The late Maurice Hayes, the former senator, once summed up the conflict in Northern Ireland, when he said, “There was nothing achieved through the use of violence that could not otherwise have been achieved through peaceful means.”
For that reason, the suggestion that families of terrorists killed in the Troubles should be compensated, as well as relatives of their victims, embraces a narrative that suits extreme voices. The Commission for Victims and Survivors sent its proposals to Stormont, with an estimated cost of £130 million sterling, which would have included relatives of terrorists.
Such a scheme would reinforce the idea that there was no alternative to The Troubles and its more than 3,500 direct deaths, arguably a similar number caused indirectly by consequences like suicide or addiction, thousands injured, billions of pounds of damage and approximately 20,000 imprisoned (12,000 republicans and 8,000 loyalists).
Treating the bomber’s family the same as the family of the bombed ignores that the hatreds that lay behind their actions were often passed down the generations. We forget that every hunger striker’s family, for example, was divided between those who wanted their loved one to live and those who said they had to die for the cause.
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There are other reasons to reject the scheme too. What about the families of those who committed suicide due to the effects of the Troubles, like the Niedermayers? And can we really decide who should benefit from the payments, sometimes fifty years after a death?
Many republican paramilitaries I’ve talked to over the years sought the status of victims. One loyalist leader gave me a more honest and realistic assessment, “We are not victims. We made victims.” Unfortunately, I sense that some within loyalism are now going down the republican route. It moves away from unconditional apologies, which if given could potentially open up the possibility of a degree of reconciliation with the individual perpetrators. Something they should appreciate.
Victims from all sections of our society have shown an amazing and underappreciated grace, that has allowed us to move away from the dark past. We should not waste that gesture by allowing perpetrators to masquerade as victims.
So we can welcome the move by violent extremists away from violence but we should not in any way feel obliged to have to thank them or buy into their narrative that what they did was justified.
As to reconciliation, a significant section across our society refused to go to where the extremes wished to take them and countered the consequences of their actions by constantly challenging them. Building relationships while they were destroying them.
As we shape our future that challenge needs to be maintained, though also guided by a realistic pragmatism encapsulated in the words of a unionist councillor about one of his Sinn Féin colleagues when he said to me, “Trevor, I will work with the guy but please don’t ask me to be his best friend. Several years ago he set me up to be murdered”.
I also recall a TV documentary covering a visit to Auschwitz by the grandson of the Camp Commandant. It was obviously traumatic as he came to terms with his Grandfather’s actions and even more so at the end when he stood in front of a group of young Jews, who were also visiting, and answered questions. At the end an old Jewish survivor, who had been watching the interaction, walked over and put his arms around the young man and said, “It was not you. You were not there. It was not your fault.”
If the young man had defended and justified his Grandfather’s crimes such a gesture would not have been possible. Reconciliation is possible but it must have a proper basis.
