Examination of Witnesses (Questions 141-159)
MISS MAGGIE
BEIRNE
12 MARCH 2008
Q141 Chairman: Miss Beirne, you are very
welcome. Thank you very much indeed for coming to give us evidence.
Although it is a total breach of protocol, we do have a number
of visitors from the parliament of Iran who have come to listen
to this session and we are all delighted to see them. I gather
that you have just retired.
Miss Beirne: And very happy as
a result.
Q142 Chairman: I thought you had
a bounce in your step when you came in. We are grateful to you
for coming and we would obviously like to meet your successor
on some occasion. Your organisation has been in existence since
the early 1980s. Could you just, for the benefit of the Committee
and for the record, say a little bit about the background and
in particular about the funding of the organisation?
Miss Beirne: We were founded in
1981 at a conference at Queen's University, essentially with people
coming together and saying we may not agree about the constitutional
status of Northern Ireland—some of us believe it should
be part of the United Kingdom, some of us believe it should be
part of a united Ireland—but we do all agree that whoever
is responsible for this jurisdiction must comply with international
human rights standards. From 1981 to 1985 there was no staff;
it was just a voluntary group of people, mainly legal academics
but gradually a variety of social workers, campaigners and other
people got involved. Then it took on staff in 1985 and now we
have six full-time staff. We have a broad membership. We consider
ourselves a cross-community organisation. We have always worked
with anyone and everyone who has a concern about how to ensure
that human rights are maintained and protected in Northern Ireland.
Q143 Chairman: Do the people who
run it come from both communities?
Miss Beirne: Yes; our executive
committee and staff are all drawn from right across the community
and I suppose it would be fair to say that up until the agreement
we would have been a responsive organisation in that we just had
to deal with what we saw as serious human rights violations that
were occurring there and then. In the lead-up to the agreement
and thereafter we tried to build on the lessons from that experience
and tried to make contributions about how you build human rights
and equality standards into fair society rules.
Q144 Chairman: How long have you
been with them?
Miss Beirne: I have been with
them as a volunteer since the late 1980s, on staff since 1995
and as director since 2004.
Q145 Chairman: And what was your
background before all of this?
Miss Beirne: I worked for 17 years
with Amnesty International in their international secretariat,
worked on Latin America and, in the last few years, was head of
campaigning and membership internationally. Basically I am a human
rights activist.
Q146 Chairman: What about the funding?
Miss Beirne: Obviously we did
not have an awful lot of funding in the early days but we have
always taken the position that we should not take government money
because we wanted both to be independent and to be seen to be
independent. We take money from charitable foundations, from members,
from selling publications, just general fund raising but mainly
from charitable foundations. As many such groups we would have
been very dependent on the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Foundation
in the early years and then diversified, the Barrow Cadbury Trust—very
keen on chocolates—and now Atlantic have been giving us
funds, Oak Foundation, and we have also tried to raise money in
the States, but not with great success I have to say. Everyone
thinks there is an awful lot of money in the States.
Q147 Chairman: There is, but it is
a question of getting it. What is your budget?
Miss Beirne: I have gone completely
blank.
Q148 Chairman: Doubtless you will
let us know in due course.
Miss Beirne: Yes; I have my annual
report with all the audited accounts and so on.
Q149 Chairman: Your mind is clearly
on higher things like retirement. You have a very great deal of
experience of the areas into which we are inquiring, so perhaps
you could share that with us this afternoon. Colleagues have a
number of questions they would like to ask you about inquests
and other things but perhaps I could kick off. One of the disturbing
matters is the high cost of public inquiries. One of the things
we are looking at is the possibly disproportionate cost of historic
inquiries when it comes to the police budget and indeed when it
comes to the budget of the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman himself was
very forthright in what he said and actually said he felt two
organisations should be spawned out of his: one to deal with the
past; and one to deal with the present and the future. Your views
on that and on the justification of the high costs of public inquiries?
