Examination of Witness (Questions 440-459)
MR WHITE
AND MR
LAMONT
2 APRIL 2008
Q440 Chairman: We have heard various
proposals. We have heard the proposal referred to this afternoon
of Dame Nuala O'Loan which would be the hiving off and the creation
of an independent agency that would embrace the two. There is
the proposal that this Committee has received from the current
Ombudsman which is slightly different because he wishes to concentrate
on the present and he believes that he is going to be overwhelmed
by the past if there is not a division. There are a variety of
suggestions, but what is your general view? Would you hive off?
Would you create something separate? Would you let both organisations
continue in spite of what Lady Hermon refers to quite correctly
as the inevitable duplication?
Mr White: Certainly we would aim
for the line in the sand aspect of it. We think that an historical
Ombudsman would simply be perpetuating a process where we see
the time clock running down with no great prospect of making anybody
amenable before the courts for old offences. I think hard decisions
have to be made by our political representatives of whether the
time has come, whether, in essence, they will have the majority
of the public behind them, to make that decision and say that
we have to bring our past to a close and leave history to the
historians to write. You will recall that the Irish Rebellion
of 1641 is still being argued over in terms of how many people
actually died as a result of the pogroms there in Ulster. It was
interesting to read that in 1644 as part of a settlement with
King Charles, the Irish aristocracy were trying to bring in an
Act of Oblivion to officially wipe out the history of the past.
You mentioned before an amnesty as a mechanism for bringing things
to a close. We certainly would not subscribe to that if it is
linked to the declaration that in actual fact we were engaged
in a war. I think any examination of the statistics will clearly
show that a war was being waged only against civilians on both
sides. In actual fact, when you look at the "success"
records for the paramilitaries, the Provisional IRA managed to
kill 30-odd known members over three decades of those who were
in the Loyalists organisations and the Loyalists in turn managed
to kill 42-odd people who were in the Republican paramilitaries.
The remainder of their targets were innocent members of both the
Roman Catholic and the Protestant communities. Anything that would
attach it or give it the dignity of viewing those people as combatants
abiding by what you would call the normal conventions of any war
would certainly be abhorrent to ourselves and our Association.
Q441 Mr Murphy: Following on from
that, in your submission you quite rightly point out to the Committee
the trauma faced by the vast majority of your members. Do you
meet on a regular basis with them? Do you offer any help and support
apart from the counselling that you mentioned some are now receiving?
Mr White: Yes, indeed, there is
a benevolent association and there is an organisation known as
the PRRT which has been given very kindly a government grant which
provides psychological support services for these people and helps
them resettle themselves back into their families and retrain
for other employment. So there is a fairly proactive management
process there that these people in retirement can still have access
to.
Mr Lamont: I think it is important
to point out that within our ranks we do have many victims and
survivors as well. Indeed, it is not just the members but it also
has a knock-on impact for their families and their loved ones
that have to live with their continuing and recurring nightmares.
Certainly a number of our members have highlighted to us the fact
that the retrospective industry keeps dragging them back to very
dark places and reminds them of standing on roads in places like
South Armagh surrounded by bits of bodies and things. I think
sometimes, when we are looking at victims and survivors, the police
family can be overlooked.
Q442 Mr Murphy: You have actually
touched on my next question, Mr Lamont. Do you not see any value
at all from the Historic Enquiries Team for members of your Association
who themselves have been directly affected being able at least
to try to find out? From the evidence we saw, even with some police
murders, there are perhaps only two or three pages of A4 available;
there is very little evidence for them. Do you not see that it
could also be beneficial to their families to be able now at least
to try to find out what happened?
Mr White: I go back to what I
said at the very beginning. We fully support that particular aspect
of access to what you would call the historical archive of police
investigations and files for materials that both assist police
families, especially younger members who were in their childhood
when their father or their mother or their brother or uncle died,
and where talking about it within the family circle was taboo
because it only upset their mother. They are now in the late 20s,
30s and 40s; they have had questions burning in their minds for
a long time and are now seeking the capacity to understand how
their relative was targeted and how did it take place in detail.
