Broadcasters have a duty to reflect that our history is complicated ... Unquiet Graves didn’t do that
President Michael D Higgins suggests the British need to apologise for their past behaviour in Ireland. A better proposal would be for both governments to apologise for the atrocities committed supposedly in the interests of their national causes.
Perhaps naively, I thought we’d advanced beyond a caricature of history that portrayed one side as the wrongdoer. When the Queen visited Dublin, she set out a context through which to understand the past and build future relationships.
She said that, for all of us, “there were things we wish we had done differently, or not at all”. With these words, she opened up the opportunity to consign our hatreds to history, which is the best place for them, and avoid perpetuating them through our children.
Yet, too many are still trying to wage old battles through one-sided accounts of the past. RTE recently broadcast a film about the security forces, Unquiet Graves: The Story of the Glenanne Gang, that promoted the narrative a certain section of nationalism/republicanism has used to justify an unnecessary and wrong campaign of violence.
While there were many things that former members of the RUC and the Army may wish they had done “differently or not at all”, they saved thousands of lives and prevented fullblown civil war on this island.
They paid a heavy price: 1,019 were murdered and most of those murders remain unsolved, while thousands more were injured, or scarred mentally by their experiences.
I didn’t experience directly the aftermath of the IRA emptying an AK-47 magazine into a human skull, or the smell of bodies caught in a loyalist bomb, but my policeman father did. Security force personnel saw the outcome of every murder and were forced to live with the consequences.
They solved only around 30% of the estimated 2,148 murders committed by republicans, but cleared up 50% of 1,071 perpetrated by loyalists. The RUC was responsible for 52 deaths, the Army 301 and the UDR — so demonised in nationalist mythology
— eight. Many of these killings were carried out in an attempt to stop far greater life-taking.
It’s alleged that the state controlled loyalist murder gangs, yet they managed to murder only 40 republicans, with republicans murdering roughly the same number of loyalists. Overall, 157 loyalists were killed and 394 republicans, with the majority of those deaths attributable to other republicans.
The so-called ‘Glennane Gang’ operated from around 1972 to 1978. During that period, republicans carried out 995 murders and loyalists 628. None of this context was provided in the programme.
A retired senior officer told me last year: “The thing that annoys me about all the discussion about the ‘gang’ is that I put a lot of them in prison. Yet nobody talks about that.”
The statistics also indicate that, after that period, the security services became particularly effective at countering loyalism, as their murder rate dropped significantly.
By the late 1980s, anecdotally, my father said, the security forces were frustrating 80% to 90% of attacks, which is when the republican movement decided to talk to John Hume about peace — a factor which is too often ignored.
Between 1972 and 2001, the police in Northern Ireland charged some 10,957 republicans and 8,099 loyalists with serious terrorist and public order-related offences. On a personal level, there were five direct attempts to murder my father and many more indirect threats to his life.
That was quite normal for police officers, who often knew exactly who was trying to kill them, but still worked through the legal system to counter the threat posed by paramilitaries. Interpol identified Northern Ireland as the most dangerous place in the world to be a police officer in 1983.
The Holy Cross dispute took place in an area devastated by 30 years of sectarian and racist conflict, the impact of which would have been so much worse had it not been moderated by those in uniform.
Could space not have been found in another recent RTE programme to show how relations between the communities in the area have improved since? Like much of Northern Ireland now, there is a positive story to be told.
There’s an added responsibility on a national broadcaster to reflect the fact that our history is complex.
The EU referendum, perhaps understandably, stirred strong emotions and created an atmosphere where older hatreds can easily be rekindled.
The future is about building a shared home place, whether it be Northern Ireland, this island, or these islands, and we should maintain our focus on that ambition — whatever our constitutional preference.