Without better ways of recalling a contested past how can communities be reconciled? (Paper given at Oral History Network Conference, Waterford, June 17th)
Increasing human longevity and the evolution of information technology have significantly enhanced our capacity to recall past events in more detail than ever before. However the institutional means for doing so have not kept pace and there are moral and legal issues involved when dealing with events that have caused communal conflict leading to death and serious injury.
The courts, including coroners courts play a very significant role in Legacy cases today but they are still based on adversarial procedures that emerged centuries ago: in the case of anglophone jurisdictions the age of Alfred the Great.
As someone who has been a defendant, a plaintiff, a witness and a working journalist, I have found the system to be inefficient, expensive, time consuming and often unsuited to retrieving reliable testimony of what happened. Courtrooms are arenas and lawyers are gladiators, trained primarily to represent clients and win cases rather than establish facts.
Yet court proceedings, including Coroners’ inquests remain one of the most important primary sources of documentation available to historians. They are generally accepted as the most authoritative records available, as indeed they are also often the only records available.
On August 9th and 10th 1971 I was in the Ballymurphy, Whiterock, Turf Lodge areas of Belfast. I was a member of the Official Republican movement and after the introduction of internment I found myself helping to operate Workers Radio – Free Belfast. It was located in a block of maisonettes where the height enhanced our radio signal across the city. The station had quite a wide audience because, in the era before mobile phones, we could relay messages for people and tuning in to us was one of the few ways by which those stranded in various locations around the city could keep in touch with their families and friends. Our news bulletins were a mixture of rumour, hard information and propaganda. The selection of music was determined by the dozen or so LPs we had to hand. My cousin Sylvest was the song in most demand.
We would stop broadcasting when it grew dark because of the increased risk of British Army incursions. When we finished on Monday night Eddie McDonnell (now deceased), a member of the local Republican Club, and myself made our way to the home of a member of the Official IRA where there was a queue of men waiting for weapons to defend the area; not at that stage from the British Army, but from ’UVF’ gunmen. (In fact the ‘UVF’ gunmen concerned were members of the Springmartin Defence Association, later a branch of the UDA). Many years later I met one of them and he told me that they took out their weapons that day after local teenagers, helping a family move out of Springfield Park, had been fired on by ‘a gunman from Ballymurphy’. It was the sort of evacuation that was happening all over Belfast, that fortunately did not escalate elsewhere into a full scale gunbattle.
People on both sides were driven by communal fear. For Loyalists it was fear of a Fenian insurrection, which they believed internment was introduced to suppress. For nationalists it was fear that people were going to experience a repeat of the pogroms of the 1920s, 1930s and of course 1969. This was the power of communal memory kicking in with a vengeance and I quickly discovered there is no collective emotion as powerful as fear.
The gathering darkness did nothing to alleviate the growing belief that the ‘UVF’, which meant any Protestant or any group of Protestants with guns, were going to come in and slaughter people in their beds. And, inevitably, the internment arrests in the early hours of that morning were seen as a deliberate move by the Stormont regime to leave Catholic areas defenceless.
Eddie and myself went down to the NICRA office in Marquis Street to tell them of the escalating sectarian gunbattle and the need for troops to be sent up to the area to contain it. Kevin McCorry and Oliver Frawley were manning the phones. Kevin called a number they had in Whitehall for emergencies only to be told to call Thieppeville (HQ of the 39th Brigade in Lisburn). Apparently, the British Army was running things now. At first the NICRA calls were dismissed but eventually the Army conceded that its own units were reporting escalating ‘sectarian gunfire’ in the area and they were sending someone up.
The rest, as they say is history and if you ask most people who they sent up they would say the Paras, that they massacred ten people - and some commentators have gone so far as to describe it as a dry run for January 31st 1972 in Derry.
I was extremely reluctant to give evidence at the inquest because my own recollections from that night were extremely hazy after almost 50 years. I didn’t know the area well and much of what happened occurred in darkness because the public lighting had been destroyed. Plus, Eddie and myself had also spent the better part of two hours either in the NICRA office, or on our way there and back when some of the fatal shootings took place.
I notified the Coroner, Mrs Justice Siobhan Creegan (as she then was) of my reluctance to give evidence for the reasons stated, but I was summonsed anyway.
As expected, my recollections did not suit either of the legal teams. A barrister representing the families of two victims questioned me intensively about my past and sought to have me cited for contempt when I refused to disclose the identity of the UDA member who told me about British Army SLRs they were given for self-defence after earlier sectarian gunbattles with the Provos. I did promise the Coroner that I would endeavour to ask the individual concerned to come forward and give evidence and, on that basis she decided not to find me in contempt. I was unsuccessful in that endeavour which, I think, came as no surprise to either of us.
A barrister representing the Government had only one question: was I at the time a member of the Official IRA? I said I was. He thanked me and sat down. That was it.
In her findings the Coroner described me as giving my evidence ‘candidly’.
To what extent it influenced her findings, I have no idea.
But returning to the question of the dominant narrative, a number of points did emerge from the Coroner’s findings which have been largely ignored. The first is that the Paras were not the only unit sent up to Ballymurphy that night, so were members of the Queen’s Regiment and various specialist units.
A soldier who served four terms of duty in Northern Ireland, including one during the introduction of Internment told me that word on the Army grapevine was that the Queen’s Regiment did most of the shooting that night in Ballymurphy. Later in the week I myself saw a complete breakdown of discipline among members of the Royal Anglian Regiment, who illtreated prisoners and in the case of William McKavanagh, in The Markets, kicked and stamped on him as he lay dying.
In Ballymurphy, the only soldier who was clearly identified at the inquest as having shot a civilian was M3, a member of the Royal Engineers. He claimed that he fired in self-defence at a petrol bomber. The petrol bomber missed M3, who missed the petrol bomber but hit 31 year old Edward Doherty, a father of four, who was further down the road.
M3’s conduct was referred to the DPPS by the Coroner for failing to undertake an adequate safety audit before discharging his firearm and for failing to give the three mandatory verbal warnings to the petrol bomber. M3 himself ended up in hospital from injuries later that day.
The Coroner concluded that soldiers killed eight civilians in Ballymurphy and probably a ninth, while John McKerr, a local resident and a former soldier was shot by persons unknown.
Unfortunately reconciliation of the facts requires a degree of honesty and space for reflection rarely achieved in a court room. However without reconciliation on the facts how do we achieve it on anything else, especially when we are dealing with contested, half remembered and partially reconstructed events designed to vindicate group narratives? These are often projected by people who are sincere but weren’t there at the time, or were too young to have meaningful recollections; and whose primary purpose is to achieve more immediate objectives. I think this might be described as a process of constructive anachronism rather than oral history.
Padraig Yeates
