Dealing with the Past – Page 10 – Slugger O'Toole

A process on the past is pointless if there is “no corporate way of verifying”.

Mick Fealty on October 22, 2014, 3:33 pm

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There was a lot of whinging about the politicisation of this difficulty (or ‘diff’s in Twitterised ‘unspeak’) over Mairia Cahill’s story, Barney Rowan makes a very important and very real political point over at Eamonn’s place: What jumped out at me was the line that the IRA had long left the scene and that there is “no corporate way of verifying” if an investigation had been conducted. Am I reading that line correctly? Is that what Adams meant? That the …

Drop the mawkish “peace process ” label and get down to grown up politics

Brian Walker on October 4, 2014, 12:36 pm

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In The Detail, Stephen McCaffery uses fine, straightforward reporting to bring home who are the real losers in failing to deal with the past exclusively on the basis of need. The Abercorn restaurant bomb was one of the early atrocities which stands as a permanent reproach to those who play party politics with dealing with the past today. That means all parties, those who argue over a hierarchy of victims, and all who demand full disclosure from others without offering …

Peter Taylor hooks up with the boy turned retired IRA volunteer..

Mick Fealty on October 1, 2014, 8:40 am

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The Firemen have done a sterling job in clipping telling detail from Peter Taylor’s documentary Who Won The War. You can find them all on our Facebook page. But I wanted to clip this one myself… With the possible exception of Jim Pryor, almost everyone else Taylor talks to is trying to play some contemporary angle, from the two FMs, to Tony Blair and Jackie McDonald. Sean McKinley doesn’t, and his confession of confidence and fealty to Adams and McGuinness …

Torturing our sports personalities over questions our politicians fail to resolve in themselves?

Mick Fealty on August 5, 2014, 11:58 am

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Well, it’s summer, and for other parts of the world a very serious and concerning one. At home, the ennui of the Peace Process™. We owe much to our guest bloggers, new talent and the sheer hard work and presence of our old stagers for keeping the conversation fresh, live and relevant in our glacial political space. One thing worth remarking on, before it fades completely from memory, is the Paddy Barnes ‘controversy’ (such as it was) from last week. …

Considering the Past: “Too comfortable a zone and we stop looking towards a ‘better’ future.”

Mick Fealty on July 28, 2014, 12:18 pm

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we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind is politics, and of a kind we will not like… – Lionel Trilling John Bruton has published an interesting apologia for John Redmond and his achievements in securing the Home Rule Bill in September 1914. Considerable brinksmanship was needed, because, if the Liberals lost the election, the cause of Home Rule would also be lost. Redmond and Dillon did not have all the trump cards. …

Intercept evidence could convict terrorists, says former SoS Murphy

Brian Walker on July 16, 2014, 6:48 pm

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As a curtain raiser to Lady Justice Heather Hallett’s review of OTRs’ “ administrative scheme” due out tomorrow (Thursday), the mild-mannered former Labour secretary of state Paul Murphy has told the separate inquiry into the affair by the Commons Northern Ireland Select Committee that more convictions might have been obtained if the rules of evidence were changed. “Now my own personal view, which I expressed when I was chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee (at Westminster), was it should …

Gerry Adams: “this can be too easily twisted into a view that since everyone was to blame, nobody was to blame…”

Pete Baker on June 21, 2014, 4:46 pm

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The Sinn Féin president, Gerry Adams, TD, has been blaming others, again, for the failure to agree a comprehensive package on, among other issues, dealing with the past – in particular, a failure to agree on the holistic approach that could be said to characterise the mechanisms contained in the Haass proposals. But he had some interesting comments to make last weekend on a specific topic from the past elsewhere – [Not here? – Ed] No, there – that could help inform further discussion. Here’s …

Kennaway: Resolving the Parading Conflict

Soapbox on June 4, 2014, 8:25 pm

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Brian Kennaway served on the Parades Commission from 2011-13-an essay similar to this has also been published in the Newsletter POLITICS Politics in Northern Ireland does not reflect any real understanding of what it means to be a political representative in a democratic society. When any politician is elected to represent a particular parliamentary constituency they are to represent the totality of that constituency, not a sectional interest within it and certainly not only those who may have voted for …

Now it’s the PSNI in the dock. Chaos over the past deepens as political deadlock over Haas agenda continues

Brian Walker on June 3, 2014, 7:39 pm

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At last the clash has come between accountability and transparency and “national security” over dealing with the past. After the unhappy period of Al Hutchinson we have a Police Ombudsman in the assertive tradition of Nuala O’Loan. Michael Maguire who was also Hutchinson’s successor as Police Oversight Commissioner probably knows where quite few bodies are buried (figuratively of course) and is an altogether steelier figure. NI’s chief constable is being taken to court over claims he obstructed Police Ombudsman investigations into …

Art of the Troubles: Culture and Conflict

Soapbox on June 3, 2014, 12:37 pm

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Dr Stefanie Lehner (Queen’s University Belfast); Dr Laura McAtackney (University College Dublin); Dr Cillian McGrattan (University of Ulster) The importance of culture in Northern Irish political life was reinforced in the events surrounding Pastor McConnell over the past week. It is clear that within Northern Ireland, the effects of fear, judgment, prejudice, hate and intimidation make themselves felt in various forms throughout society. Cultural difference, then, shapes and informs the contours of political life – it works to valorise certain …

Compensation for inquest delays underlines the need for dealing with the past

Brian Walker on May 21, 2014, 12:13 pm

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Yesterday’s landmark compensation awards of £7500 each to the families of six men killed by the security forces means that the logjam of inquests is beginning to cost the state money – money the justice system says it hasn’t got and never will have, to pay for optimum legal accountability for the Troubles. As the Guardian reports: The high court in Belfast ruled on Tuesday that the damages were awarded due to the “frustration, distress and anxiety” suffered by the …

Sunningdale, The UWC Strike and their legacies. 23rd May 2014, PRONI.

