State Violence

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© Raymond Murray, 1998

ISBN: 978 1 85635 235 2

Epub ISBN: 978 1 85635 892 7

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For

Denis Faul

December 1971 marked a watershed in my life. Political prisoners who had been ill-treated and tortured in Holywood Palace Barracks and Girdwood Park Barracks were imprisoned in Armagh Jail where I was chaplain. I saw the horrific marks on their bodies. I experienced the blatant cover-up of this illegal and immoral behaviour. Directly and indirectly, the army, police, doctors, civil administration and government were involved in this criminal action.

Pursuance of the grievances of those who suffered duress in interrogation centres, a never-ending story in the recent long war in Northern Ireland, led Denis Faul and myself into campaigning against other violations of human rights in Northern Ireland in subsequent years: corruption of law; lack of independence in the matter of inquiry into complaints; the abuse of emergency laws; harassment and intimidation of civilians by security forces; injuries and deaths caused by rubber and plastic bullets; collusion between British security forces, British intelligence and loyalist paramilitaries; unjust killings and murders by state security forces; excessive punishments in the prisons; cruel strip searching in prisons. In the 1970s only a few people actively helped to try and stop these violations of human rights: the Civil Rights Movement, the Association for Legal Justice, the National Council for Civil Liberties, Amnesty International and some concerned priests, doctors, surgeons and lawyers. In latter years the Committee for the Administration of Justice, Belfast, and the Pat Finucane Centre, Derry, have come to prominence as state watchers. Fr Brian Brady, Fr Denis Faul, Sister Sarah Clarke of London and myself worked individually and together from 1971. We were also connected with the Association for Legal Justice where a small number of valiant people worked day and night to take statements and record the plight of the oppressed. I recall them with respect and pride: Frances Murray, Clara Reilly, Anne Murray, Rita Mullen, Rosaleen Boyle, Margaret Gatt, Mary Thornberry, Seán McCann and Paddy Kelly. There was also a distinguished group of solicitors who gave advice and took up cases. Paddy McGrory heads the list, honourably followed by Oliver Kelly, Eilis McDermot, Pat Finucane, Peter Madden, Chris Napier, Pádraigín Drinan, Pat Marrinan, Ted Jones, Francis Keenan and Paschal O'Hare.

There are two kinds of histories, one fact and one semi-fiction. This is the conclusion of my experience in working for human rights. The history put out by the ruling class borders on fiction. Their official communiqués are published first and grab the headlines. They hold attention while a crisis lasts. It is an attempt to legitimise illegal actions by which they maintain their power over the powerless and the poor. It is tyranny's deceit.

The second history is the short and simple annals of the poor, the worm's eye view. It is often secret. It is the story of the injustice done to them in order to preserve the power and privilege of a few. When power is threatened, the ‘lion' and the ‘eagle' and the ‘bear' will grab the nearest and crush them as an example to the rest. It matters not that they are innocent or guilty. What matters is that they are close at hand and are representative.

Can true history be written? Is it essentially the story of the ruling class? Is it the speeches of President Ronald Reagan and the memoirs of Mrs Margaret Thatcher? Is it not also the story of the unemployed in Birmingham and the deprived blacks in Atlantic City? Must the ‘nobodies' remain statistics of birth, death and marriage? There are many ‘hidden Irelands' but who has hidden them? The sufferings, the tensions, the spiritual striving for holiness of countless poor families, the injustices done to the underprivileged and the miraculous survival of their traditions in spite of the ever-present monster of power, these are true history. We should give the poor the dignity of their names.

Traditionally too much writing of the history of Ireland was based on state papers and the public judgements of governments and judges. Historical expression was reduced to a truculent embarrassment which silenced the cries for justice of the poor. When the state was wrong it hid the facts and stopped the truth being told. The writer of the introductory history to
Liber Munerum Publicorum Hiberniae1152–1827
says, ‘We may observe here once for all that Ireland of itself has no history, properly speaking'. No wonder Pádraic Pearse countered such attitudes in his tract,
The Spiritual Nation:

But the soul of the enslaved and broken nation may conceivably be a more splendid thing than the soul of the great free nation; and that is one reason why the enslavements of old and glorious nations that have taken place so often in history are the most terrible things that have ever happened in the world.

Since we are commemorating in 1998 the bicentenary of the United Irishmen, we might recall the comment on the deprivation of justice by the United Irishman Arthur O'Connor in his address
To the Irish Nation:

But, why should I waste time in proving that government, in the hands of Irish administration, has been a system for supporting the few in oppressing the many, instead of yielding impartial protection? Has it not been by sowing, maintaining and fomenting division, that Irish administrations have governed Ireland? Look to the continuation of civil discord, of plunder and bloodshed, which has infested our island, since the Welch landed in 1165, to this instant, that these hell-hounds intituled Ancient Britons are butchering our disarmed people. Look in this century to the writings of wretchedness, of misery, of want and oppression, under the different shapes of White-boys, Right-boys, Hearts-of-oak men, Peep-o-day boys, and Steel-men. Yet where is there an instance on record, in which the Government or Legislature in Ireland have inquired into the causes of their constant unerring marks of oppression? No! A system of smothered war between the oppressors and the oppressed, could not bear inquiry, for it would bear redress. Redress means restoration of plunder and restoration of rights. Therefore sanguinary laws and military outrage, whose expences are endless, have been substituted for justice, whose expences are nothing.

