legacy Matters’ Conference Report to Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, QUB, April 1st, 2023

Please note: The conference was held under Chatham House rules of anonymity. This means the names of victims, survivors and former combatants who spoke on the panel are not mentioned but their contributions have been summarised. Also, the general discussions that followed each session remain confidential.

The 'Living the Agreement – Legacy Matters' conference was held on Saturday 1st April 2023 in the Great Hall at Queen's University, Belfast. It was a collaborative event between the Truth Recovery Process CLG and QUB. Almost 100 people signed up for the day long conference and 80 attended, 65 staying until the end.

The question it sought to address was:

Twenty-five years after the Belfast Good Friday Agreement, why has the legacy of conflict in Northern Ireland and the suffering of victims and survivors still not been adequately addressed? Society remains deeply divided. The latest British government legislation has been condemned by all of the Irish political parties. Polls suggest that today people want to prioritise more honest ways of reviewing our past so that they can move towards a more reconciled society. The question is: how can this be achieved?

1. Implications of recent opinion polls

The first session was chaired by Liz McManus, former Labour TD and Minister for Housing in the Republic. It was addressed by Professor Peter Shirlow (Director of the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool). He looked at opinion polls and changing public attitudes to Legacy issues since the Belfast Good Friday Agreement was signed.

These surveys showed that awareness and acknowledgement of the suffering experienced by members of the other community has increased dramatically since 1998. Back then, an average of 4% of people agreed that there had been suffering in the ‘other’ community. Today, the figure is 76.2%.  However, people’s attitudes towards many legacy issues continue to change due to both transient short-term factors such as political controversies and longer term societal trends. For instance, the social context of discussions show that people’s views expressed in a family setting are often more considered and tolerant than those expressed in the public arena, where they often reflect more strongly communal identities.

Trust in politicians remains low. While nationalists tend to feel more strongly about the Legacy of the Troubles than unionists, most young people in both communities want to put the past behind them. Politicians continue to voice opposition to conditional amnesties but the idea has far more support among ordinary voters in both communities.

According to opinion polls undertaken by Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University on behalf of the Irish News in the lead up to the Northern Ireland Assembly election last year, 38.6% of all unionist voters agreed with conditional amnesties. The respective figure for nationalists was 53.5%. Among respondents who did not identify as either unionists or nationalists, the figure was 40.8%. By comparison, only 29.1% of unionists, 12.6% of nationalists and 22.8% of those who were nonaligned, were opposed to conditional amnesties. The rest were composed of Don't Knows.

There was cross community opposition to the current situation where two years is the maximum sentence for Troubles related offences, including murder.

2. The experience of Truth Commissions in Chile and Colombia

The second session was chaired by Andy Pollak, founding director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies.

Dr Anita Ferrara (Irish Centre for Human Rights, NUIG) has worked extensively in the fields of Truth Commissions, Transitional Justice and Post-conflict Reconstruction, with a particular focus on Chile and the Latin American Region. She spoke in depth about the Chilean experience which had evolved in three phases between 1990 and 2011.

During the Pinochet regime there had been 1,100 disappearances, 2,116 executions and 38,256 people had been victims of political imprisonment and in many cases torture. Political will was needed to establish a truth commission that would unearth the truth. It had been a gradual process and it had taken over 20 years to reach a consensus on the extent of the repression and human rights violations. It was hard to build a shared narrative about the past when society was so divided. To do so involved opening up a dialogue on ‘Why did the violence happen?’ which led to an acknowledgement that ‘the others’ had also suffered. Twenty per cent of people continue to believe that the military coup in 1973 was the right thing to do. Yet time heals and older people are more willing to acknowledge moments of truth.

Sergio Jaramillo, the former High Commissioner for Peace (2012-2016) and National Security Advisor (2010-2012) to the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos also addressed the conference. He led the four years of secret negotiations with the FARC guerrilla movement which made the 2012 General Agreement that ended nearly 50 years of civil war from the 1960s to 2ooo. There were three failed peace process attempts. He then co-led the public negotiations in Havana (Cuba) resulting in the Final Agreement in 2016 and oversaw the disarmament of the FARC in 2017, which took eight months. They were assisted by the Norwegians and Jonathon Powell.

He spoke in depth on the Colombian experience and how successful it has been in achieving a lasting peace settlement. Out of a population of 8 million, over 300,000 had died. He emphasised the role that reconciliation had played in the process of bringing victims and survivors face to face with those who had killed their relatives.

Sergio Jaramillo said that every conflict was different but to succeed in Colombia they needed to include all the perpetrators – the FARC, the army and the paramilitaries. They agreed a set of principles based on international standards of justice which gave it credibility in the public domain:

·         The principle of acknowledgement of victims. Addressing their rights and their participation became central in the secret negotiations. When the different victims’ delegations saw the process was serious, their attitudes started to change. There were many emotional moments of shared suffering in the middle of the negotiations and it became both a truth recovery exercise and a reconciliation process.