Miss Beirne: It would be very
difficult to sit and to say that the money that is currently being
spent on inquiries is all money well spent and absolutely every
penny of it should be spent in this way. We have a lot of concerns
and have expressed these at different times about the expenditure
and about whether this is the appropriate way to respond. However,
in a sense we want to start at a different place which is that
this is where we are at now. Families have been asking for answers
to questions for a very long time and we seem to have come up
with this piecemeal response in a number of different areas: we
have the Historic Enquiries Team within the Police Service in
Northern Ireland; we have the Cory inquiries, three of which are
up and running in the north; we have the Police Ombudsman's responsibility
in this area. Obviously we have a much broader swathe of cases
which have not even really been effectively addressed and presumably
some of which can be addressed through the work of the Victims'
Commissioners now and the Eames/Bradley Panel to deal with the
past. One of the key concerns that we have been trying to question
is, why we are spending so much money. We would argue anyway that
there seems to be insufficient interest in actually tackling these
problems effectively. We gave the example in our written submission
to the Committee that in the Billy Wright Inquiry there is one
legal team representing David Wright, the father of Billy Wright
who was killed in prison, with three staff—a senior and
a junior barrister and a solicitor—and then several legal
teams representing various government agencies. One of the things
that you regularly see in the media is how much these inquiries
are costing and querying why we are spending so much on Family
X, but when you break it down, you realise that there is a big
question mark about all of those agencies that feel that they
have to be separately represented at the inquiry. It was only
very latterly that the security services decided that they needed
to be represented separately at the inquiry and that they would
require their own legal team. So the first problem is the route
that has been taken and the fact that government agencies in their
many forms, feel that they have to have official representation.
Also, when we went to the Eames/Bradley Panel to deal with the
Past, we were saying that there were several things that we thought
could be dealt with in terms of capping, legal fees and trying
to encourage a less adversarial approach. The problem, we would
argue, is that this is all being done after the fact, a rather
piecemeal approach and that if you choose to go the Cory inquiry
route, Cory made various recommendations about how to cap legal
fees, how to maintain it within a reasonable expenditure but some
of the questions need to be addressed out to government agencies.
Then I suppose a key thing that I probably will reiterate several
times during this testimony is that we feel that there is a lot
of learning to come from these inquiries. We certainly do not
see it as just looking back and asking what happened, who was
responsible, bring them to court, whatever it might be, but actually
asking what the learning is from that past experience and how
we can put it to good effect in our current response to policing
and future arrangements around policing.
Q150 Chairman: This Committee will
have to make recommendations and although, of course, we cannot
guarantee that they will be accepted and adopted, we will have
to make them and have to make them in the field of costs as well
as to what should be done. If there were two or three things that
you believe would help address this issue, what would those two
or three paramount things be that you would hope that we might
endorse and recommend?
Miss Beirne: One of the issues
would be engaging with the Law Society and the Bar Council about
issues around legal fees.
Q151 Chairman: Is this the capping
issue?
Miss Beirne: Yes, the capping
issue. Another issue would be asking Government why so many different
agencies need their own separate representation in these inquiries.
I am talking now particularly about the Cory inquiries because
there were obviously so many different issues and I can come back
to the other matters, if you like. Also, and I know that that
is not directly the remit or at least, if I understand the Committee's
terms of reference, which is very much about the expenditure I
suppose I would be saying that one of the things is actually to
think about how this expenditure could be made as effective as
possible. I know that you have already received testimony from
the Chief Constable, but I do not think this question arose. One
of the issues would be how that learning is being institutionalised
now. The Billy Wright Inquiry has already made some serious criticisms
of the police response. How is that information being taken back
within the PSNI and built upon for improvements and so on? I really
want also to think about how you get the most benefit out of money
that is spent as well as trying to keep the level down.
Q152 Chairman: If you have to assess
the inquiries in general, would you say that they excite too many
unrealistic expectations or would you say that, on balance, they
have done more for public confidence and therefore the expenditure
is justified?
Miss Beirne: I do not like either
of those two options. They have not excited too much expectation,
certainly we have had contact with all of the four families that
are involved in the Cory inquiries and we have a lot of contact
with families that are working with the Historic Enquiries Team
and obviously with the Police Ombudsman's Office and in fact it
is always quite surprising, or at least I find it quite surprising,
how victims very often do have a very limited expectation in that
they do not expect to get answers to all of their questions. Sometimes,
as I am sure you would have heard from the Historic Enquiries
Team, families just want very basic information such as whether
a doctor got to a person in time, a priest or a religious minister
or whatever it might be. In terms of families at least, they have,
in my experience, extremely high expectations. On the other hand,
society as a whole looks at these inquiries—and in fact
they are only just starting after a very, very long comparative
period, after big expenditure in terms of gathering the documentation
and so on—and I do not think that society would say this
is the best of monies use and this is reassuring them about confidence
in policing. That would bring me again to this question about
the whole tone and tenor of the debate. I have raised this personally
with the Chief Constable himself in response to a speech he gave
at Queen's and I felt it came through again in the testimony before
you. Obviously, he has a budget and he has to keep within that
budget and he is very concerned about the expenditure, but if
most of the public pronouncements from the Chief Constable are
about the burden that these things place on the police, then it
is not surprising that many people within society will think that
inquiries create an obstacle to good policing. I feel the inquires
should be part of this process of encouraging greater confidence
of society in the police and ensuring that they do feel confident
that we have learned from the past and that hopefully we will
not make the same mistakes. Maybe ideally some of our learning
can be shared with other police forces.
