Analysis: British determined to control historical inquiries

Posted by Jim on October 10, 2015

By Brian Feeney (for Irish News)

As events at the Nama committee dominated headlines last week, the NIO
released its policy paper on implementing the Stormont House Agreement

You probably didn’t notice and there’s no reason why you should, but the
same day that a certain loyalist blogger and serial self-publicist was
giving evidence to Stormont’s Nama inquiry the NIO snuck out its policy
paper on implementing the Stormont House Agreement. Needless to say it
got virtually no coverage in the tidal wave of sensational allegations
made about the alleged recipients of money from the Cerberus deal.

If you’ve ever wondered why the NIO decided to draft the Stormont House
Agreement Bill 2015 and bring it through Westminster rather than allow
the clowns on the hill to legislate, once you read the policy paper all
becomes clear. Quite simply the British government intends to control
the Historical Inquiries Unit (HIU), what information it can have and
what it can reveal.

Anyone who believes the Policing Board will hold the HIU accountable is
living in cloud-cuckoo land. “The Secretary of State will have oversight
of the HIU regarding reserved and excepted matters.”

The UK government will prevent disclosure of any material or information
‘likely to prejudice national security (including information from the
intelligence services)’. None of this material can be published ‘without
the consent of the secretary of state’.

Now as we all know from past experience, ‘likely to prejudice national
security’ is whatever our proconsul for the time being decides is
national security.

When you look at the policy paper you see it begins with a questionable
statement and continues to ignore all suggestions and recommendations
made by interested parties, nationalist political parties, NGOs like the
Committee for the Administration of Justice and university academics. In
short, it’s a classic NIO document.

It begins with the unconvincing claim that ‘the institutions have the
needs of the victims and their families are at their heart’. No. The
needs of secrecy in the Ministry of Defence, the NIO and the Home office
are at their heart.

It has never been any different in the secretive British state. For
example it was only in 2002 after Freedom of Information requests that
details of Special Branch investigation into Charles Stewart Parnell and
other Irish MPs were released and even then only in restricted fashion.
The names of informers and amounts paid are still secret 125 years after
the fact.

Academics at QUB, Sinn Fein politicians and the CAJ among others
recommended that former RUC and RUC Special Branch personnel be not
employed in the HIU partly because they may have been complicit in
collusion or cover up or both. The great merit of the Historical
Enquiries Team was that its personnel were seconded from English forces
and we all know why.

However, ignoring all that, ‘the Bill does not prohibit the HIU from
recruiting persons who have previously served in policing or security
roles in Northern Ireland.’ So the HIU won’t work and the NIO has made
sure it won’t work because it will only investigate and publish what the
NIO allows it to investigate and publish.

Then there’s the Independent Commission on Information Retrieval (ICIR).
It’s modelled on the Independent Commission on the Location of Victims’
Remains (ICLVR) which has worked extremely well. However the NIO policy
paper goes out of its way to make clear that while information given to
the ICIR is inadmissible in court, if that information is obtained or
can be obtained by other means then prosecution may follow.

That puts the kibosh on the ICIR because given the record of the PSNI
over the past four years, starting with the Boston college fiasco (all
hearsay) and continuing with their apparent trawling after the killing
of Kevin McGuigan with almost a score of people arrested and released,
who is going to risk giving information to the ICIR to pass to families?
Inevitably individuals in the PSNI would be working backwards from the
material a family received. In mitigation it has to be said on the basis
of evidence so far, that’s only likely in the case of prominent Sinn
Fein figures.

Buried in the policy paper is our proconsul’s admission that ‘on some
detailed questions covered in the Bill, there is not yet a clear
consensus between the five main Northern Ireland parties. Work will
continue to build consensus on remaining points of difference.’ Yeah
right.