Examination of Witnesses (Questions 640-656)
MRS ANN
BOAL, REVEREND
ANDREW RAWDING,
MRS GILLIAN
GRIGG, MRS
ROSALIND DILLON-LEE
AND COMMODORE
TOBY ELLIOT
23 FEBRUARY 2005
Q640 Chairman: That means it comes out
of his budget. I think you may just have misunderstood her there.
I was talking to her this afternoon. She is very clear that she
has the overall sight, or wants to have the overall sight, of
all the victims' problems. It may be she has to refer them to
another Minister. Mr Pearson is also the finance minister and
he has the purse strings, and so everything has to go to him in
the end. From the Northern Ireland point of view, that should
be the absolute focal point.
Mrs Grigg: I am not quite sure
who exactly Angela Smith is.
Q641 Chairman: She is the Northern Ireland
Under-Secretary with responsibilities, one of which is for victims'
affairs in Northern Ireland.
Mrs Grigg: That is for Northern
Ireland. Is there such a person equivalent on the UK mainland?
Q642 Chairman: That is Ivor Caplan.
Mrs Grigg: I have regular contact
with the Minister.
Mrs Dillon-Lee: If one has a problem
with the Veterans' Agency over pensions, it would be nice to be
able to go to somebody higher up.
Q643 Chairman: That is the Minister;
that is Ivor Caplan in the Ministry of Defence, who is the Minster
responsible for Veterans' Affairs. The Government has tried to
provide a focal point. How successful it has been is another matter.
Commodore Elliot: I was going
to make the same point myself. I do not have a view about whether
there should be a Victims' Minister but I most certainly have
a very clear understanding that there are two Ministers to whom
we go. Angela Smith hears us very carefully and understands; she
has not actually managed to solve some of the problems I am putting
to her yet, but that is another matter. Ivor Caplan is our Minister
for Veterans, to whom we go frequently and who actually gives
us a very good hearing and gives his own team an extremely hard
time until he gets the right answers. I am quite happy about that,
I really am.
Chairman: I think the changes this Government
has made have been a great improvement.
Mr Pound: For a minute I thought you
said there have been great improvements this Government are making.
Chairman: I did say that.
Mr Pound: I am speechless.
Q644 Chairman: Mrs Grigg?
Mrs Grigg: Could I say that from
the services' point of view, I am very heavily involved with the
RAF Widows' Association. We have direct access to the Air Force
Member for Personnel. With the Army, we are hoping that General
Palmer will also be a good focus particularly for military issues.
Again, we have two prongs.
Chairman: That was always the case but
there is now one Minister. That is the point. We are talking about
the political direction.
Q645 Mr Swire: I am going to roll these
questions together as much as I can because I know we are short
of time. This is really to Mrs Boal, please. What has the reaction
of your members been to the changes that have occurred in the
Police Service of Northern Ireland since September 1999?
Mrs Boal: When the name change
was first announced, it caused the biggest wound and our members
felt that they had been betrayed. That is the way it came across,
and not just the members. I listened to Sir Ronnie Flanagan give
the midnight speech when the name change came about. I was broken-hearted
because I have been in the police family for 35 years. There was
hostility towards the new police service, although all the serving
officers are ex-RUC officers now, but we have found that that
has changed within our organisation over the last year or 18 months,
and change was inevitable. We had started to accept the change
and we are now working closer with the PSNI. They wanted our members
to know that although they were still RUC officers when they left,
they are as close to the PSNI.
Q646 Mr Swire: You would say down the
line things are calmer than they were initially?
Mrs Boal: They definitely are
with regard to the name. We carried out a survey or our members
last September/October. It is as well that our members cannot
vote in the General Election here because Labour would not have
got one of their votes. Their hostility has been directed away
from Patten and the changes towards the Government because they
feel that this Government has totally let them down.
Q647 Mr Swire: Can I ask, to no-one in
particular, a question about cross-community work and, where your
organisations and members have engaged in cross-community work,
have they have found that therapeutic? Have they have found that
too much cross-community work can put too much pressure on them?
Do they feel that it is a good thing to work with people outside
the Armed Forces or Police communities? Can any of you comment
on that?
