Mick Clifford: No room for closure when history is rewritten
Police officers and firefighters inspecting the damage caused by a bomb in Market Street, Omagh.
Patricia McLaughlin watched the children getting off the bus. They were returning to Buncrana, Co Donegal, after an excursion to a folk park in Omagh. Earlier that day, a bomb ripped through the centre of the Co Tyrone town. Mrs McLaughlin was willing that her 12-year-old son, Shaun, would be one of those coming home to their families. He wasnât. He and two other local boys, James Barker, aged 12, and 8-year-old Oran Doherty died in the explosion.
Two Spaniards who had been staying in Buncrana and were on the trip didnât come home either. Rocio Abad Ramos, aged 23, Fernando Blasco Baselga, aged 12, were also among the 29 who were killed that day.
At the Omagh inquiry last week, a statement from Patricia McLaughlin was read out by her sister. âI watched all the other children get off the bus but Shaun never got off it,â she wrote. âIt seems a lifetime since I held him. If somebody had said to me before I lost a child that you will feel exactly the same 26 years later, I wouldnât have believed them. I would have thought maybe a couple of years that you would be brokenhearted, but that you will still move on. Itâs going to have to ease. But it just doesnât.â
Like the others bereaved by the outrage on August 15, 1998, Patricia McLaughlin has spent the intervening decades attempting to find out why it happened, who knew that it might, and whether something could have been done to prevent it. The current inquiry may be able to provide some answers.
Over quarter of a century after the Good Friday Agreement so much remains unresolved that, every now and again, the past comes calling, as if asking why havenât you done anything about unaddressed pain.
Omagh was perpetrated by the dissident Real IRA, which refuted the agreement signed just four months before the outrage. The playbook though was one used by the Provisional IRA throughout its twenty-five year campaign of killing for a united Ireland. Bombs were planted in public places, sometimes genuine warnings were issued, sometimes not. The purpose of the bomb was to terrorise locally and kill targeted individuals and whomever else happened to be in the way. For the greater part the bereaved and injured have been denied full knowledge of who was involved and whether anything could have been done to prevent it.
If the person to die was from a nationalist tradition, which accounted for nearly a quarter of the 1,700 victims of the Provos, well, they too had to be sacrificed. There has never been a reckoning within the so-called Republican movement where this level of base callousness has been questioned and found wanting. Everything that was done, as far as the movement is concerned, had to be done for the greater good, whatever that was.
The heart-rending testimony at the Omagh inquiry wasnât the only visitation from the past this week. There was a resolution of sorts about another instance of killing at Belfast coronerâs court on Thursday. The coroner ruled that four IRA men, who had just completed a mission to shoot up an RUC station, were killed in 1992 in a manner that was ânot justifiedâ. The four were shot dead in Co Tyrone in a hail of bullets from SAS guns as they were changing vehicles, having attacked the station in nearby Coalisland.
As far as Sinn FĂ©in, the political wing of what was the Provisional IRA, is concerned, these four were âmurderedâ.
As with the British, the so-called Republican movement still has, all these years later, a hierarchy of victims.
The ruling gives further credence to the belief that the SAS element of the British army operated a âshoot to killâ policy against IRA people. There has also been copious evidence adduced down through the decades that elements of the security services colluded with loyalist elements to kill both innocent Catholics and known IRA figures. Successive British governments have never faced up to accepting how, as a democratic state, it allowed itself to be dragged into such a morass that it was complicit in murdering its own citizens. The Legacy Act brought in by the last UK government was designed specifically to ensure there would be no more exploration of crimes committed on behalf of the state during the Troubles.
Another development which echoes with the past occurred on Tuesday last when Conor Murphy, a senior Sinn FĂ©in figure in the North, was elected to the Seanad. Murphy is a serious politician who has held a number of ministries in the Northern Executive, including finance. There was much surprise that he was leaving a position with major powers in the North to join what many consider a backwater forum.
Unlike all other senior figures in the party in the Republic, Murphy has a past with the IRA. In 1982, as a young man, he was sentenced to five years in prison for membership and possession of explosives. One wonders what the explosives might have been used for if he hadnât been arrested.
His past lends him credibility with those who oversaw the campaign of killing and shaped the Sinn FĂ©in that emerged to pursue fully democratic means. There is much speculation that he is coming south to ensure that the partyâs primary focus remains pushing to achieve a united Ireland through a border poll as soon as possible. As far as Sinn FĂ©in is concerned, such progress is merely continuing and completing that which was started with the partyâs formation in 1970, initially as a political front for the Provos.
Between them, the Republican movement and the British state are determined that there will not be a full reckoning with the past. The British have used the law to delay, prevaricate and erase any attempts on behalf of victims to achieve closure. Sinn FĂ©in and its allies certainly do not want laid bare the extent of depravity and base criminality the Provos engaged in, both within their own community and in killing innocents whenever it was felt necessary.
Instead, they attempt to rewrite history. The version of the past so-called Republicans present today is sanitised and distorted, portraying heroic freedom fighters rather than the reality of violent fanaticism that ultimately delayed rather than expedited the prospect of a single political entity on the island.
In such a milieu, the plight of victims even today is relegated entirely, divided into ours and theirs, to be used to promote a version of the past that casts that other side as the villain. Itâs difficult to see how proper closure can be achieved, either for people personally or on a societal basis, while that attitude among decision makers on both sides persists.