David McCann on May 14, 2014, 5:30 pm

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The Public Records Office of Northern Ireland Friday, 23 May 2014 9am – 4pm The 40th anniversary of the establishment of the first power-sharing executive is an opportunity to reflect on the nature of democratic practice in Northern Ireland. This one-day conference is open to the public and aims to explore not only the reasons for the sudden demise of the ‘Sunningdale Assembly’ during the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike but also the divided legacies that that demise bestowed on Northern …

Call for an Amnesty referendum faces parties and governments with the big decisions

Brian Walker on May 12, 2014, 1:55 pm

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Sir Des Rea the first chair of the Policing Board and Robin Masefield the former head of the Prison Service are people of conscience and great experience. They are no ivory tower observers. Prompted it seems by the risks to stability threatened by the Adams interrogation, in very flat language they make public their fundamental proposal that cuts the Gordian knot of humbug and misplaced principle over the availability of justice . It is what much if not most of the professional establishment …

No sign yet of smoking gun in the Adams case

Brian Walker on May 8, 2014, 10:24 am

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Gerry Adams uses a column in the Guardian to describe and comment on his interrogation. I was told that the interrogations were an evidence-gathering process, and that the police would be making the case that I was a member of the IRA; that I had a senior IRA managerial role in Belfast at the time of Jean McConville’s abduction; and that I was therefore bound to know about her killing. I challenged my interrogators to produce the new evidential material. They …

Government shambles revealed over details of OTR links to murder

Brian Walker on May 7, 2014, 7:11 pm

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After republican outrage over Gerry Adams’ interrogation, it’s high time to revive unionist fury over the OTR comfort letters with the revelation that 95 out of 228 beneficiaries were linked by the police to murder. From the tortuous accounts by the Chief Constable Matt Baggott and ACC Drew Harris before the NI Select Committee of MPs today, the DUP can hardly be blamed for failing to realise in full what was going on. Neither did the Chief Constable for most …

Daithí McKay: Sinn Féin will not be deflected by ‘old guard’ within the police

Soapbox on May 7, 2014, 8:14 am

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Slugger is pleased to host a piece on the recent arrest of Gerry Adams from Sinn Fein’s Economy spokesman, Daithí McKay MLA Last week those who have opposed the Peace Process and Sinn Féin got what they always wanted – the arrest of Gerry Adams. It served a number of interests, those anti-Sinn Féin voices who have sought to undermine the Good Friday Agreement; the selfish and strategic interests of the NIO who want to distract public attention from the …

Boston College Archive and the maintenance of our “collective dissociative amnesia…”

Mick Fealty on May 6, 2014, 2:15 pm

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Ahead of tonight’s Spotlight programme a good report from Greater Boston and Emily Rooney talking to Jack Dunn of Boston College on the controversy over the Belfast Archive and the sequestration of some by the PSNI… There was always a possibility that it would come to this. But after the 1998 peace accords there was such good will that emanated from Northern Ireland that no one thought that British Law Enforcement would take that step… Interesting perspective, and it pinpoints …

The peace process sceptics need addressing as the governments prepare to intervene

Brian Walker on May 6, 2014, 7:13 am

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People who had to catch their breath over Gerry Adams’ arrest are now be having second wind. The former Labour secretary of state Shaun Woodward has called for a referendum over the heads of the local parties on what sort of mechanism they want to deal with the legacy of the Troubles. This may be commended as an initiative for jolting what remains the sovereign government and its Dublin partner into exercising their responsibilities in a low intensity existential crisis. But …

After the Adams arrest what do we know and what has changed?

Mick Fealty on May 5, 2014, 6:52 am

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So after four days of being questioned in thirty three taped interviews, Gerry Adams emerged, if not exactly blinking into the light yesterday, then clearly very happy to be back amongst his own activists. As, it must be said, they were to have him back. For a party that twenty years ago was probably the most resilient of any political movement on these islands, Sinn Fein looked strangely lost without Adams’ steady hand at the tiller. In retrospect, the decision to arrest rather than interview under …

Compulsory reading: Susan McKay on Jean McConville’s life and death

Mick Fealty on May 3, 2014, 9:24 am

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Anyone familiar with some of the stories of the hundreds and thousands of victims of state and paramilitary forces will understand that each has its own unique capacity to appall. Jean McConville’s is just one of several which has refused to go away. In part because of the brutal context for the killing, and its potential political ramifications. Today in London Review of Books the writer Susan McKay tells Mrs McConville’s story in considerable and telling detail from her first …