Commodore Elliot: We came very
late to this. We have paid too much attention to our own business
rather than to the community relations side of the house. I have
to admit that I had forgotten about this funding but we do get
a little bit of funding for one of our welfare offices from a
community relations programme. We are encouraging our welfare
officers to engage with all the various committees that are sitting
looking for ideas as to how to improve what we are doing with
our own people and how to help to improve their attitude to society
in general. I think the more we do that, the more we find out
and the more we find there is common ground and a lot of it is
very good.
Reverend Rawding: We are participating
in a form of reconciliation work specifically with IRA ex-prisoners
and other ex-prisoner groups. This is essential to some of our
veterans because the one way they might get to wholeness or to
real reconciliation is to get to a point where they actually accept
that they are no longer under threat and they no longer have an
enemy. The only way they will get that is actually to come into
physical contact with someone who they would perceive to be their
enemy. We are proactively looking at this. Some of the veterans
from the early Seventies have tried every single therapy and psychiatric
treatment. Some have actually insisted that they are not interested
in the other agencies; they want to meet Republicans, they want
to meet IRA or former-IRA people[5].
Q648 Mr Swire: How is that funded?
Reverend Rawding: I am having
to work through a charity in Northern Ireland to put funding through
the Community Relations Council and get funding from over there.
That is the way we are doing this at the moment. I have not tried
the Veterans Minister. I am having to work through other charities
that are already in place and charities that are willing to work
with this sort of project.
Q649 Mr Swire: How many members of your
organisation are former Special Forces?
Reverend Rawding: I do not know.
Mrs Boal: We do receive some funding
under Peace and Reconciliation. When we applied for the funding,
and it was just three years ago, we made it clear that we would
have to establish or organisation first and help our members to
become reconciled with themselves before we could move to cross-community.
It happened quicker than we thought. We have participated in five
separate projects working with other community groups of women
from Londonderry and women from the Republic of Ireland. I even
had the chance to go to an international conference held in Northern
Ireland where we came face to face with an ex-IRA prisoner. Our
members only meet with people who have given up paramilitary activity
and who are committed to peace, as these people were. With the
projects we worked on, we thought we were making small steps and
things were going well. Obviously other people felt we were doing
better because we were nominated for an award, an achievement
for our cross-community work. That award will be presented on
7 March. Our people do want to move on. They do not want the same
problems for their children in growing up as we had and that may
mean meeting someone half-way. We also want to make people feel
aware in both communities that under the police uniform there
is a human being who has suffered as others have. This may help
our current members of the PSNI and future members. We are doing
it in consultation with the PSNI as well because they are participating
in the cross-community exercises too.
Mr Clarke: First, I want to acknowledge
how difficult this session is, given that we have four organisations
representing many different services, and also we are firing many
questions at you. Some are aimed at one organisation and some
at another. I for one wish we had more time.
Chairman: This is because of the pressure
of having to finish in an hour.
Q650 Mr Clarke: I think we ought to acknowledge
that, Chair, and we apologise that it may seem as if we are rushing
you all in terms of the answers. One of the other difficulties
we have is dealing with the question of the truth. When we talk
to communities that were affected by the troubles in different
ways, they often say that the Government wants reconciliation
without the truth. I noticed from the submissions that the Veterans'
Association is saying that families of some soldiers have said
that they require the truth.
Reverend Rawding: Yes.
Q651 Mr Clarke: Yet, Mrs Boal, in terms
of your members, only 30 per cent have said they would support
a truth and reconciliation committee; 70 per cent said that they
did not think it would be a good idea. I wondered if we could
have a view from across the organisations as to how important
it is to get to the truth, irrespective of how painful it may
be, irrespective of what it involves in terms of possible amnesties
and possibly people not being brought to justice for crimes that
they have committed.
Mrs Grigg: First, I think most
people would like an apology. I spoke to two ladies who said they
have never received an apology.
Q652 Mr Clarke: From?
Mrs Grigg: From anybody for what
happened; nobody has apologised. That is one issue for a lot of
people. The second one is that they have never known whether the
perpetrators have been arrested, caught, punished, or whatever
happened, and they would like to know that. Who did it; why did
they do it, and what punishment have they received? Those are
two issues.
Reverend Rawding: First, I think
it is very difficult to give just a quick answer on that because
there has been no consultation or education on truth processes
amongst veterans. Secondly, it is problematic for us because we
are seen to be perpetrators. We have people within our organisation
who have killed other people, so we are as likely to be dragged
in front of people and held up as the perpetrators and the offenders
as others. It is a very difficult issue. On the one hand, we have
families saying, "We cannot move on without the truth".
