Examination of Witnesses (Questions 740-753)
MR MICHAEL
POTTER, MR
BRANDON HAMBER,
PROFESSOR ROY
MCCLELLAND,
MR OLIVER
WILKINSON AND
MR ROBIN
WILSON
28 FEBRUARY 2005
Q740 Mr Campbell: Receiving from Government
and state agencies the recognition and the delivery?
Mr Hamber: I think that there
has been a fair amount of funding in this area and I think that
some of the groups have used that fairly well. I think many of
them are very good at what they do in terms of delivering services
to individuals, but I think I would say that some form of let-down
would be more over the long term rather than the short term. There
is a continual talking about it as if the next tranche of money
is the last tranche of money, and there does not really seem to
be a sense of what is the long term thinking, recognising that
if we look at comparative examples this is not a two year funding
cycle problem, this is a much longer term issue. So I think there
might be enough money, although more money could always be used.
Where the weakness comes is always this perception that it is
going to run out and it is going to run out really soon. Currently
there is the lack of a long term strategy and funding.
Mr Wilkinson: There is a problem
in introducing the financial issue into this because, yes, there
has to be a regeneration strategy, funding for good, helpful support,
but just introducing it in the first instance means that someone
is saying it is not enough, others are saying they are getting
it but not us, and you get all of the—
Q741 Chairman: That is rivalry between
groups, or jealousy between groups. We have had a number of different
responses and for some of the victims groups the issue has been
about compensation, they want compensation for their bereavement,
their injuries, whatever it is; others say it is not the compensation,
it is just recognition that these victims are a group in society
that has suffered. Where would you put that balance amongst the
victims groups that you have experience of?
Mr Wilkinson: Where there is a
lack of other services people will look to the issue of compensation
because it is a practical way of saying, yes, something has happened
and here is the practical recognition of that, so it did happen.
That is the main significance of money, but it goes beyond that—and
if there are medical or other needs an individual has then financial
compensation can be significant—and for me the issues are
acknowledgement, are ensuring that what has happened to that person
does not happen to someone else in the future. Those are also
very big issues and in my opinion bigger issues than that of financial
compensation.
Mr Wilson: Can I put the question
the other way round? I think what comes across frequently in discussion
is people saying however much compensation is necessary—and
I would not want to demean the level of compensation—at
the end of the day you cannot put a value on a human life and
that is why there are psychological/recognition issues apart from
the point that I was making about trauma, that is why they are
so critical.
Professor McClelland: On the health
side it is worth noting that unlike some countries that have been
traumatised by civil conflict, we are quite a sophisticated society
in Northern Ireland with quite a sophisticated health and social
care infrastructure. That said, 30 years of civil conflict have
contributed to the mental health morbidity of this community;
there is at the present time a review of mental health and learning
disability, and it is most important, particularly in the face
of an effective moratorium on spending, that the mental health
reform, including responding to the trauma needs of victims, is
properly resourced and addressed. I do feel that a lot of the
material needs of people can be met by adequate and proper resourcing
of our health care system appropriate to the needs of the people
of Northern Ireland, rather than a separate system to meet the
needs. Those provisions need to be strengthened.
Q742 Mr Clarke: Another suggestion that
has been put to us is that there is plenty of money, there is
plenty of resource, but it is going to the wrong people and that
in many cases today money seems to have filtered through to the
perpetrators, not the victims. How much do you feel that victims
groups themselves have been politicised in being, perhaps, not
totally representative of victims but representative of a different
opinion of a victim, in as much as in a small society like Northern
Ireland everybody can be a victim?
Mr Wilson: There is a phrase that
an Israel social psychologist uses about the Middle East where
he says the reason why it is so intractable is because there is
an endless struggle for the moral high ground of legitimate victimhood,
and there is no doubt that that struggle continues in Northern
Ireland. One of the difficulties in this whole area is that even
though the group I represent is dealing with the past in Northern
Ireland, history is not just the past and it is not even over
yet. So there is a kind of struggle being waged and it is not
the case that the average person who was just in the middle of
a car bomb in the Seventies is going to be in a victims group.
