No further police investigations, inquiries or inquests should be conducted into pre-1998 killings, Northern Ireland's attorney general John Larkin has said. Is he right ?
This debate is about expediency versus principle. The rule of law would oblige everyone to go on turning over stones for many years, unearthing unsavoury stories from all sides of the Troubles, and thereby keeping the wounds open. Practicality dictates drawing a line in the sand and letting sleeping dogs lie - an "Act of Oblivion". Many different countries have faced the same dilemma after a long, divisive war, or a spell of oppressive tyranny. Some have declared an amnesty, only to have to undo it many years later. Others have kept on pursuing and prosecuting individuals with obsessive vindictiveness. In my view, the real question is not: what does justice require? It is: which is best, to put our troubles behind us and move on, or to keep picking at them indefinitely?
From the way you phrase the options it sounds very much like you are in favour of putting the troubles behind us and moving on ? I hadn't realise that the Good Friday Agreement limited sentences to two years maximum anyway ? Is this not really about hiding the truth rather than unearthing it ? I could understand an amnesty but why prevent investigations, enquiries or inquests ? John Larkin was appointed by Peter Robinson and Martin McGuiness. This smacks of deals done behind closed doors to protect the guilty.
Still prosecuting war criminals from ww2, not seen many campaigns to end that ' justice'. Quite right too. re this latest one, from the victims relatives point of view, should their be a time limit on justice for violent crimes? I don't think so. technology improves, crimes that are not 'solvable' today could well be in years to come, so keep the liability open.
Am I alone in thinking that "the troubles" is a hideous euphemism for the violence that was involved?
yes....also 'the troubles', and phrases such as 'loyalist' and 'republican' are euphemisms for 'protestant' and 'catholic', but because religion is never to blame for anything, it is removed from the discourse, and political terms are shoe horned in. the irish are the by and large, the most religious territory on our bits of rock, so the violence goes hand in hand..scotland, which has a similar demographic is a bit more secular, so they haven't descended into the same violence...except perhaps for Rangers and Celtic.. When religion is involved there will never, ever, ever, ever be a resolution because both sides are right(eous), and both sides have been wronged.... The squabbles go back centuries...rewind the clock back before William of Orange stuck his oar in, and youve got the Roman Empire converting everybody...Henry the bleedin VIII making it up as he went along, just like the catholic have always done....total and utter load of nonsense....before then, the people were probably quite happy minding their own business.... My Ex was Irish, and all of her catholic family (well, the one's who hadn't moved over here that is) had all been on the receiving end of bigotry, yet astonishingly never seemed to be involved in any the other way around....weird... Also, the so called 'loyalists' go to every possible extreme to antagonise the opposition with Royal this and Royal that..utter stupidity..i was on a flight back from Ireland once and it was full of nasty looking blokes, most of whom were wearing ER badges and such like crap.....they seem to be more Royalist than any other sector of the globe, except for maybe Gibralta....all done of course, purely to antagonise... Stupid question: Ireland is an island, so why didn't they fish when the famine was on?
Bit its ok to prosecute 75 yr old fellas on the single testimony of a woman who says they touched her leg for too long in a time between 1972 and 1975...go figure
loved ireland the people where very friendly, what i didnt like was the banners saying "we salute young defenders", crazy, let it go put your energys in to somthing else.
"Protect the guilty"? But everybody is guilty. The loyalists, the republicans, the police, the army, the British government and the Irish establishment - everybody on all sides did things which could, in a perfect world, result in prosecutions all round. The whole lot of them could go on arresting and imprisoning one another, and thus perpetuating the troubles, for decades more. But if the different sides have somehow managed to find a way to agree to put it all behind them, it is mischievous in the extreme to oppose that agreement and try to force them back into conflict for theoretical reasons. The South African way post-apartheid was to declare a general amnesty but to hold a Truth & Reconciliation Commission; amnesty for what they had done was available only to people (from all sides) who told the Commission the truth, fully and frankly, about what they had done. OK, it didn't achieve justice, but it did achieve peace and closure - and avoided civil war. Of course that needed a man with the character of Desmond Tutu, and such a one is hard to find in Northern Ireland.
