MPs have declared victory for British restraint in the Troubles. They leave it to Legacy Commission to deal with the unanswered questions

Without attracting much attention even from the local media, the Commons spent the best part of two days  this week debating the Northern Ireland  Troubles Bill.  This is the latest attempt at what’s claimed  to be the very last chance to provide legacy information on an agreed basis  to victims and survivors about  the multiple horrors and tragedies that befell them stretching back 57 years and counting.

Passage of the Bill is now assured although a few stages remain.

A recast Legacy Commission will take on powers like those of a standing public inquiry with  investigative powers but without offers of amnesty.

The Republic will set up a legacy unit to feed information into it.

Providing  “non prosecutorial” data for  truth recovery will be the task of a separate body.

After the second day of debate and for this second report, I’m struck by how MPs  have focused very little on victims and survivors but on the longer term  reputational  contest for the legacy before the bar of history. The GFA  processes required even handedness towards all parties  including the paramilitaries  to achieve  peace. But it was always at odds with Republican claims  for equivalent status between  the state and the IRA as   “combatants” during the “war”. The British state has finally made no such concessions.   Everything before the new dawn of the Good Friday Agreement of May 1998 was during the dark days of rebellion and sectarian violence   And that is  legacy being legislated for now. The Troubles Bill utterly rejects equivalence as claimed by Republicans who may now  face restraints in applying to the courts for reappraisals mainly on human rights grounds.  We are assured these conditions have the support of the Irish government.

MPs of all parties vied with each other in calling for  extra protection for veteran soldiers under investigation. Most of them are at heart opposed to prosecutions at all,  no doubt encouraged by the fact that evidence has  generally been unavailable.  However it was conceded that the old Legacy Bill went too far and basic respect for the rule of law had to be restored.   But that respect competes heavily with the propaganda battle that accompanied the real battle from the beginning

In Britain the propaganda battle may be won already but its success in Ireland will greatly depend  on the extent of transparency now being offered by the state actors about  their own conduct. And that remains problematical. Not surprisingly given Sinn Fein’s abstention from the Commons there was little support for the republican cause shared by transitional justice lawyers. Only one prosecution has succeeded,  that against Private Lee Clegg in 1989 and that was eventually quashed. But so called accidents where victims like 12 year old Majella O’ Hare were shot dead require further scrutiny.  Following the revelations  at the inquest, will the Ballymurphy “ massacre” become a suitable case for treatment by the Legacy Commission or the courts?  Reminders of the other side of the story  were given the two non unionists, SDLP leader Claire Hanna and the Alliance MP  Sorcha Eastwood. Both however support the Bill.

According to the  extreme version of collusion going far beyond informing, the UDA and UVF supplied a string of state sponsored gangs to carry out murders and draw the IRA out into open conflict with the state where superior numbers and tactics would count against them.  A particular case involving the notorious Glenanne gang of terrorists in uniform is before the court today. This and other critical cases of  violence by state actors, blatantly  criminal or otherwise,  were almost wholly absent in the Commons this week.

The Conservatives  and critics of the Bill outside are  in unholy alliance to oppose  giving the power to decide on prosecutions  to the British attorney general who is an elected member of the government unlike the AG in Northern Ireland,  but for opposite  reasons. The Conservatives  want a higher bar of  a Supreme Court Judge. Republicans  object to a perceived  conflict  of interest whereby a member  of the government albeit independent,  would have a natural bias in favour of the veteran soldiers and the secret state.

The Conservative opposition is opposed to the resumption of almost 40 inquests which were paused when the discredited Legacy Act  was introduced, claiming they provide a theatre for the IRA. More on this later.

They are also sceptical that the Irish government will  submit much evidence of value  to the Legacy Commission. They also want the Legacy Commission to take on  the Omagh bomb atrocity  even though it falls just outside the date range of the  GFA deadline of May 1998 Their motive being to test  whether Dublin will provide  full information of the passage of the car bomb before it crossed the border. The government are currently resisting this demand as the Omagh Inquiry is under way which has itself uncovered significant information which was allegedly not passed on.

For their part the government  will add duty of candour being required from state actors under  the Hillsborough Bill to be  included to Troubles Bill when its passage  through Parliament is complete. Whether duty of candour will  make much of a dent in “ national security” restrictions remains to be seen.

