State Violence (4 page)

The ghetto people of Northern Ireland, particularly those in Derry and West Belfast, are like other ghetto people. They regard themselves, in John Steinbeck's phrase, as on ‘the wrong side of the track'. Problems like vandalism, illiteracy, drugs and violence in ghetto cities are basically the result of deprivation. There is a temptation on the part of government to regard these problems as a matter of ‘law and order'. That embitters the situation. The ‘haves' and ‘have nots' divide seems to be perennial. It has led to major conflicts in today's world – South Africa, Nicaragua, El Salvador and the Philippines.

The rich eventually are forced to take notice of the situation. What do they say to the poor? They dictate to them from government offices, palaces, penthouse flats and mansions. The more they dictate to them, the more the poor resent their solutions. They presume the loyalty of the ghettos to the state but many ghetto people hate the state. Sometimes the poor reply with bombs and guns, as much as to say, ‘Well, if I don't share, you are not going to enjoy your wealth in peace'. That is the
raison d'être
of anarchy.

Why, for example, should the Northern Ireland Office presume the loyalty of the people of Ballymurphy, a little housing estate of nationalists in Belfast where in the past twenty years over sixty people have been shot dead by security forces and loyalist gangs, where houses on numerous occasions have been systematically wrecked by police and soldiers, where nearly every able-bodied man has been interned or imprisoned? Who built that ugly ghetto in the first place?

Liberation theology has something relevant to say to us here. It can be summed up in the phrase ‘Listen to the Poor'. The rich have an attitude, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' Can anything good come out of Ballymurphy? Can anything good come out of Ballyfermot? The poor want no plan handed down to them, neither from the USA government, nor from the Northern Ireland Office, nor from Leinster House, nor from the Irish Episcopal Conference, nor from the National Conference of Priests of Ireland, nor from the International Funds. What are the poor saying themselves? Come down and listen to them. They don't want people telling them, ‘What you want is ...'

Northern Ireland mirrors the world-wide problem of the rich and the poor, the resource-hungry northern hemisphere devouring the southern hemisphere. If oil or any other aspect of economy is a problem then the powerful, in the name of democracy and the free world, will bury the weak with great earth-movers. The creed of secular liberalism, materialism and capitalism provides the philosophy to do so.

Secularism can be a pseudo moral voice that offers us more and more to eat and drink, comforts us with block-buster bestsellers with sex and violence on every page, assassinates the characters of other moral voices in competition and shields the sins of media bosses. It wrecks the unity of the family and aborts children from the womb. Its bland monotonous sameness provokes the revolt of the small nations and cultures anxious to preserve their national heritages. It threatens non-conformists with nuclear and chemical weapons and aspires to star wars. But what about the enemy within? Could it be that as the ghettos expand in this brave new world we will live to see the poor rise again in a new socialist revolution? Who says socialism is dead?

Where does the world of the sacred stand confronted by the pervasive dominance of this heady secularism? Does it respond by tirelessly proclaiming the old virtues – disciplined prayer, disciplined charity, disciplined chastity, conservative authority?

Or will the sacred try to survive in dialogue with the secular and content itself with small committed Christian communities, bright faith globules in the darkening pagan sea?

Priests in the field have no time to answer. Every day a desert boy hands them a satchel of bread and fish. Every day they find Adhmed Kassim lying wounded on a stretcher. Like Jesus they have learned their lesson.

A response to papers read at the 1991 AGM of the National Conference of Priests of Ireland. Published in Good News in a Divided Society (1992).

A Chathaoirligh, a dhaoine uaisle, is mór an phribhléid dúinne, lucht feachtais agus gaolta ar son na cóire bheith i láthair ag an bhFóram agus bheirimid buíochas daoibh as an fhaill seo a thabhairt dúinn labhairt.

Madam Chairperson and members of the Forum,

Thank you for the privilege of addressing the Forum as chairperson of Relatives for Justice and chairperson of the Campaign for the Right to Truth. The Campaign is an umbrella group of eight organisations. There are six speakers on this panel and there are some thirty members present at the Forum. You will meet many of them informally and hear their stories. We are happy that you are willing to listen to poor, humble and vulnerable people who have suffered at the hands of the state in the past twenty-five years. You will have heard, and doubtlessly will hear more testimonies from victims and their relatives who have suffered grievously at the hands of the paramilitaries. We sympathise with these victims and encourage you to do all you can for them. Today we are focusing narrowly on a section of people, victims and their relatives who feel they have been neglected and ignored. The ghetto poor have to a great extent been a voicless people – although they can be eloquent – voiceless because they are without power. Government officials, religious people and academics were not always willing to listen to them and so their lack of human rights and civil rights and justice went unredressed. They found it difficult to get their story told. The people represented here, madam chairperson, have been the victims of the corruption of law. Such a problem is worldwide. We are focusing here on Northern Ireland and Britain but we have also a speaker here to challenge governments and politicians in the Republic of Ireland whose silence on the Dublin and Monaghan bombings is as deafening as the explosions themselves. The agents of the law in Northern Ireland and Britain, people in charge of the law, have violated the law to use it as a weapon to torture men in interrogation centres, to send some innocent people to jail for life, to kill and injure civilians with plastic bullets, to shoot citizens with army guns, to act in collusion over twenty-five years with the murderous intent of the loyalist paramilitaries. A second hurt, added to the injuries, is that the law has provided no adequate remedy for proper investigation; no truth or justice for the Relatives for Justice. Hence the appreciation of our groups to have a voice here today.

