Arlene Foster’s letter is worthy of a substantial response

If you want to experience raw hurt, then spend a few days along the border that runs from Castlederg in Co Tyrone to Dromore in Co Down. Talk to the members of the unionist community who have had loved ones killed in the Troubles.

Listen to the stories of the murders of their fathers and their sons as they tilled their land and tended their livestock.

Allow them to explain their decisions to join the RUC and the UDR to defeat the attempt to destroy their British identity and drive them into a united Ireland. And their conviction that behind the killings of their menfolk by the IRA was the even more malevolent intent to drive them off their holdings and homesteads in order to allow those lands to return to the Irish.

By now it should be clear that, no matter how awful, no single event or incident can encapsulate the Troubles

Hear the insinuation that the southern government was sympathetic to the IRA and that the guards did only the minimum to stop the terrorists crossing the Border and using the south as their organisational headquarters and, after bombing and killing, their bolthole.

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Arlene Foster’s constituency is right in the middle of that terrain. That is why the First Minister and DUP leader ’s letter to the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, asking for a meeting to discuss these matters, is important. The letter is a recognition that there is a large constituency within unionism that continues to be held in the grip and the power of the past. It is a proper reminder that the past is not exclusively a nationalist issue.

The tone of the letter is also constructive and helpful. It reminds rather than confronts the Irish government of the breadth and the complexity of what happened during the Troubles years. It underpins the reality that a “shared future” evolves out of a shared and pain-filled past that demands to be acknowledged and, as far as possible, resolved.

Sketched out

Resolving it, of course, has been a problem. Despite the various models that have been sketched out and shared widely with the politicians and the victims and survivors, none have been implemented. But there is much learning from what has gone before and there is an implied suggestion in Foster’s letter that former mistakes should not be repeated.

Some of those mistakes were glaring in the reaction to the British government’s refusal to hold a public enquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane and the seminar about dealing with the past that took place at Lambeth Palace. All within the last fortnight. By now it should be clear that, no matter how awful, no single event or incident can encapsulate the Troubles, and addressing any single event in isolation will not provide a pathway to a resolution. The past must be dealt with in its totality. No hierarchy of victims and no hierarchy of importance.

The revealing of the Lambeth Palace event, where the Archbishop of Canterbury allowed a seminar on the past to take place, led to many prominent politicians repeating the mantra that victims and survivors must be at the centre of any process dealing with the past.

We should not be too surprised that our local parties are incapable of agreeing on methods of addressing the hurts of the past

It is shocking that such a mantra is still being trotted out. To put victims at the centre of such a process would mean there would never be a resolution. Victims and survivors are as diverse and divided on the issue as the politicians and the rest of society, except that many of them, naturally enough, see it through the prism of their own hurt.

That there are more than 50 organisations dealing with victims’ concerns, some of whom are intensely political, tells its own story. Understanding, empathising, listening, being sensitive to victims is the duty of those tasked with dealing with the past, but that does not mean burdening them with agreeing to a mechanism. That is the role of politicians.

Chasm

But which politicians? Recent statements continue to reveal the chasm that exists amongst our local political parties. Under the joint chairmanship of the two governments, a broad agreement entitled Stormont House was constructed in 2014 . It contained most of the core approaches found in the Richard Haass proposals which were an edited version of the Consultative Group on the Past which reported in 2009. Every political party was to have representation on every strand of the process. That differed from the original proposals, and it would have been a managerial nightmare. It has never been implemented and the two unionist parties have already distanced themselves from it.

We should not be too surprised that our local parties are incapable of agreeing on methods of addressing the hurts of the past. The Belfast Agreement, decommissioning of weapons, new policing structures, none of those issues would have been resolved without the determination, the leadership and the authority of the two governments working co-operatively. Why would anyone think the resolution of the past would be different?

There was great surprise and shock in March of this year when the British government, on their own initiative, published new proposals for dealing with the past without consulting the Irish Government or the local parties. The response evoked universal condemnation. It was unfortunate that the proposals included a statute of limitation for British soldiers. Remove that insensitive and probably illegal suggestion, and a strong argument can be made for what is proposed.

It is reasonably similar to one of the main recommendations in the Consultative Group on the Past that a two- to three-person legacy commission be established to interrogate the files of every murder during the Troubles, and only in cases where there was compelling evidence would there be a police enquiry. That core recommendation is based on the knowledge, confirmed by recent high-profile police investigations, that prosecutions are nigh impossible.

It would be easy to throw in the towel on the past. Except that would not get us out of the swamp that the past has become. Despite the evidence that it keeps dragging politics and human relationships back into its sogginess, there are processes that can get us on to more solid ground. The initiative by Arlene Foster will certainly do no harm and hopefully it will do much good.

Denis Bradley is a former vice-chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board. Together with former Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh Robin Eames, he chaired the Consultative Group on the Past