I do not mean that in any way to de-legitimise the groups or to
say anything at their expense, but it is to say that clearly in
a society which is heavily dominated by political and paramilitary
elites, who have had very strong ideological battles with each
other, this area is not going to be immune from that, sadly. That
is all the more reason why we have to at least ensure in this
area, if not more generally, some kind of sense of a set of moral
values that will apply to everybody concerned.
Mr Hamber: My view of it would
be that the issue is that all of these people were victimised
because of the political context, and that is where they are different
to road accident victims or other individuals. They were victimised
because there was a political context which was somehow, for a
whole range of reasons, not working, so to expect them not to
be politicised, in my opinion is inappropriate; of course it is
going to be a political fight because the politics is what led
to their victimisation. I think the difficulty we have there,
if I understand what Robin was saying, is that without a conducive
broader political environment you see small fights being caught
up within victims groups, so that is where you need everything
to be working. I do think that the battle around the victimhood
would decrease if, at the top level, politicians were able to
find a way to resolve their issues.
Q743 Chairman: Can you help?
Mr Hamber: Optimistically.
Chairman: Actually Mr Wilson almost said
it all when he said the past is not over yet.
Mr Clarke: Let me try and be a little
bit controversial on purpose, in as much as the South African
model recognised that ex-combatants, post conflicts, needed work
to do and were employed in the police force or as security and/or
as villains, that is the way they went.
Mr Campbell: Preferably not robbing banks
though.
Q744 Mr Clarke: In this community there
is a feeling that quite a lot of the ex-combatants are themselves
politicised in community works, working for groups which are themselves
supposedly supporting victims. Should there not be set criteria
that look at the cross-community work that organisations do before
suggesting that they are a good potential candidate for funding,
because there are a lot of single community groups that in many
ways are being given money aimed at helping victims who are really
continuing to drive communities apart.
Mr Potter: I think there is a
fundamental problem in trying to draw conclusions from other contexts
in that the conflict is not over yet and also the past is not
agreed, from contexts like South Africa or those in Latin America
where the truth process has been taking place. The majority of
people in Northern Ireland simply would not recognise those contexts
because there the state was seen to be wrong and those fighting
the state were seen to be right, and those transformation processes
are different to those here, there is an attempt at agreement
here rather than one winning over the other. For example, I would
be extremely surprised to hear of a victims group made up of ex-security
forces getting funding in South Africa, whereas one would expect
that to happen here. I think that is a fundamental problem in
drawing some of those comparisons. On the role of victims groups
themselves, because there is this uncertainty there is a huge
amount of fear amongst those who have been affected by the conflict,
particularly by ex-security forces but also people generally,
in that the majority of people in the research that we carried
out had not accessed any kind of help from the state at all, and
for some their only point of contact for help or support was through
victims groups. It is this access point that gives a lot of victims
groups that want to be political a lot of help. At the same time
we have a victims group that can access up to 2,000 people in
the rural area that we think have been directly affected by the
conflict through the loss of somebody, and yet they cannot afford
to sustain one outreach worker.
Q745 Chairman: Who are you talking about
there?
Mr Potter: West Tyrone Voice.
Mr Hamber: My view on the question
you are raising is that in an ideal world I think what one would
want is that all groups are engaging in genuine cross-community
work. If we speak with them, what they say is that they often
have to go through some of the local processes before they can
engage in that sort of work. There is no doubt that there are
some that get stuck in the single identity stuff and that that
makes the situation worse, but there is also no doubt that there
are some which move through that process, so for me the issue
is more about how we monitor and evaluate the development of the
groups, it is about saying what is your long term plan; you might
start like that but you plan to move, rather than saying you absolutely
have to start at this position, because I think that some would
not be ready to do that.
Q746 Mr Tynan: Some of the individuals
who have given evidence today have indicated that they are very
aggrieved about the whole issue because they have been victims,
and they feel that as far as being victims is concerned they would
not want to see someone coming and giving the truth and then simply
walking away. How do you see the situation as regards the truth
recovery process, do you think it should be focused on individual
events and individual responsibility or should it be wider on
the wider truth about general practices and institutional responsibility?