·         The use of a restorative justice process was anchored in truth telling. The truth process had to be tailor-made to the nature of the conflict and it had to be properly resourced in recognition of the traumatising and retraumatising experience it would involve for participants on all sides. It involved workshops and encounters where it became possible for former combatants to offer a formal acknowledgement of responsibility in front of the victims.

·         Traditional sanctions such as imprisonment were less useful or effective than requiring former combatants to engage in work to repair the damage caused by the conflict.

·         The process did not offer a blanket amnesty but was based on four conditionalities:

1.       You must tell the whole truth

2.      Acknowledge what you did and accept responsibility

3.      Apologise to the victim

4.      Not take up arms again [20 years prison sentence if not done].

·         Robust legal guarantees were put in the Constitution so as to give certainty.

·         Transitional justice was embedded in the larger transitional process. There were special development programmes for those regions most affected by the conflict.

Sergio’s presentation concluded with a powerful nine minute video of an ‘acknowledgement hearing’ where mothers of victims engaged with a former Colonel in the government forces whose battalion had killed innocent civilians as well as insurgents.

3. Panel of victims and former combatants

The third session was chaired by Professor John Barry, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen's University, Belfast. There was a panel comprising victims from both nationalist and unionist communities, as well as former combatants from the British Army and republican paramilitary groups. There were contributions from the floor, including criticism that there were no women on the panel. Here are some of the reflections from their life experiences:

v  We will not get reconciliation through the courts. We have rejected the amnesty proposals – they won’t work. The hurt is still carried by us.

v  We have been told what is good for us by academics and politicians. The powers that be don’t listen. They ask: “Why don’t they get on with their lives?”

v  We know the truth and don’t need a truth recovery process. We are not stupid people.

v  Young people are interested because they don’t want to go through what we went through.

v  I was injured from an IRA car bomb and still have scars on my face. The experience of being a victim made me want to retaliate. But we need to get back to the Stormont House Agreement (2014). I am content to put my suffering aside so as to ensure that armed action does not continue.

v  I was very hesitant about being on the panel today. I could not do this on my own.

v  My father was killed by the IRA but nobody knows the individuals who killed him. I am not denying everyone’s right to grieve but I feel our priorities must be about the future and not the past.

v  My brother was shot dead by Paratroopers who staked out the killing zone. It was not done in the heat of the moment but was carefully planned and executed. Evidence was lost or withheld and the HET failed to press the Army or the RUC on these issues. The state was allowed to keep the truth from us and consequently we rejected the report believing it was a carefully constructed fiction.

v  We are old veteran soldiers and are also victims having buried our friends in the borderlands. We carried a gun but were ‘piggy in the middle’. The security forces are seen as the perpetrators. There was  demonisation of the army. The GFA moved us forward and stopped the killing.

v  Amnesty is not the way forward.

v  The current system is unaffordable and corrupting our history.

v  Those who break the law and engaged in collusion must be answerable.

v  How much did the state know?

v  People have been taught to rank their pain but there is no hierarchy of pain and victimhood. Suffering should not be ranked because pain is not a contest. Pain is pain. You get through pain by accepting it and working out how to deal with it.

4. The South African TRC experience

The fourth session was chaired by Andy Pollak. Because Dr Wilhelm Verwoerd was suffering from long covid, he addressed the conference on Zoom but was able to take questions from the floor. He is presently based at Stellenbosch University “still coming to terms with its past”. He was a former researcher with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). He was later a programme coordinator for former combatants at the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in the decade after the Belfast Good Friday Agreement.

Wilhelm reminded us that there were 7,000 applications for amnesty in SA. Only 1,000 received amnesties after going through the process under the TRC amnesty committee. However, there was much frustration that the other 6,000 were not prosecuted, most of whom were state actors and not properly held to account. Given the imbalance of forces in the conflict and the capacity of the South African armed forces to continue the armed conflict, compromises were inevitable if a peaceful settlement was to be achieved.

The TRC approach enjoyed widespread support with the public watching it on TV. South Africa was the first country to link amnesties with a truth reconciliation process as an alternative to blanket amnesties or reliance on the criminal justice system. The TRC was a powerful example of a third way of an ‘accountable amnesty’ between the Nuremburg Trials and a blanket amnesty. Three things had to happen:

·         To give the full truth

·         Show they were politically motivated

·         Proportionality in regard to the means and the goal they achieved.

Amnesty means ‘mercy’ but this latter concept was not used because Desmond Tutu’s language of forgiveness dominated the proceedings. While it was a shift away from retributive justice, it was not really geared to restorative justice in terms of reparation but delivered in terms of the moral, emotional and relational work of rehumanisation.

The TRC was ‘carrot and stick’. The Commission went out of its way to involve all sections of society but the majority of victims were black. It encouraged people to come forward and tell their truth in a way that was not possible through the legal system. It also met a wider need in society to share responsibility for what happened historically and to deal with the legacy of communal and intrastate conflict. While amnesties represented a sacrifice of justice for the victims, they did bring out truths and information that society must address that would never emerge from the legal system.

