End the hounding of our heroes in tribute to veteran
THOSE who risk their lives on behalf of our country should be honoured for their service and cherished for their selflessness. But, due to the warped values that now prevail in parts of our political culture, such heroes can now find themselves in the dock, where their courage is portrayed as a form of criminality.
No case highlights this pattern more shamefully than the persecution of the late Dennis Hutchings, a military veteran who died at the age of 80 while standing trial for attempted murder during the Northern Irish Troubles.
The tragic circumstances of his death this week matched the despicable nature of the long legal witch-hunt against him. A member of the Life Guards regiment for 26 years, described by one of his commanders as “the epitome of the best class of senior British non-commissioned officer”, Hutchings had been charged over the killing of John Pat Cunningham in County Tyrone in 1974, after shots were fired at the victim in a chase by an army patrol.
Hutchings fiercely denied the accusation and had been cleared by two previous investigations. The authorities in Northern Ireland, determined to win favour with the Republican movement by besmirching the record of the British armed forces, would not give up, despite the recent decline in Hutchings’s health.
BUT their zeal to drag him through the courts pushed him to his grave. Even his own doctor had warned him against travel to Belfast because of the risks, advice that was sadly fulfilled as Hutchings contracted Covid-19 on his visit.
Northern Ireland, the setting for the incident that cast such a dark shadow over his later life, claimed him at the end, another victim of the baleful Troubles.
Instead of passing away in the arms of his loving family in
Cornwall, he died alone, struggling for breath in a Belfast hospital. In its vicious lack of compassion and morality, the whole saga brings disgrace on the British legal system.
Supporters of the prosecution talk about the need for the law to take its course, but this grotesque, deadly farce actually made a mockery of real justice.
There was little chance of achieving a secure conviction, given that the killing of John Pat Cunningham took place nearly 40 years ago, for the long passage of time will have undoubtedly undermined the reliability of witnesses’ accounts.
Nor did the prosecutors seem to have any new evidence that had not been considered by previous investigations. It was a sign of their desperation that they reportedly planned to introduce a reference to Hutchings’s conviction for a minor assault when he was a teenager in 1957. Although he was fined just £2 for this juvenile incident, his legal opponents wanted to insinuate that it pointed to his “bad character”.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Dennis Hutchings was an honourable man with the medals to prove it.The attempt to portray him as a kind of dangerous recidivist illustrates the depths to which the prosecutors were potentially willing to sink in their ruthless quest for the scalp of a dying veteran.
But then, this was no ordinary set of legal proceedings. On the contrary, it was a McCarthyite anti-British show trial, driven by the desire of the Northern Irish establishment to appease the Republican agitators. In its turn, these Republicans had two aims: first, to drag the British army down to the level of their own murderous terrorists; and second, to feed their own movement’s narrative of victimhood by painting the British as criminal oppressors.
This is a travesty of the historic reality. Thanks to soldiers like Dennis Hutchings, the British Army did a magnificent job in pulling the province back from the brink of blood-soaked, bomb-wrecked anarchy.
IN THE WAKE of Sir David Amess’s killing in a suspected terror attack last week, there has been a lot of defiant rhetoric about not allowing the terrorists to win. Well, the terrorists did not win in Northern Ireland, largely because the British security forces destroyed the capacity of the IRA to continue with the armed struggle.
The cost was high: 1,441 British personnel lost their lives during the Troubles, but the inspiring result was the peace that has existed since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Neither the Republicans nor point-scoring lawyers should be allowed to set the judicial agenda.The best way to honour Dennis Hutchings’s memory would be to end all the witchhunts against British military veterans.
‘The whole saga brings disgrace on the British legal system’