Professor McClelland: That is
a big issue, and I will just start this and others can come in
along with me. As you will probably be aware, the Healing through
Remembering Project looked at this area through a consultation
process and looked at what people wanted in relation to dealing
with the past, and the issues surrounding truth recovery; it was
probably the one on which there was the most said but equally
quite a lot of difficulty and tension around it. Coming out of
that you can see that truth has many meanings and significance
for individuals; it can be knowledge about what happened and I
think for many people and many victims and survivors it is just
about that, to know what happened, for example the disappeared.
I think an important part of truth work is about getting facts,
but a second part is personal recovery rather than just information
and with that I think there is a major issue about acknowledgement.
Certainly, in our work we are very much of the view that the acknowledgement
embraces a wide sector of society, that a lot of people have been
involved, either through omission as much as through commission,
and there is a need for a wider social engagement in terms of
responsibility for the acknowledgement process. An example would
be the Methodist Church's own thoughts about doing some work on
its own contribution corporately; I think when it comes down to
direct acts of commission it is probably unrealistic to find individuals
signing up to direct acknowledgement, particularly in the present
context at this moment in that history. I do think there would
be a belief—including the responsibilities of all the Governments—that
there is ownership of our corporate contribution and that all
society, including the media, including health, we have all played
our part in different ways of not responding, or failing to respond
or actually not adapting the responses. I think there is a large
corporate responsibility here.
Q747 Mr Tynan: In the circumstances of
Northern Ireland do you think it would be acceptable to forego
the likelihood of legal justice in order to obtain the "truth"?
Mr Wilson: In terms of South Africa
that is not a premise that we should assume to be a pre-given
one because it arose from the balance of power in South Africa
and those particular circumstances, but if I can put it the other
way round you could say that no one should have any restriction
placed on their right to receive justice. We are now all covered
by Article 2 of the European Convention and the Human Rights Act
1998 which guarantees the right to life, but one aspect of guaranteeing
the right to life is to ensure that people have a right to pursue,
through the courts, and secure the punishment of, people who have
abrogated that right to life, and that should not be sacrificed
in the name of some wider political goal. But we are not in the
situation where we have to talk about serious immunity anyway,
as Roy says frankly, because a lot of the perpetrators, even if
they had immunity, still would not tell the truth in a way that
would be recognised. So I think we should not assume that the
only vehicle in all of this would be some kind of truth recovery
process as against, for example, the effort that is going to be
invested in the unsolved murders that the Police Service of Northern
Ireland is pursuing.
Mr Hamber: Speaking from the South
African context, one of the problems of this whole debate has
been that because the South African model has received so much
attention there is a view that somehow this trade of truth for
justice is central to a truth commission type of process, and
it is the only country in the world that has done that. Our research—speaking
with my Democratic Dialogue hat—shows that there are a lot
of people conflating the ideas of truth and justice, and actually
what we need to do is find a way to somehow try and separate them
and not think about the idea of a truth mechanism as having to
absolutely forego the right to justice. I think that also then
links with a bigger problem which is that one will never find
a model which will deal with all these issues, so you might want
to start with talking in the sense of institutional type of processes—the
various institutions, what are their responsibilities? That should
not be set up in a way that precludes the potential that as time
unfolds and as the legal context changes you might find it appropriate
to have a more individual process, or if the process goes positively
there might be some way that people start to feel that that is
not necessary because their needs have been met through some other
processes. For me, therefore, it is quite important not to think
about one mechanism that will be the be all and end all, this
is the one thing that one is going to set up to do it. If you
look at every single context, there are mechanisms which are before
and mechanisms after truth Commissions for example. In South Africa
there were three commissions of inquiry, big commissions, before
the truth commission, then there was the truth commission and
now there are debates about prosecutions. If you look at Chile
it is exactly the same example: there was a truth commission and
various prosecutions, now there has been a big commission on torture
and now they are prosecuting Pinochet. These are very long term
processes and that is horrible to say, but that is the difficulty
of structuring something like this. One needs to think of what
is the next step, but not use that to close what might come after
that.
