Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-208)
MISS MAGGIE
BEIRNE
12 MARCH 2008
Q200 Sammy Wilson: You mentioned
the fact that CAJ are concerned about the activities of some of
the covert sources that the police used and of course at many
of the inquiries references have been made to covert sources which
the police recruited. Do you believe that it is possible for the
Cory inquiries, which are quoted quite a lot, to do a job without
first of all risking the exposure of those covert sources and
their handlers and also of the methods of intelligence which the
police used in the past and which could be useful to criminals
and terrorists in the present and future?
Miss Beirne: The Government must
think it is possible because they passed an Inquiries Act which
allowed for the establishment of these inquiries and there are
plenty of safeguards, some of which we think we criticised, which
would enable the inquiry not to seek certain disclosure or to
protect the anonymity of witnesses and such like. Certainly the
Inquiries Act does allow for that reality. What we have to do
is see what actually happens now in practice.
Q201 Sammy Wilson: The fact that
you are critical of them would indicate that you believe therefore
that the inquiry cannot do their job without some of those safeguards
being removed.
Miss Beirne: It would be very
difficult for the inquiries to do their job. Obviously the legislation
just gives the power to the minister to intervene in a number
of different circumstances. If the minister chooses not to intervene
then clearly that is not going to be so problematic. If, however,
the minister does see that there are many instances in which he
or she has to intervene to protect sources then it will be very
difficult to see how the inquiry can get to the truth of a situation.
Q202 Sammy Wilson: On balance then,
is it the view of CAJ that, in order to get to the truth that
the people who asked for the inquiry want to get to, the police
should be obliged to disclose who their sources might be, disclose
who handled those sources maybe and in some cases disclose the
methods they used? Is it CAJ's view that when you balance these
things up really police methodology and police anonymity are less
important than the demands of the people?
Miss Beirne: No. It is CAJ's view
that there should be a balancing out of these different demands
and I think testimony has already been given to you that informers
have a right to life too. They are certainly not in the business
of emblazoning names of informers across Northern Ireland.
Q203 Chairman: Do you accept that
it is an unfortunate but necessary part of the process that some
people's anonymity has to be protected in perpetuity?
Miss Beirne: That clearly would
have to be the case. What we are saying is that there needs to
be a proper balance. We are not sure the legislation has got it
right about that proper balancing.
Q204 Sammy Wilson: In an earlier
answer you said you did not believe it was possible for the inquiries
to do their job on some occasions without the information being
disclosed. Yet all along you have been defending these inquiries.
That to me is contradictory. If you believe that there should
be some protection, because informers have a right to life, and
inquiries cannot do their job without that protection being removed,
then what is the point of having inquiries?
Miss Beirne: In a sense you are
going from one extreme to the other. It is not necessarily the
case that in order for the inquiry to do its job the name has
to be given of every informer and the level of detailed methodology,
but that actually there is a lot of information which could be
put into the public domain, more information certainly than is
there currently, that would allow us to assess why certain decisions
were made and what actually happened.
Q205 Sammy Wilson: Yes, but the police
argument is—and in fact that you have said in some cases
you need to know the name of informers, you need to know whether
they are dead or whatever—that once you start down that
route by naming or maybe not even naming but giving some of the
information they gave or some of the incidents in which they had
supplied information or whatever, that you immediately identify
them to their colleagues; you do not have to give their names
and addresses. If you identify the methodology which the police
used to get that information that compromises not just what happened
in the past, which is bad enough, but that compromises current
police operations and future police operations.
Miss Beirne: I am not sure I am
allowed to ask questions of you. My question is: how do we then
get to the truth of these situations? You have very credible allegations
of collusion between police officers and various individuals and
that information cannot be pursued because of a concern around
protecting the methodology, protecting individuals, so how do
we then make sure that those problems are not going to continue?
Q206 Chairman: You are quite right
to address that to the Committee. Of course the Committee will
not give you an answer this afternoon, but it is one of the issues
which we will have to wrestle with and we will have to address
in writing our report. We will have to decide what recommendations,
if any, we make on this particular issue. Mr Wilson is entirely
right to raise it and you are justified in batting it back to
us in the way that you have.
Miss Beirne: To be fair, the key
thing, one of the issues you rightly raised, is how we ensure
general confidence in policing. That is what our concern ought
to be. We want to have good policing and we want to ensure that
society as a whole has confidence in policing. I think dealing
with this past has to be part of that. It cannot just be pushed
under the carpet.
Q207 Sammy Wilson: Part of the confidence
in policing rests with the people being prepared to come forward,
sometimes having placed themselves in dangerous positions, to
give evidence and information to the police. One point which the
police have made to us is that if the kind of demands made by
some of the relatives of families who have asked for inquiries
to be made and demands made by groups like yours, were acceded
to, in the future it would be almost impossible to recruit informers.
An informer would wonder whether ten years, 20 years down the
line their name would be given out in some inquiry because demands
were being made to try to find what happened to a particular individual
whose case they were involved in.
Miss Beirne: That is not an inconsiderable
concern but I do not know how else we are going to handle this.
Drawing your attention again to the McCord Inquiry, that was really
one complaint about one individual who was murdered. That essentially
opened a can of worms about operations like that, and not that
long ago either. I can certainly see there are big problems with
what was happening in the 1970s and a lot of the testimony from
the Chief Constable was very right in emphasising that the number
of deaths in any one year—1974 was horrendous—placed
particular pressures on policing. The interesting thing is that
the Cory inquiries were all late 1990s, McCord is also a more
recent case, and yet clearly it took some of the uncovering (bought
about by the Ombudsman's Inquiry) to start to create the change
we are now beginning to see in terms of that overview of informers.
Q208 Chairman: Clearly there are
dilemmas and clearly there are tensions and we will have to discuss
many of these things. Do you believe, as many of our witnesses,
both formal and informal have believed, that there has to be—you
have made your position on arbitrary dates plain—a drawing
of the line at some point in some way? Do you believe that is
right or do you think it is so important that inquiries be conducted,
that there is absolutely no time limit; we go on and we go on
and we go on.
Miss Beirne: That discussion needs
to be had. Looking back with hindsight to the agreement, it is
really interesting that, with the exception of one of the opening
paragraphs where it talks about tragedies of the past and, the
need to build a shared future, there was no discussion of the
past, no discussion about anything really, it was essentially
about what we wanted to do for the future. Now we have realised
in the ten years since then that that was not going to cut it.
We need to have something much more fundamental looking back.
I personally will not answer. I do not think organisationally
we can say what that timeframe should be. Hopefully something
is coming out of Eames/Bradley about whether people as whole think
a time limit can be set. Look at Spain, Japan, Germany.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you for coming, thank you for giving your evidence; it is
helpful to us and we will take this into account as we see others.
We are going to be visiting the Historic Enquiries Team and the
Ombudsman's Office next week in Belfast and we shall be reflecting
on these things. If there are points you believe ought to be brought
to the Committee and they are not contained either within your
written submission or what you said this afternoon, please let
us know. Please also discuss with your successor in case he wishes
to add anything to the testimony you have given. We appreciate
your coming and wish you a safe journey home. That concludes our
proceedings. Thank you very much.
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