Wilhelm believes that not sufficient time was given to the ‘institutional hearings’ for societal healing which came at the end of the TRC process [see Volume 4 of the TRC report] because most of the time was given to individual hearings of gross human violations and the amnesty hearings. The public hearings on TV and radio were focussed on individual cases. It would have made a big difference to have started with a focus on the institutional abuse, which would have provided more opportunities for examining the degree of shared responsibility across the main organisations involved. They could also have continued this process after the TRC proceedings in order to carry on follow up activity at communal level, putting flesh and bones on what happened during the inter-communal conflicts. Apartheid  was a crime against humanity.

5. The Churches role in healing the past

The fifth session was chaired by Rev Tony Davidson, former Convenor of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland's ‘Dealing with the Past Task Group’. Rev Dr Eamon Martin, Catholic Primate and Archbishop of Armagh expanded on his address to the Irish Council of Churches in St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast (22nd January) on the need for the churches to become facilitators of truth recovery as an essential part of the peace process. 

“Our failure to recover the truth will only continue to undermine the foundations on which our peace is built and stifle the opportunity for ongoing peace-making and reconciliation… If a truth recovery process is to lead to genuine reconciliation it will include an authentic and honest critique of the past which recognises the immense pain and life-changing trauma which actions or inactions have caused to a fellow human being.  It will entail a readiness to:

Ø  honestly share the truth of what happened,

Ø  to express contrition for the long-lasting suffering that has been caused,

Ø  to adopt a firm purpose of amendment – ‘never again’, and

Ø  commit to an openness in repairing the damage in whatever just ways might still be possible – even many years after the events. 

Reconciliation therefore entails sacrifice, crossing the road to the other in a sincere desire to repair damaged relationships – be they personal, communal, societal – and from a faith perspective, our spiritual relationship with God.

He continued: ‘That is why I would describe truth telling and recovery as a work of mercy which involves a change of heart – we recognise the dignity of the other, especially the one who we may have once seen as our enemy; through speaking the truth in love and through conversion of heart we see in them a brother, a sister, a child in God’s image like ourselves.’

In short, Eamon would like to help develop an agreed process that would create spaces in churches and schools for dialogue at parish level, circles of listening to each other and overcome the toxic topic of legacy.

6. Is the Truth Recovery Process proposal compliant with Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).

The sixth and final session was a panel debate chaired by Brice Dickson, Professor Emeritus of International and Comparative Law at QUB, who served from 1999 to 2005 as the first Chief Commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission.

Michael Lynn SC provided the Legal Opinion that the Truth Recovery Process was compliant with Article 2 of the ECHR;

Daniel Holder, Director of the Committee for the Administration of Justice, called for the withdrawal of the Legacy Bill on the basis that it has abandoned the provisions of the Stormont House Agreement;

Professor Kieran McEvoy, QUB, referred to their work in preparing proposals for the ICIR in the Stormont House Agreement and the role of the interlocutor with former combatants;

Dr Austen Morgan, a practising barrister in London and Belfast, believes the British government will succeed in getting the Legacy Bill through Parliament

Geoffrey Dudgeon of the Malone House Group reported on how their group had been active in tabling amendments to the Legacy Bill

Padraig Yeates, Secretary of the Truth Recovery Process, explained the core elements of their proposed Truth Recovery Process.

Conclusions

The conference was attended by a wide range of people from nationalist and Unionist communities, and by a senior observer from the UK Government, who spoke from the floor. He stated that the British Government would introduce a number of significant amendments to the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill that aimed to address many of the issues raised at the conference.

As far as we are aware there was no representative present from the Department of Foreign Affairs.

The feedback from participants was very positive and the general mood was that a fresh approach was urgently needed to address Legacy issues. There was broad support for the concept of a Truth Recovery Process and for Archbishop Eamon Martin’s initiative.

The main conclusions from our conference may be summarised as follows:

1.       Legacy issues in Northern Ireland can be addressed by a truth and reconciliation process.

2.      The process should be complementary to the criminal justice system.

3.      Politicians must support and encourage such a process.

4.      Buy in from London and Dublin is essential.

5.      Time is of the essence not only because of the impending UK legislation but because of the passage of time, which means that many of those involved are dying before their testimony can be retrieved and verified. {This has been starkly demonstrated by the recent death of Fred Scappaticci, who was central to Operation Kenova.]

Thanks: We would like to thank Professor John Barry and Queen’s University, Belfast, for hosting the event, which would not have been possible without their support. The total cost of the event came to almost €5,600 of which €2,100 for the venue and catering was provided by QUB. The TRP covered the balance, amounting to €3,500. A full breakdown will be given in the annual returns of the Truth Recovery Process CLG for 2023.

Unfortunately, due to technical problems it proved impossible to record the main speakers. Because it was a Saturday there was no technical support available on site to rectify the problem.

We would like to thank all of the speakers for waiving their fees and most of their expenses, as well as those members and supporters of the TRP who covered the other inevitable costs that arose. We would like to thank Brian Maguire, who allowed us to use reproductions of details from his paintings for Legacy Matters II. The ezine version is available on our website at www.truthrecoveryprocess.ie