Q748 Mr Tynan: So the position in Africa
was different from other countries in giving immunity to people
who were guilty of crimes.
Mr Hamber: It was different insofar
as South Africa gave immunity at the moment of giving the truth,
so that you could only get your amnesty if you were deemed to
have told the truth, with all the difficulties that come with
that, and that was built into the truth commission process. It
is not unique in the sense that there are many other conflicts
which have given immunity; the El Salvador truth commission did
a whole investigation, raised a whole lot of issues and the Government
passed an amnesty shortly after the primary report was published.
That sort of thing is problematic, obviously, but if you have
this mechanism of truth for justice built into the truth commission,
on one level I think that is problematic because of questions
of justice—I am not saying that in our conflict that was
not necessarily correct in terms of our political arrangements,
perhaps that was the maximum amount of truth one could have got
out of that.
Q749 Mr Tynan: What could a truth commission
do which a combination of adequately-funded grassroots projects,
academic studies, public inquiries, piecemeal institutional reform
and criminal prosecutions could not? Is there any difference that
you see about what a truth commission could do that those could
not?
Mr Hamber: The main difference
is that a truth commission gives official acknowledgement, and
however one manages to achieve it there is some sort of consensus
which is achieved about acknowledging what has happened in the
past, and that comes from the highest levels—whether that
is through apologies or statements of acknowledgement or even
just all signing up to the final report, it gives that sense of
officialness; you do not get that in other places. The second
thing is that if they are run properly, they are well-resourced
processes where there is a pooling of energies, pooling of resources,
pooling of information, and I think that that is more difficult
if it is disparate. Those would be the two things that I would
say that could potentially offer that others could not.
Professor McClelland: The reality
is that on the ground at the minute in Northern Ireland a considerable
amount of effort and local initiatives are going on about story-telling
and so forth. These are extremely important, but in a sense there
is an absence of broad civil recognition. Like acknowledgement,
I do think we need a high level societal process that brings all
this together.
Mr Wilson: If I can give a concrete
example to Mr Tynan, we need to have something that can go into
the history curriculum in schools, that is a useable past for
Northern Ireland, so that everybody will have the same books across
the different school systems. As you probably know there is in
theory a core curriculum for history in schools, but in practice
the Protestants do the Blitz and the Catholics do the Famine;
what we actually need is a situation where there is some common
history. Someone has got to direct that, and one of the things
that a Commission could do is to say here in broad outline is
our understanding of a useable past for Northern Ireland. A number
of groups went to South Africa a few years ago and Nelson Mandela
kind of berated them because they were arguing with each other
about the past, and he said how on earth can we envisage going
somewhere together if we cannot agree on what the past is. That
is the problem, that is why we cannot get out of the deadlock
we are in because there is not agreement about the past, so we
will not actually be able to establish a workable future until
we have a useable past and one that we can communicate to our
children. One of the problems that parents have in Northern Ireland
is what they tell their kids; what do you say as to why you cannot
play in that kind of area without resorting to saying there are
bad people there and therefore just contributing to exactly the
kind of sectarian stereotyping we want to try and avoid? These
are the practical problems that we need to be able to deal with.
Q750 Mr Tynan: In your view would a truth
commission now be divisive?
Mr Hamber: I think there are so
many contingent factors linked to it. I think it depends on how
that process comes into being, who actually sits on it, what is
the mandate of that process? All of these things are going to
be important factors; how do you actually select the types of
commissioners that go into this process? If that is not a public
process that everybody feels signed up to, it is sunk before it
even starts and it will probably be divisive. If you cannot get
all the major political parties around the table to agree that
this type of process is actually helpful, it is going to be sunk
from the first step. If you said to me you could deliver a well-resourced,
independent process which has the buy-in from all the various
communities, I would say I think it probably would be quite a
useful thing. Where it would be divisive is probably all communities
would find what actually comes out in the end fairly annoying,
which was the South African example, nobody seemed to leave it
feeling unscathed, so if you do all that right you are probably
going to annoy everybody but you are probably going to create
a whole lot of grey areas which I think is the essence of changing
the nature of conflict, when people realise that the past was
more complicated than actually what they thought, it was not just
black and white. For me, therefore, there are so many contingent
factors; in some senses I think it is quite helpful to begin the
discussion by saying what are the obstacles to this process and
what would be our short term gains that we could deal with in
terms of the obstacles? How do we get consensus? How would we
discuss questions of mandate? How would we discuss who would be
on this process? I would start by breaking it down rather than
setting up the big process at the end and then see how one goes
on that.
