Examination of Witnesses (Questions 71-79)
MS JO
DOVER
2 FEBRUARY 2005
Q71 Chairman: First of all we are very
sorry indeed about last week, democracy was not running at its
smoothest, but thank you very much indeed for coming back. We
all know a certain amount about what the Trust does because a
number of us came up to visit you—alas I could not do it—but
I have had long conversations with Colin Parry. Would you like
to start off by just telling us really the purpose of your work
with the victims of conflict?
Ms Dover: As you know, the Trust
works generally with young people in relation to conflict resolution,
but back in 2001 we secured funding to work with victims of conflict
who live in Great Britain in England, Scotland and Wales.
Q72 Chairman: Incidentally, where did
the funding come from?
Ms Dover: From the Northern Ireland
Office. The Legacy Project was set up and started in November
2001 to identify and meet the needs of victims and survivors of
the Troubles who live here on this island, and that includes people
who were caught up in all the bombs that happened, predominantly
in England, whether they were bereaved, injured or witnesses to
those bombs; also former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland,
families of soldiers killed in Northern Ireland and emergency
services workers who attended incidents here as well. That is
how it all started.
Q73 Chairman: So it is rather more than
civilian victims.
Ms Dover: In terms of numbers
there are more ex-soldiers who served, but it is right across
the board, anybody basically from here who was affected in some
way.
Q74 Chairman: What do you do to meet
the practical needs of victims of the Troubles who are based in
Great Britain?
Ms Dover: Initially, we had to
try and identify the scale of the problem here because there has
not really been much research on this island in relation to the
Troubles, so back in 2002 we engaged a consultancy company to
help us undertake a needs analysis and to identify the numbers
of people killed who were from Great Britain—which is 622
out of 3,700, and also there were 628 incidents that involved
people from Great Britain—to try and give us an idea of
how many people here were affected and where they might be. Obviously,
it is difficult to locate everybody because in some of the incidents—for
example in London—people could have been from anywhere,
they are not necessarily from that community. Then we published
the needs analysis and launched it at the House of Commons in
November 2003, and I think all of you probably should have been
sent it. I have a copy of the actual report here.
Q75 Chairman: We have got that.
Ms Dover: And I have some executive
summaries if anyone wants to have a look at them to refresh their
memories now, identifying what those needs were. That has taken
the majority of our time with the three-year funding that we had,
which finished last November, to identify the needs before we
could go about meeting what they were, and in my paper I have
given an indication of what those needs were. As I said in the
paper, a lot of those needs were very similar to victims of other
kinds of crime, but one of the most important things was the context
in which they had been affected was quite important to these people
because obviously there was a political and deliberate action
behind the events that happened where people were caught up. People
in this country have not really felt much of a connection to the
Troubles, of the general population many people do not know much
about what the whole argument was about and the reasons behind
it, and so people who have been affected here have often felt
isolated from others because people have a lack of understanding
about their experience, and quite often they might have felt that
they were catapulted into something that was not anything to do
with them. Maybe things have changed a lot, but over the last
35 years there was a lack of communication about where people
could go to get particular help in relation to their having been
caught up in a bomb or something like this, and so they have not
received support from people because they did not know where to
go to get help. Quite often, where there was not much communication
between agencies, people were falling through the net in terms
of services offered as well.
Q76 Chairman: Do you know about the work
that An Crann did in Londonderry when they attempted to bring
ex-soldiers into contact with local residents?
Ms Dover: Yes. An Crann I do not
think exists any more, but there is another organisation that
was linked to An Crann, Towards Understanding and Healing, which
we work very closely with, and we have brought people from Great
Britain into contact with those kinds of experiences, story-telling
weekends for example.
Q77 Chairman: Are there any lessons from
that?
Ms Dover: Absolutely. Certainly,
the people in Northern Ireland need to hear the voice of other
people who were connected to the conflict, particularly of ex-soldiers
who served over there but then went back and have had no part
to play in the peace process. Hearing from them has been very
beneficial for the people of Northern Ireland, but equally for
the ex-soldiers and the civilians from here who have been caught
up in some of the bombs here, it has been very important for them
to try and understand why things happened to them, and they can
get that from talking to members of the community, former combatants
and all those kinds of things.
Chairman: Thank you. The Reverend Martin
Smyth.
Q78 Reverend Smyth: I take it that you
would agree that reconciliation should be victim-centred.
Ms Dover: We feel that they should
be at the heart of it because some of these people have been most
directly affected and their lives have been impacted greatly,
and their needs have not generally been met. So in terms of reconciliation
no party could be forced into those kinds of things and I think
that victims need to be at the heart of any kind of process of
reconciliation, and probably those who committed any of the acts
need to be part of that process as well.
Q79 Reverend Smyth: You have mentioned,
for example, the soldiers from outside Northern Ireland, but there
are other victims from outside Northern Ireland, even Australian
tourists and American tourists, so how do we actually involve
victims from outside Northern Ireland in this type of process?
Ms Dover: I think one of the difficulties
we found was locating people. There have been some obvious links
for us in our own community, but also when there have been other
programmes that we have been involved with that happened in Ireland,
we have come across victims from the incidents in England, for
example, and quite often it has been through word of mouth where
somebody knows somebody who knows somebody else. How we actually
find people is a difficulty and some people do not want to be
found, they do not want to be reminded of what happened and maybe
do not need to talk about, but others do. I think it is a really
big issue, how you actually find people and how you approach them.
There are some ethical concerns about that; I can give you an
example: when we were doing our needs analysis we focused on Warrington
and Manchester and we discussed how we could contact people who
had been injured in Warrington, for example. We happened to have
from the time of the bomb a list of names and addresses of people,
but we felt ethically we could not actually write to all of them
because we could be bringing something up that was very difficult
for people and we could not support them and know whether we had
reopened an old wound that they did not want to reopen. We looked
at how we could contact them and we did it through the use of
press and local community groups to ask people to come forward
and volunteer to do that if they wanted to, which gave those who
did not want to have those wounds reopened the opportunity to
stay silent.
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