Opposition  to resuming  inquests centres on the test case of Loughgall, the subject of the major speech of the day by the Conservative veteran MP, former leadership contender, right wing civil libertarian and ex SAS member David Davis. I let him speak for itself as  a vivid testimony of how a big majority of MPs across all parties feel about the service record in Northern Ireland  that has so much shaped this Troubles Bill

Why Loughgall? It was the greatest single defeat of the IRA—the one that they are most sore about and still feel the scars of. Why is that? Because it involved the defeat of what they considered their most successful unit, the East Tyrone brigade. What was the measure of that success? That so-called brigade killed 250 innocent people. The defeat at Loughgall was seen as a humiliation for the IRA, and that means that they are now desperate to rewrite history and cast their murderers as heroes and British soldiers as amoral killers. That is why they want a coroner’s inquest, rather than a legacy commission.

In the rest of the United Kingdom, an inquest is not allowed to pursue a case if it becomes at all apparent that it may lead to a criminal prosecution, such as the finding of an unlawful killing, but in Northern Ireland the reverse is true.

Even Northern Irish judges recognise the ludicrous nature of that situation. We saw that in the Coagh case with Soldier B, where there was judicial review attempt after judicial review attempt, which led to the judge talking about the “ludicrous nature of this challenge, funded as it is by legal aid.”

Why are operations such as Loughgall, Clonoe, Coagh or any of the others challenged by supporters of the IRA and others? The peculiar circumstances of Northern Ireland made this sort of operation necessary. How is that? The IRA knew how to frustrate justice. They would murder or intimidate not just anybody who thought that they might be a witness, but their families. If I were in that circumstance in Northern Ireland, I would baulk at giving evidence if I felt that my family might be murdered as a result of doing so, and I would baulk at serving on a jury for the same reason. That is why we ended up with Diplock trials, which had judges without juries, because that was simply not viable. When Diplock recommended those trials, he gave the example of a man who was executed in front of his young son the day before he was due to give evidence in a terrorist trial. That is the background and the circumstances.

However, the IRA did not stop there. They understood that, as well as witnesses, the other thing that matters in court cases is forensics. That is why they wore a strange uniform of boiler suits, rubber gloves, shoe coverings or wellingtons and balaclavas, because they knew that they had to deny the evidence, but that was not all. When they had carried out their crime, the cars used were frequently abandoned and burned to destroy the evidence. There are plenty of examples—I think Clonoe was one of them—where a crowd prevented the authorities from getting close to a car until it had burned out, for the very simple reason that it destroyed the evidence. Even in the case of the murder of a previous Speaker at Stormont, Norman Stronge, and his son, the IRA set fire to the house, with the same aim.

The aim at Loughgall was to destroy the police station and kill the police officers who would be coming off shift at 7 pm—the attack was timed for 7 pm. It was not the first such operation, but the third; it came after Ballygawley, where the IRA shot and killed two police officers before

blowing up the station, and the Birches, where they machine-gunned the station—fortunately, they missed people—before blowing it up. At Loughgall, the IRA team attacked the police station in two units. One unit was in a van, carrying a team armed with automatic weapons with the intention of killing the three police officers as they came off duty, and the other unit—of three men, I think—was in a JCB-style digger that was carrying in its bucket a 300 lb to 400 lb bomb.

The attack happened at 7 pm, when the police officers were due to come off shift. Inside the station at the time, because of intelligence that was known, there were three police officers and three SAS soldiers. To be frank, I find it hard to imagine the level of courage it takes to sit in a building, waiting for it to be blown up by a 300 lb or 400 lb bomb. It is beyond my imagination, but that is what they did.

The attack started when the van screeched to a halt, and a number of the unit debussed and opened fire on the police station. They fired a total of 78 rounds; I do not know whether all of them were fired at the police station, but I imagine most of them were. Inside the station, people reported being hit by fragments of bullets as they hit the steel frames of the windows and disintegrated. The digger then crashed through the perimeter fence and the bomb exploded, destroying half the building and injuring the occupants. “Injuring” is too mild a term, frankly—one occupant had a fractured skull, while others had broken bones, and two of the soldiers fell about 10 feet on to rubble. Others sustained hearing injuries.

In the firefight that followed, all eight members of the IRA active service unit were killed. These are the people otherwise described as victims in this exercise. I have already detailed the worst of them, Jim Lynagh; rather than detail the rest, I will simply say that on forensic analysis, it was found that the weapons recovered after the event were responsible for 40 to 50 killings—killings that took place in every single county in Northern Ireland. What was the effect of this operation? Well, the East Tyrone brigade had been responsible for more than 20% of the IRA’s activities and killings in Northern Ireland beforehand; afterwards, they were responsible for less than 10%. This operation saved lives.