Q153 Sammy Wilson: Given that we
have already seen the reaction of some of the families, for example
involved in the Bloody Sunday inquiry, given that many of those,
especially those who push for inquiries, do not just want to hear
what happened, they want actually to see somebody in the dock
at the end of the process—many of the families have already
made that quite clear—and that is not likely to be the outcome
of course of these inquiries given their nature, is that not one
of the things that the Chief Constable is referring to, that regardless
of the outcome, if someone does not finish up in jail over this,
then people will believe justice has not been done? So you have
a costly inquiry, you have big demand on police resources and
people dissatisfied at the end anyway.
Miss Beirne: I should not have
given the impression that everyone starts from the same starting
point. I totally agree with you, the families cover the whole
spectrum and there will be families who expect that there will
be individuals who are prosecuted at the end and some people who
feel that prosecuting individuals is not the key point, it is
getting institutions to take responsibility for what they did,
and other people who want something very basic in terms of information.
There will be fantastically different expectations within families
but also some of the realism that the Chief Constable was talking
about. Certainly the Historic Enquiries Team have really very
consistently gone out of their way and all the families engaging
with them know what their remit is—that they are looking
for evidential opportunities. If you are talking of older cases,
it is less likely that there are going to be evidential opportunities.
Q154 Chairman: I want to move to
historic inquiries separately a little later on and colleagues
will want to ask questions, but that is very helpful. What about
the Inquiries Act itself? Are there severe limitations that make
it difficult or do you think it is more or less all right?
Miss Beirne: I need to check but
I think that CAJ in an earlier inquiry the Northern Ireland Committee
may have addressed this, even indirectly, when we talked in more
detail about being very concerned about the Inquiries Act when
it was introduced and our belief that it would not ensure an Article
2 of the European Convention compliant inquiry. Obviously, when
the Government decided to bring together all of the many statutes
that allowed for inquiries this was to cover a vast, vast array—major
train accidents, food problems and so on—but, particularly
in the Northern Ireland context, there was a sensitivity where
there were allegations of state involvement in loss of life, where
it was felt particularly problematic where the minister, a political
appointment, would determine the composition of the inquiry, the
terms of reference of the inquiry, in fact could even call the
inquiry short at certain stages and certainly had a lot of authority
over what could and could not be disclosed. We were very concerned
when the Inquiries Act was introduced and argued very strongly
against it.
Q155 Chairman: And your fears have
not been allayed since.
Miss Beirne: No.
Q156 Kate Hoey: You mention here
in the memorandum to us "Any even cursory glance" at
the Billy Wright Inquiry "about the inadequacy of police
response to their efforts should disturb NIAC members. The audit
trail highlights serious problems about police procedures and
record-keeping at the time of Billy Wright's murder, but also
in the year 2007". Tell us about 2007?
Miss Beirne: Essentially, in the
statement that the Billy Wright Inquiry issued, they really went
through an audit trail of their engagement with the police and
obviously requested material from the PSNI that related to the
time of the murder of Billy Wright, but the concerns that they
expressed were that they had made numerous requests for information
which were initially not responded to, that they then received
an assurance that they had received all of the information that
was available to the PSNI, then they subsequently received further
information that had been found and that was then made available.
Then the PSNI asked to hold a specific internal review, invited
retired ACC Kinkaid to ensure that all the information was now
available, and meetings were arranged at different times for inquiry
panel members and the police did not arrive and so on. So the
reference to 2007 was the difficulty that the inquiry was having
then in receiving full response and comprehensive responses and
effective responses from the current PSNI, albeit about events
that related to an earlier period.
Q157 Kate Hoey: In saying that, were
you actually being absolutely overtly critical about the police
in 2007?
Miss Beirne: The Billy Wright
Inquiry; yes.
Q158 Kate Hoey: Your organisation.
Miss Beirne: We were reading into
that that there was reason to be concerned about police.
Q159 Kate Hoey: So you were being
overtly critical.
Miss Beirne: Yes, though it does
not sound as though we were being very overt. It is ambiguous.
Yes, we are concerned about this information which would lead
us to think that there are currently concerns about the police.
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