The British government does not hold the high moral ground. Like the paramilitaries it should also acknowledge and repent for its crimes, the deaths and suffering of innocent people it has caused. Truth helps a peace process and has healing effects. Justice and charity flow from it. Our submission to the Forum outlines 16 classifications of the violations of human rights. The headings are:

1.
Murder and unjust killings by the security forces.
148 members of paramilitary oganisations and 138 innocent civilians have been killed by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the British army; some of these can be classified as murder and some as unjust killings. Prosecutions and convictions of members of the security forces have been avoided in most cases.

2.
Collusion
of the British Intelligence system, members of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the Royal Irish Rangers (RIR), members of the RUC, with loyalist paramilitaries leading to the murders of hundreds of Catholics.

3.
Widespread and deadly use of
rubber and plastic bullets
resulting in severe injuries and the deaths of 17 people, of whom 8 were children and one was a woman.

4.
Internment
of
c.
2,000 Catholic men and 32 women under special powers and the cruel ill-treatment of same.

5.
Inhuman and degrading treatment
of detainees in Palace Barracks, Holywood, and Girdwood Barracks, Belfast, 1971–2.

6.
Torture
of 14 hooded men by sensory deprivation in Ballykelly Barracks in 1971.

7.
Duress:
Arrested people in the 1970s were forced to sign statements admitting crimes the police wanted to connect them with.

8.
Harassment:
For 20 years nationalists were subjected to arbitrary house searches, house wrecking, beatings, verbal harassment, and census taking by security forces.

9.
Ill-treatment of arrested persons in
RUC stations 1972–75.

10.
Ill-treatment of arrested person in the
interrogation centres
at Castlereagh and Gough Barracks 1976–77.

11.
Alleged verbal statements of accused given out by the police were accepted on their word in the
Diplock Courts;
beating, thumping and kicking prisoners and interrogating them for long periods and putting them in positions of stress, were not accepted as cruel and degrading treatment and statements taken after these forms of ill-treatment were accepted in court. There followed great disparity in sentences and some of the sentences were inhuman. Despite the censures of the British domestic report, the Bennett Report, in 1979, ill-treatment continued centred on beatings designed not to leave marks, on psychological torture and threats, blackmail and the use of supergrasses.

12.
Severe
punishments
were inflicted on prisoners who refused to do prison work and wear prison clothes in the 1976–81 period.

13.
Degrading
stripping
naked of the women prisoners in Armagh Prison 1982–1986.

14.
18 innocent
Irish people were imprisoned for long years by police action and judicial procedures in Britain which were contrary to human rights.

15.
Some Irish political prisoners in British prisons were treated with
cruelty.

16.
The Prevention of Terrorism Act
brought great suffering to many thousands of Irish in Britain.

When those charged with upholding the law appear to violate it with impunity in this way, the foundations of respect for law and order disappear. The question is: will the new Northern Ireland with a radically restructured police force, with strict regulations re appointment of judges, magistrates and coroners, avoid political prejudice, guarantee the human and civil rights of all citizens, provide independent modes of investigation of police and legal abuse, and will citizens in positions of power show concern for justice regarding security and social justice? We hope so

My Introduction to Oral Submissions from Relatives for Justice and from the Campaign for the Right to Truth to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, Dublin Castle, 11 April 1995.

On 13 March 1977 British media workers formed the Campaign for Free Speech on Ireland and in 1979 published a pamphlet
The British Media and Ireland – Truth the First Casualty
. It listed some television programmes from 1970 to 1978 dealing with Northern Ireland that had been banned and carried articles by journalists and other commentators on the difficulties of reporting on Northern Ireland, censorship and distorted images of Ireland. The blurb on the back of the pamphlet has a quotation from a BBC television news sub-editor, ‘I've always assumed that the official line is we put the army's version first and then any other'.

At the inaugural meeting of the campaign Jonathan Dimbleby, Thames television reporter, said, ‘Those who have access, anywhere, at any time, to our media, should be pressing to ensure that in those media Northern Ireland is put in context, the events there are explained, the possible future analysed. Otherwise it will continue to deny the British public the kind of information it needs to form a judgement about the most important political issue that any government has had to face'.

I contributed the following piece to the pamphlet. It was written for the Theatre Writers' Union conference on censorship in London on 28 January 1979:

‘The one means of redress left to people in the north of Ireland is publicity. There has never been in the past ten years proper machinery for the hearing of complaints regarding the violations of human rights – murder by security forces, torture and brutality in interrogation centres, imprisonment without trial, excessive punishments in prisons. It is quite clear that the sanction for these violations came from the British government itself. It therefore used the law and counter-terrorism as part of its war effort. In short, people with a grievance were asking the very people responsible for the violations of law against them to hear their complaints and grant justice.

‘The British government therefore exercised great pressure at home and abroad to distort the truth, their simple case being that they were honest peacemakers caught in the middle of a savage war between Catholics and Protestants.

‘On the unjust killing of civilians the army and RUC always got their story to the media – they were fired at first, the civilian was carrying a weapon, etc. The British media accepted the army spokesmen as did Radio Éireann often. The big lie was one of the most hurtful things to people who suffered and knew the truth. The British army version was what the people in charge of the British media wanted themselves; so they would not speak out the truth.

‘Fr Denis Faul and I tried to break through on this many times: we had to resort to writing our own pamphlets – on the murders of Leo Norney, Peter Cleary, Majella O'Hare, Brian Stewart, for example ... the eleven men killed by the SAS in the past year. Which of the media has undertaken that? They are guilty by their silence and omission. These are the big sins of the British media.