Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 731-739)

MR MICHAEL POTTER, MR BRANDON HAMBER, PROFESSOR ROY MCCLELLAND, MR OLIVER WILKINSON AND MR ROBIN WILSON

28 FEBRUARY 2005

  Q731 Chairman: Thank you all for coming. We are, as you know, looking into the problems of reconciliation and whether there is a way forward, and we have spent the last month or two addressing ourselves to victims and victims groups, of which you are representative of four of them. If you could just answer our questions as briefly as you can and we will see how we go. The question really is whether approaches to reconciliation should be victim-centred or not. Has anybody got examples of a country which has succeeded in designing an effective victim-centred approach to reconciliation? Can anyone drag anything out of their memories? We do not think we have found one. (After a pause). Good, that is the first answer, the briefest answer of all.

  Professor McClelland: I think that centring on victims and their special needs has informed a number of initiatives. There is the South African initiative, and Brandon Hamber would be much better at talking about that but, equally, having just come from meeting people from Peru this afternoon, the Peruvian initiative also was cognizant of the hurt and the legacy of that hurt that needed to be dealt with as a moral prerogative, to take initiatives and to move processes forward. For me, in terms of our own community, it gives us the moral prerogative of responding to the hurt where hurt has been most felt.

  Q732 Chairman: Do you want to add anything, Mr Hamber?

  Mr Hamber: I think most of these initiatives start out very much with the idea of being victim-centred. Some of them might have a political background at the start, like in the South African case with issues around amnesty questions, but in terms of what they are subsequently trying to do, they will often try and put the victims at the centre of it. Whether they achieve that fully or not I think is another issue. There are other examples that I think one could think of; for example, there was recently a commission looking at the issue of torture in Chile, following initial truth commission reports. That has very much built on the testimony of victims and arguably we could say actually that in both Argentinean and the Chilean cases they really did focus on victims. It is a case, I suppose, of how we define what we mean by the issue of victim-centred, but I think many of them set out, certainly, to focus on victims.

  Q733 Chairman: A number of victims and victims groups seem to be sceptical about whether their views have been taken into account by the Government; do you think that is a justified criticism, not least of the groups we have just had in? Do you think the Government has done all it should do, enough of what it should do, or do you think that that is a justified complaint on behalf of the victims?

  Professor McClelland: I think there have been significant efforts on the part of Government. The initiative, for example, of trying to deal with trauma and trying to deal with physical trauma as well as psychological trauma is really quite palpable. I think victims are in the best position to read out just how much has been committed, but I do sense, as a trustee of the Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation, and being in receipt of quite a large donation from the central Government, without that we could not do our work. I sense that there is at least one major gap, however, where issues about truth and other issues about the past perhaps have not been taken up at all by Government, and that is a gap that I do believe needs to be addressed.

  Mr Hamber: I think you can draw a distinction between two separate things: one is about the actual support or dealing with the consequences of what happens to victims, and that might be about counselling, it might be about finding support and other sorts of things. Since 1998, as you know, there have been a range of initiatives to try and set that up, as Roy has mentioned. The second component of it is much more around the issues that affect the victims, which are these questions of truth, justice, compensation and these sorts of issues, and I think when one starts to look at that it is quite clear, speaking to victims, that certainly they feel that that has not been fully addressed. Having said that, that is the more difficult part to address because that is fundamentally about political questions rather than actual service delivery, so I think that fact, that there are two separate needs, can be quite important.

  Q734 Chairman: What about the dilemma as to whether you talk to victims groups or the victims themselves, some of whom of course do not belong to any group? Which of those approaches do you think is the most likely to get us where we want to go?

  Mr Potter: From a political perspective there are a number of victims groups who see themselves as representatives of victims in Northern Ireland. The problem is that the victims sector is very divided and those who are parts of groups are a tiny minority of those who have been affected by the conflict. What we have found through our research is that people seek help, guidance and support in a range of areas within society itself and not necessarily from victims groups—and there are a number of reasons why that happens. Talking to victims groups, therefore, will only really reach a small proportion of people generally. Most ordinary human beings who do not feel themselves politically disposed one way or the other might seek help through the family, churches, other community organisations, but predominantly we have found that women's centres have sustained communities during the conflict, and if we are talking about support to organisations that have supported victims and will support victims in the future, the fact that a lot of women's centres are having to close because they do not get funding from the Government beyond March this year will probably be very detrimental to the communities they serve.

  Q735 Chairman: Do they know they are not going to get it, or do they not know whether they are going to get it?

  Mr Potter: They have been told that they will not receive emergency funding and a number have closed already.

  Q736 Chairman: Would you very kindly let us have a note of those groups which have been told that their funding has been cut off because that would be very helpful to have on the record?