Mr Potter: There is a lot of scepticism
within the victim sector itself at the moment as to whether a
truth commission or a commission dealing with the truth is to
be imposed without consulting them. There is a lot of concern
that that will have a form of something like the South African
commission, which is widely viewed as being set up to discredit
apartheid; whereas if a similar thing was set up here to discredit
the British Government or the Stormont Government obviously that
would not be favourable to a lot of people. The other problem
is that the example they have so far is the Bloody Sunday inquiry
which has been described as an extremely expensive argument. There
is a lot of scepticism again that that will not resolve anything,
and that is for a significant incident but just one amongst many
incidents.
Mr Wilkinson: I am worried that
it would be very divisive at this point in time. It would take
a number of years, in my opinion, to get to a stage where the
process that you are hinting at might be of some use here, and
the two things for me would be, one, that it would have to be
set within the context of a number of other initiatives that would
complement what it is you are talking about. We find from our
Healing through Remembering work that for some people this idea
of truth is very important, but for others it is the opportunity
to tell their story, so it is the story-telling initiative, for
others it is a way of remembering—this is where it is contentious—a
day in the year when we could collectively remember the hurt and
the pain and so on. There are a number of complementary initiatives,
therefore, that would have to take place alongside this issue
of a truth-finding process, but the most difficult one and the
one we are still struggling with is that of acknowledgement. The
base on which all of this could have some meaning is one where
there is acknowledgement by all of us of what we have done and
what we have failed to do, of what we have said and what we have
not said, that we would begin by acknowledging as a society the
contribution, to whatever extent admitted, there has been to the
pain and suffering of all and that all have experienced. On that
base we can then begin to have these other initiatives, but without
it I think it is going to fail.
Mr Tynan: Thank you very much.
Q751 Mr Beggs: Is remembering always
therapeutic?
Professor McClelland: That is
a challenging one, is it not? I think the way that we have come
at this through the Healing through Remembering Project is that
remembering—and my goodness we are good at it in Northern
Ireland—is not an option, it is a fact, it is a reality.
The challenge is to try and find alternative ways of remembering
and dealing with the past and trying to come to, as Robin was
suggesting, a common understanding of history. Of course, forcing
people to rake up issues from the past can be quite traumatising,
and we know that there is all sorts of evidence that inappropriately
managed trauma just exacerbates it, it does not heal at all. That
said, there is a social science and a psychological science that
helps us to understand how remembering can serve good purposes,
and I think in terms of the broader society difficulties, particularly
this issue that we were just on a moment ago about truth and remembering
about the past in terms of truth, the issue of acknowledgement
seems to have gained the greatest degree of social agreement because
that tends to place the victim in a more acknowledged position
and moves them up instead of being in the down position, as many
of them feel. I think that that kind of remembering, therefore,
is a very important societal healing process.
Mr Hamber: If I could merely add
that in the South African truth commission they had this advertisement
which used to advertise the commission and said "Revealing
is healing". I think that that was hugely problematic because
revealing is simply not healing by itself, it depends on who you
are revealing it to and what they do with that information, how
they hear it, what type of context it is used in. For me that
then goes back to the environment in which one embarks on these
things; if we are thinking of the story-telling process, you cannot
just have that as if it is something which is just separate from
society, that victims tell their stories and they will feel better.
