The New Year is about letting go of the old and ringing in the new but the thirty-rule, which sees the release of official files from the Government archive, is akin to an annual political time bomb. We learn what we would prefer not to. We read the thinking of our generation in our generation. We open sores, which are still scabby.
The release of historical papers of is immense interest to historians and political buffs but it may be uniquely threatening to our political stability. The duplicity of governments, the murky and inconsistent forked tongues of players past and present are there for all to see. It’s not so much warts and all as blood, bowels and intestines of all. It’s the offal of politics.
The truth about our conflict is that both the British Government and the IRA played the wider public for fools and their terror and counter-terror initiatives which included the Government giving loyalist paramilitaries an ‘un’official leg-up meant that the death of innocent civilians, police, prison officers and indeed some volunteers became acceptable collateral damage in pursuit of the game.
It’s difficult to comprehend just how leading figures in the IRA, UVF, UDA, and securocrats still active in Government sleep easy in their beds knowing that they are steeped to their armpits in blood. It’s difficult to understand how any of them can look families of victims in the eye without suffering mind-blowing flashbacks. The irony of the released Government documents is the clear demonstration that even during the Hunger Strikes preventing loss of face for both the Government and the then Leadership of SF/IRA was more important than saving the lives of the individual Hunger Strikers who were making the ultimate sacrifice. There is not enough stone in all the quarries in Ireland to make monuments or headstones big enough to fill the gaps left in some families by an unnecessary and wanton loss of life.
To some the archives show just how far we have politically travelled. Frankly, I believe the release of the papers show just how much sooner the conflict could have ended. The papers clearly demonstrate that just as the Catholic hierarchy used to put the reputation of the Church ahead of the needs of the victims of clerical child abuse so too did British securocrats and leaders of paramilitary organisations put the protection of their own personal and organisational reputations ahead of the victims of violence by waging a fruitless strategy of military and political attrition. How do we know this? Well its apparent by the recorded patronising lip service paid both by the authorities and some patsy like interlocutors to the then mainstream constitutional national party. While the SDLP collected international gold stars for good behaviour the British Government was clandestinely practising the military two-step behind their back with the paramilitaries.
The families of victims from all sides of the divide must find the thirty-year release of files particularly gut wrenching, especially when some of the main local protagonists are still very active in public life. Baroness O’ Loan is correct when she asserts that some in the current political classes want to live only in the bubble of the present as if they had no pasts. If the current process of opening these documents continue in its present format it may only serve to embarrassingly demonstrate how some of our political representatives could be unsuited to holding public office.
Today with hindsight its easy to see how wrong De Valera was about the Treaty but the prism through which he is judged is against the backdrop of an Imperial world order. The current conflict can claim no such excuse. Throughout the 20th Century the campaign for equality has always been an evolving one whether it’s about religious, gender, sexuality, colour or disability rights. Our campaign for civil and equal rights did not need to spill blood. The British Government should have recognised that from the start.
Loyalist and republican paramilitaries who are now so determined to find common cause used to feed off sectarian blood-letting, fear and suspicion that unnecessarily set working people from different traditions but of similar economic backgrounds against each other. Their breeding grounds for hatred created killing fields of some housing estates. Of course this was our past, one fuelled by misty green-eyed, corner boy militants and sectarian coat trailing bigoted preachers, unworthy of any Godly calling. The past like conscience may make us cowardly but which political Hamlet will first say ‘Be all my sins remembered’.
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