Potatoes were the cheapest food, and the staple food of the poorer part of the population, who could afford nothing else. When the potatoes all went rotten with the blight in the 1840s, the poorest starved because they couldn't afford to buy corn* for bread or oats for porridge. Since fish is and was much more expensive than cereals, fish was even less affordable. So no, the poor could not make up for the lack of potatoes by buying fish, or meat. The wealthier parts of the population survived, because they could afford to buy food. *especially since corn was taxed.
If all the people who had killed or harmed other people in WW2 had been prosecuted for doing so, that would have seen a large slice of the population of most of the countries of Europe imprisoned or executed. In fact only a tiny proportion were ever prosecuted at all. In Germany a programme of prosecuting Nazi war criminals started in 1945, but by 1950 it had run out of steam, and resources, and everybody was fed up with it, so it was largely abandoned. Anybody who hadn't been prosecuted by then (and there were lots) was left alone, except for a very small trickle over the last 60 years. And people from the winning allied side were hardly ever prosecuted, regardless of what crimes they might have committed. If you are suggesting there is a parallel with Northern Ireland, I agree.
The current suggestion isn't about "truth and reconciliation" it is about preventing the truth from emerging. Who is behind it and why ? I think the South African model would be a good idea but that would implicate too many people at the top I suspect.
no, I specifically said war criminals not all combatants. Those whose actions were perceived to be criminal within the context of a "legal war" , if you will, and taken through a legal process. my opinion is that the conflict in the OPs thread is not a "legally declared war" and that those who" did things" or more specifically committed crimes, as covered by the prevailing laws, should continue to be open to face prosecution as and when evidence/new evidence comes to light. It is never a ' perfect' world, so for my money the victims of the crimes should today still be able to pursue justice. I struggle to see the victims being part of " the different sides" agreeing to sweep any future chance or opportunity of seeing the crimes taken through the legal, en masse. i Think as further time goes by, the new evidence and prosecutions will naturally decline-only logical-but it is too soon to force that natural sequence .
Ireland is an island, so why didn't they fish when the famine was on? Because the English owned the boats and the majority of businesses at the time. Actually food exports were extremely high at the time the nation was starving, but the potato was the staple of the poor,and they simply couldnt afford to buy anything else. Coastal communities could of course depend on fish as a supplementary food,but fish spoils quickly and with no real way of preserving it was hard to move inland. "Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. Records show during the period Ireland was exporting approximately thirty to fifty shiploads per day of food produce. As a consequence of these exports and a number other factors such as land acquisition, absentee landlords and the effect of the 1690 penal laws, the Great Famine today is viewed by a number of historical academics as a form of either direct or indirect genocide" As a young Irish man, i've seen both sides, and with friends both north and south and also England most sides of the story are familiar to me. Its a very tricky scenario. Yes, of course we'd like our country whole again, but the sad part is Ireland at the present time cant really afford to run the north. Talking to British friends of mine,in truth the north is just a thorn in the side for the English thats costing millions to maintain and police. I bet if you asked most British under 30's to explain the troubles in the North they wouldn't have the first iota. Truth be told there's a sizable portion of the Irish youth in the same boat. What was done to the Catholic population up there was terrible, and war crimes and Loyalist collusion was rife, but where does it all end? Its very hard to keep everyone happy.....
This is central to the issue. Whether the IRA was a legitimate army fighting for freedom or a terrorist organisation. Similarly whether the Loyalist paramilitaries were defending the status of NI within the UK or just defending their own narrow self interest. Putting a blanket ban on all investigation of the crimes committed on both sides would be wrong and thankfully this is something David Cameron has ruled out.
