Susan McKay: What is behind Britain's drive to wipe out Troubles history?

The question of how to deal with the past has haunted the North since the conflict ended with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The late Lyra McKee wrote about the way belligerent old paramilitary murals had been painted over with more tourist-friendly images. Some of these show a sprightly King Billy on his white charger, surrounded by orange lilies, on the banks of the sparkling Boyne. “Maybe we were trying to erase our own memories, hoping for a collective amnesia by blotting out reminders of what had happened,” she wrote. “But all you had to do was scratch the paint and you’d find the city’s past, like a ghost that refused to depart for the other world.”

But even by standards of behaviour that low, what his government has now done is breathtaking

Now, Northern secretary Brandon Lewis has announced his government’s solution. You deal with the past by erasing it. You deny it ever happened. You call a halt to history. You draw a line. The paper he blandly presented in Westminster this week proposes to ban not just prosecutions – the amnesty he had already announced in all but name last year – but also all legal investigations “current and future” into pre-1998 “Troubles-related conduct”. This will include tribunals, inquiries, civil cases, inquests, and legacy investigations by the Police Ombudsman. The PSNI’s legacy branch alone has cases ongoing in relation to almost 1,500 people. From now on, it will be as if the 30 years of murders and maimings never happened. Troubles? What Troubles?

Lewis is the minister who admitted during the Brexit process that he was going to break international law “in a limited and specific way”. Who announced last year in defiance of a ruling of the Supreme Court that the British government had failed to meet the standards required by the European Convention on Human Rights, that there would be no inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane. But even by standards of behaviour that low, what his government has now done is breathtaking. The North’s former director of public prosecutions, Barra McGrory, described as “shocking” the idea that a government, which claimed it adhered to the rule of law, was seeking “to abolish completely all meaningful and judicial accountable processes”.

The bad faith is shameless. Lewis claimed everyone knew the current system for dealing with the past “is not working for anyone”. But the reason it was not working was because there was no system. Families, assisted by lawyers and advocacy groups, were having to devise their own routes to truth and justice, and many were bitterly frustrated, thwarted by the refusal of state agencies and others to facilitate them. The government’s New Decade New Approach deal of 2020, which cranked the institutions at Stormont back up after a three-year hiatus, promised that the 2014 Stormont House Agreement, which included a comprehensive set of legacy measures, would be implemented within 100 days.

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British prime minister Boris Johnson offensively repeated his claim last week that this is about ending 'vexatious' claims against former soldiers

Thousands of people whose loved ones were murdered or injured in conflict-related violence have been left reeling by the extent of this latest betrayal.

My friend Jude Whyte is one of them. A bomb left on the doorstep of his family’s home in Belfast in 1985 killed his mother, Peggy, as well as a young policeman, Michael Dawson. The UVF was responsible, but Jude wanted to know who set his mother up. In a social media post, he apologised to his mother and Constable Dawson. “I am sorry I have failed you both. RIP”, he wrote. “This,” he told me, “is my de facto surrender. I fought for 36 years to get the truth. Now it is over. This is the end.” It was almost, he said, a relief.

There have been heart-rending statements from others, too, including many who refuse to accept that the British will get away with this. The families of the 10 civilians who died at the hands of the parachute regiment at Ballymurphy in 1971 recently got the vindication they had fought for for over half a century when an inquest found that all of those murdered were innocent. They called Lewis’s proposals “a betrayal”. There will be appeals to international law, attempts to get the Irish Government as well as the United States, United Nations and the European Union to intervene and to persist. Amnesty International NI has already vowed it will fight the government, as have groups representing victims and survivors of atrocities carried out by the IRA, loyalists and members of the security forces.

Johnson thinks he can shut it up, but the ghost that Lyra McKee wrote about will continue to howl in this last small province of the British Empire

The North’s political parties have condemned the government’s proposals too, though it would be stretching it to say they are united in their opposition. The DUP and Sinn Féin do not even agree on the definition of a victim, and have quietly left vacant the office of the commissioner for victims and survivors for the past year. The DUP supported the campaign behind the “We stand by Soldier F” banners that flew all over the North since it was announced that the paratrooper accused of murders on Bloody Sunday was not to be prosecuted. However, as Prof Louise Mallinder of Queen’s University Belfast has pointed out, repeated consultations have shown that the public have no appetite for amnesties, and the government is pursuing “a unilateral agenda” tied to English nationalism.

British prime minister Boris Johnson offensively repeated his claim last week that this is about ending “vexatious” claims against former soldiers. He duly got the gung ho “our boys” headlines in the British press that he relies on (though many former soldiers have spoken about living in poverty with mental health problems and no state support). But we already know that cases against soldiers are collapsing; Soldier F will not now be tried, and nor will several others.

So what is this drive to wipe out history? I suspect the clue is in the rejection of the Finucane inquiry. In 2012 the then prime minister David Cameron had to admit there had been “shocking levels of collusion” in the Belfast solicitor’s murder.

Northern Ireland’s history is full of filthy secrets, including many involving the state’s use of illegal paramilitaries to carry out atrocities. Johnson thinks he can shut it up, but the ghost that Lyra McKee wrote about will continue to howl in this last small province of the British Empire.