  Mr Potter: We will try and dig that out.

  Mr Wilson: It is worth adding, chair, that even with the best will in the world, in terms of the victims groups every victim is an individual victim in terms of their experience, in terms of their needs, and unfortunately we tend to bracket people together and say they are victims in a homogenised, collectivised way. Secondly, a lot of people who have had the experience of being victims are actually struggling to get out of that sense of being a victim and that should be a key psychological point, how they can manage to make the best of their lives so they are no longer feeling consumed by that sense of victimhood.

  Chairman: Thank you so much. Mr Gregory Campbell.

  Q737 Mr Campbell: On the issue of the role of the victim-centred approach, I am just wondering if any of you have a view on that approach being more difficult to break out of the cycle of victimhood remaining and continuing, or does it in some ways keep on the continuum. Is there a consensus on that?

  Professor McClelland: I think there are views and I think the way you phrased the question points to some of the difficulties here. It is a bit like dealing with the past; the view is that the best way to deal with the past is to leave it behind and then go forward, but I think the past invades the present. One thing about trauma—and that characterises victimhood, that people have been traumatised—is that it leaves a lot of psychological hurt, social group hurt, and it does not go away just by ignoring it. I do believe that practically speaking it is problematic to leave it, but also it is morally inappropriate, and we need to start to listen to what they are asking for and take their questions seriously. I sense that is the view coming out, certainly from Healing through Remembering, which I am deeply involved with.

  Mr Hamber: In many senses what is important in terms of that is that victims are all seen within some sort of a context, so that if one strictly focuses on victims as if they exist as a subset somehow outside of the broader political, social and other context, then I think we run the risk of ghettoising that focus on victims, but if one places it within context—and that is where it goes back to what I was saying about having to deal with all the other issues in a society, recognition, acknowledgement and other sorts of issues—I think then you have a much better chance of that becoming much more of a social problem that somehow needs to be dealt with. I know that the first time I spoke with you I mentioned the idea of a process being victims centred but society wide, and I think I would stick with that, that although it has got to be victim-centred it has to engage the whole of society, and if it does not I think that could lead to victims becoming more and more marginalised and more and more isolated, but the moment you engage society then you are into the politics of it and that is the difficult part.

  Q738 Mr Campbell: On the issue of official victims strategies, some of the victims themselves and victims groups who have appeared before the Committee have indicated that they feel the official strategies do not address what they want to see addressed, they do not see issues such as acknowledgement of the hurt, the anger, they have a sense of being forgotten, they do not see that acknowledgement, they do not see the official strategy as recognising where they are or what they have gone through. Do you think that is an accurate reflection?

  Mr Potter: Generally in our research that is a feeling within the victims sector itself, of being ignored. That is also a symptom of trauma itself and the result of trauma, but I think one of the main problems is that because the victims sector itself is divided, both on conflict lines but on other lines as well, it is very difficult to put your finger on something and say that we will be seeing to the needs of these particular victims. You are inevitably leaving out another group that considers themselves as victims, and I think that is something that we have not really managed to resolve yet, and it is something that needs to be done over a long period of time between people within the victims sector itself rather than people imposing solutions to that dilemma.

  Mr Wilkinson: If you ask people who have been hurt it is a very difficult story that many of them have to tell and there is then a realistic expectation on their part that something will be done about it. I think the experience over the past 10/20 years is that people feel, to the extent that they have told their story, that the fact is that they have told it over again, over again and nothing has ever really happened with it. The second point is that some people who have not told their story, and perhaps have been coping perfectly well, when they hear stories of others it causes them perhaps to feel that there must be something wrong with me, and the kind of intellectualisation of the whole process creates a problem of its own. Maybe there is no answer, but by talking about it and not getting the answers in the right way it encourages people to come forward, perhaps more confused than they previously were.

  Mr Hamber: If I can add something about the victim strategy issue, the victim strategy that was produced clearly says "We did not deal with questions of truth and justice in this strategy" and we really focused on service delivery. It in fact goes on to say that it was then waiting for the report of the Healing through Remembering Project before it was going to say anything in that regard, and I think there has been a real gap in waiting for the next strategy. I think that first strategy created a sense of momentum, even if it did not address those questions which I think are difficult questions, and it created an expectation, and there seems to now have been quite a long gap before the second strategy has arrived. I think there are some issues there.

  Q739 Mr Campbell: Just on the service delivery, do you think in the round, looking at the victims sector, both groups and individual victims, that they can credibly claim, as many of them do, to have been let down significantly on delivery?

  Mr Hamber: You mean in terms of them actually being able to deliver the services themselves or giving money?


 
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