That is not the case, they will only feel better if they are feeling
heard within their society, if that information is being used
properly. So I have no doubt that there is a very big role for
this type of remembering and talking about things being therapeutic,
but it is about that context. I would throw in, like my colleagues,
that what certainly the Healing through Remembering report found
was that maybe acknowledgement was the first step to starting
to get some of that environment sorted out, that makes that part
of it better or more therapeutic.
Q752 Mr Beggs: If it is too early for
a truth commission, or if a commission is just inappropriate,
how is the "past" to be confronted and what are the
predictions for "reconciliation"?
Mr Wilson: If I could slightly
turn the question around, Mr Beggs—I am sorry, I am sounding
like a politician and if somebody here was Jeremy Paxman they
would say "Just answer the question."
Chairman: We do not mind you sounding
like a politician, we are rather fond of them.
Q753 Mr Campbell: As long as we do not
ask you 13 times.
Mr Wilson: One of the problems
is that we always get to this point in the discussion and people
always come and say "We would like a truth commission, but
just not yet", and we need to look back at why we react that
way. I think the reason why we react that way is that there is
a kind of sense that the issues that need to be addressed in the
context of something like a truth commission are not being addressed
as yet, and it is those we need to tackle. It seems to me that
one of the ways of dealing with that is to say okay, let us go
back to the victim-centred point, that what we do now is not just
have the story-telling business that has been going on already,
but as Brandon was kind of saying, the story-listening process—in
other words, some way that the people who have told their stories
and will yet still tell their stories can be sure that those are
being collated officially, recognised and given some status, which
has not hitherto happened to them. Secondly, those stories could
be the basis, among other things, for the work of some commission,
whatever it be called, which would look into the past, and that
would be a much more helpful raw material for the commission,
much more victim-centred, than if it is simply inviting, say,
all the parties and all the paramilitaries to say what their view
on the past was. Thirdly, one of the things we need to think about,
which is actually a positive in this equation, is that quietly
over the last 30 years or 40 years academic debate on Northern
Ireland has changed dramatically. There is now, frankly, hardly
anyone, be they historian or social scientist, who would give
a conventional unionist or nationalist view of Northern Ireland's
history and society, there are very, very few. There would be
a lot of consensus, for instance, that the nature of the conflict
in Northern Ireland is an internal conflict rather than one that
is caused because the Republic has got demands on the North or
because of British imperialism. There is no reason why you could
not have, I think in the not too distant future, some commission
which would use the story-telling and so on as the raw material
but would also bring to bear this huge body of academic expertise,
with an academic person in the chair, and say okay, let us put
this across to a wider audience and let us not go on with the
narratives that are just completely out of date.
Professor McClelland: Can I just
add that around this side of the table there is quite a lot of
experience on the ground of studying the very kind of issues that
you are rightly pointing towards us. I have come into this absolutely
naive, as an academic psychiatrist working in the mental health
field where everything seems much more predictable, despite how
unpredictable it actually is on the ground. I have to say that
I am convinced over the work—and our funder who looked at
what we were doing looked very critically at what our initial
outlook was, the initial project, and they came to the conclusion
that the sorts of processes that we were at stand the best chance.
It is not a single solution, but we need to focus on the processes
rather than on a big bang commission, and our work, being supported
by Atlantic philanthropy, based on our ability to work together
as a group, has given us additional seed corn funding to enable
us to build a platform on running the kinds of solutions, the
kind of processes. It is not a single process, and I am absolutely
convinced intellectually and emotionally that the only way we
can build these solutions that we long for in Northern Ireland
is a broad-based series of solutions around acknowledgement, story-telling,
reflection and building a network of those who are actually doing
this kind of work on the ground.
Mr Potter: I would like to agree
entirely with what Roy said there and just add a quote by Maurice
Hayes that reconciliation is a not a thunderclap event, it is
in millions of small initiatives. There are many organisations
in Northern Ireland that are working on those reconciliation initiatives.
Chairman: That is a lesson, certainly,
that we have learned in the past two months. Gentlemen, we would
like to extend this session for a much longer period—you
have been very valuable witnesses—but I am sorry, some of
us have a plane to catch back to London. Thank you very much for
coming and for your help and your frankness. The Committee is
adjourned.
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