Fr Denis Faul and I wrote similar words in
The Furrow,
April 1984:

The killing of a man involves an obligation to make good the damage to his dependants; stealing means that the object stolen must be given back; if one has taken another's land (or another's country) one must return it as part of the reconciliation process; if one has deprived a person of his character one must restore it; if one has sent people to jail by false witness or by the use of force in extracting statements, then that evil work must be reversed and undone to achieve reconciliation; if one discriminates in the ordering of society, then that discrimination must be reversed to bring about reconciliation. Reconciliation involves the work of justice, of restoring to the other person what you have taken from him and paying for the injury done him, with a determination that that will not occur again.

It involves giving back to people their dignity, self-respect, freedom, human rights, the right to worship and educate their children in their faith, to receive back the place that has been taken and the community/ country that has been confiscated and oppressed.

The conflicts of the 1798 period are no different from those of today. I have witnessed the state in Northern Ireland kill, torture, bribe, and imprison people unjustly. Denis Faul and I tried to stop these violations of human rights by official complaints, by breaking the silence in the media, by publishing books, pamphlets and broadsheets, by noising the problems abroad. This book
State Violence in Northern Ireland, 1969–1997,
draws together pieces illustrative of the violations of human rights by the state in Northern Ireland. They were written fresh during those years. Most of them have already been published in books, pamphlets and magazines. People who have lived through this period in Northern Ireland will immediately recall the perspective they convey. I am sure they will help others understand the frustration of the ‘nobodies' who did not get justice and whose voices were almost suppressed.

I wrote an essay in
Seanchas Ard Mhacha
in 1982 on the killing of a prisoner, Thomas Birch, a United Irishman, who was being brought under guard by the Dublin Militia from Glenane in south Armagh to Armagh Prison. When a rescue was threatened, one of the soldiers killed him. The wriggling of legal officials and military personnel to pervert justice in that case is mirrored true in this present book. Thomas Pelham, Chief Secretary in Dublin Castle, wrote to General Lake,

I received your letter of the 25th and you may rest assured that every sort of attention shall be paid to the sergeant of the Dublin Militia who is to be tried in Armagh. I do not think that any mark of particular favour can be shown to him before his trial but if he is acquitted as I have no doubt he must be I can venture to say that the Lord Lieutenant will be glad to bestow some distinguished mark of favour upon him.

We witnessed such an attitude in Northern Ireland over these troubled years. People were assassinated by policy of the British government; witness the Gibraltar murders. None of the RUC or British army did a day in jail for torture and ill-treatment of hundreds of people arrested under emergency laws. None of the middle or high command in the security forces resigned in protest. There were some 150 cases of unjust killings and murders by security forces. Only a few soldiers were convicted of murder. The military establishment and the imperialist-minded campaigned for their early release and a declaration of their ‘innocence'. We still await the uncovering of the involvement of British intelligence and loyalist paramilitaries in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 17 May 1974 when 33 people were killed. Successive Irish and British governments stubbornly refuse to reveal the facts. They are terrified of the truth. The law over many years was bent and used as a weapon in counter-insurgency. People were brutalised and sent to prison on forced confessions or on concocted evidence or on the uncorroborated evidence of accomplices and convicted persons. The ‘lion' reaches for the nearest victims: Carol Ann Kelly, a child returning home from the shop with a carton of milk, was killed by a plastic bullet fired by a soldier; Richard Moore, a ten-year old boy dashing out from school, was blinded by a rubber bullet fired from a British army post; Mrs Nora McCabe was killed by a plastic bullet fired at point blank range from an RUC landrover on a quiet street while on her way to buy a packet of cigarettes; Patrick McElhone, a farm labourer, was taken from his home and shot by the British army within sight of his aged father. These little people and many others were gravely injured or died at the hands of the state. The long arm of the state and the controlled media tried to bury them under the clay of official files. Of course the power of the state in its civil service and money is immense. This book removes some of the clay.

The role of the academic is changing, I hope. Today the historian must live with history as it is being made. We have seen historians expose the hypocrisy of the public statements and the private orders of the last world war and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. I think historians should close the gap and become investigators of current public affairs. They should expose and challenge the prejudice that the ruling class presents through the media and through their spokespersons. Similarly, what good are theologians if they can only speak for the past? And why did the philosophers in the universities sing dumb in post-war Northern Ireland while the whirlwind gathered? We had five years of internment and a decade of torture. Only a few notable academics spoke out. Do academics only comment on the dead?

The historian of today should expose the workings of modern government and reveal the enormous amount of truth that is concealed. This book gives examples of the violations of human rights in Northern Ireland, 1969–1997. Fortunately, the interest of national security, patronage and power did not suppress all the truth.