For the soldiers who died at Warrenpoint, we still do not know
who did that. I do not know who tried to kill me on two occasions.
There are those sorts of issues, but, on the other hand, there
needs to be a consultation and education process before we are
dragged up as soldier X or soldier Y and put forward as the people
who are part of the problem and who caused the problem. So it
is far too early to be coming to quick decisions on the truth
recovery process.
Chairman: That is partly what this committee
is trying to draw out.
Q653 Mr Clarke: Just to speed things
up in terms of what you have just said, is it possible that there
can be a collective general truth rather than having to rely on
individual incidents?
Reverend Rawding: I think that
there needs to be an ongoing process of truth recovery where people
volunteer to step into it and give information and other people
volunteer to step in and receive information. I think there should
be an ongoing process. There is a real fear that the Government
is going to make a decision and say, "We are going to do
this". People will be very sceptical about whatever Government
as to why it is being done. Of course, some people have real issues
about the Government, including veterans, so why should the Government
be controlling this? A lot of veterans would have issues with
the Government.
Q654 Mr Clarke: That is what some of
the communities in Northern Ireland say?
Reverend Rawding: Yes.
Mrs Boal: All you have to do is
to look at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. How many hundreds of millions
of pounds are we going to spend? I listened to a statement made
by Mr McGuinness—I do not have the date—during that
time. He made it clear that the IRA take an oath of allegiance
which forbids them from telling. Who are going to be the truth
tellers and who are going to be the truth demanders?
Reverend Rawding: And who is accountable?
We feel accountable because we have regimental numbers.
Mrs Boal: If someone stands up
and says, "Yes, I blew your father up" or, "I murdered
your son", and then the next day they are going to get an
amnesty, that is just going to cause further stress to the families.
The prisoner release caused enough stress without this all coming
up again.
Mrs Grigg: While you have unfinished
business, whatever it happens to be, to do with what happened,
then you cannot have closure; you cannot completely move forward;
you cannot take a second new life. Secondly, there are people
who would like to go and visit where it happened but who have
never had that opportunity. It would be helpful if that were to
happen, too.
Q655 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed,
all of you, for the points you have made. I am sorry if this has
seemed a little confusing and foreshortened. If we were not having
a General Election, we would have liked to have seen you in different
groups. We really do want to try and get something so that we
can offer preliminary comments before we all disappear. I hope
the next Northern Ireland Committee will want to take this up
because it is a very important subject. Thank you all very much
for coming.
Mrs Boal: In closing, may I just
ask this, Chairman? What is the point of this inquiry? What do
you hope to achieve?
Q656 Chairman: The point of this inquiry
is to try and see if there is any way whereby we could get a consensus
amongst all the different groups and communities in Northern Ireland
to find a way to try and put this wretched 30 odd years behind
us. What moved us to do it was the Secretary of State nine months
ago said he was going to consult to see if there was a way forward.
He then went off to South Africa and came back and said he did
not think that model was in any way suitable for the situation
in Northern Ireland. I must say, I agree with him. We have not
yet come to a view because we have approached this with an entirely
open mind. We have had a lot of evidence recently from various
groups in Northern Ireland, from you and from others. We have
only concentrated on the victims' side because there is not time
to look into the rest of what is a very complex matter. We are
going to try and produce just some interim remarks on what we
have learnt. I think, when we publish what people have said, that
is going to open a lot of minds to a lot of aspects which have
not been considered before, not least the ones that you have opened
our minds to today. If you think it is a waste of time, I am sorry.
Mrs Boal: I did not say it was
a waste of time.
Chairman: I know you did not, but previously,
I knew very well the views of your association because I had a
lot to do with it when I was the Minister over there. We are doing
our best to see if there is any way. I will not give a personal
view because I really do want us all to have a moment to discuss
this before we move forward. That is what we are about. You will
see, at the end of March, the fruits of our labours. If you think
they are worthwhile, that is something. Thank you very much indeed.
5 We are also keen to encourage reconciliation between
veterans of the different regiments that served in Northern Ireland
and with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Many veterans never had
the opportunity to grieve properly whilst serving in Northern
Ireland. Also the intensity of the conflict meant that at times
resentment and antipathy developed between members and groups
of the Crown Services. Back
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