Under the old process, because there was no legal aid in respect
of inquests, quite often families were never notified of the inquest
taking place or else nobody wished to attend in that respect.
Those people have a right now to get the information they are
seeking. HET and the work it does in the business of providing
that information we 110% support.
Q443 Mr Murphy: You would not say
that it is necessarily unfair that their remit is to re-examine
every single case from 1968 with a view to seeing how it was investigated,
what information currently is available, what other information
that perhaps could be found and make that information available
to as many people as possible.
Mr Lamont: I think it is important
that it is victim centred and you need to know what the families
actually want to know and where possible that information has
been given to them. I can certainly tell you personal anecdotes
of standing on a road in South Armagh, colleagues having been
murdered, and us not being able to recover the body overnight
because the army technical officers was telling me that the light
was failing and there was a danger of a secondary device and possibly
a tertiary device. His advice was that the body should lie on
the cold road all night until daylight came and he could guarantee
the safety of the officers and soldiers that would be going in
to do the body recovery. The family might want to know why their
loved one lay that length of time and I think it is important
that information like that should be made available to them. However,
it has to be victim centred; it should focus on what they want
to know. Very often, from what I am led to believe, there may
be very simple requests that could be quickly and speedily dealt
with and may bring some comfort to those families.
Q444 Chairman: Spontaneous and automatic
examination of every case is something that should give way, in
your view, to the response for information from people who are
seeking it.
Mr White: We are saying victim
driven as opposed to victim centred. Victim centred allows you
certainly to have that overview but victim driven means that I
knock on the door and I request information. It is terribly hard
to define exactly who family is. Is it simply the siblings? Does
it spread out to cousins or relatives? It should be open to all
who feel themselves requiring information and have a relationship
with a particular victim, but they should be the ones that commission
the provision of the information, not the reverse as it appears
to be at the moment with an element of cold calling.
Q445 Mr Murphy: In your view, in
the event of the HET writing off to what they consider to members
of the family of a case they are currently reviewing and they
receive no response for whatever reason, then in your view they
should not go ahead with that inquiry?
Mr White: I am uncomfortable because
a lot of families have through this past ten, 15, 20 years come
to terms with it. It does not mean that they have written it off
and forgotten in any shape or form, but by and large they have
come to terms with it. I lost my brother-in-law to an under car
booby trap bomb; who is the family in our circumstances? Am I
part of that family? Does it extend to cousins and relatives?
Who exactly does HET write to? Do they write to the widow? Is
she supposed to raise the issue with her two daughters and canvass
whether or not they and their husbands want that information?
To turn it round the other way, use mechanisms of publicity that
are there—leaflets, websites, television adverts and everything
else—and simply leave it or else wait, as we have suggested.
If there is a Victims' Commission with a Victim's Commissioner,
then I could present myself in front of him as a victim and simply
say, "These are the things I would wish you to attend to
on my behalf".
Q446 Chairman: We have come across
cases of this. The widow, for whatever reasons, wishes it to be
over. The widow dies. The son and/or the daughter take a very
different view. How do you react to that?
Mr White: If the son requires
the information then I think he is entitled to have it, but it
is terribly hard simply to do that by the issue of a letter. The
other side of the coin is this, what exactly more, in a large
number of circumstances, can HET add to the situation? If nobody
has been charged in relation to it immediately HET has to say
to the family, "I am sorry, whilst intelligence may indicate
who was responsible I can say no more than that it was the responsibility
of the UDA and that your father was targeted as a result of the
work he was doing". They cannot go into the detail that says
that it was somebody within the same employment as himself that
provided the name that helped target the deceased. That would
be stepping over the mark altogether and they certainly cannot
put names to it. Quite often, especially in rural communities,
people want to know, "Was it my neighbour? Or was it somebody
in the community that provided a service to me? Or was it somebody
in the community that my father provided a service to that actually,
as it were, colluded with the paramilitaries to set him up?"
To my mind that information would be simply intelligence and I
do not see the need to discuss that information because you cannot
prove it and you are simply fostering suspicions that can linger
on and on within communities. You are not healing in any sense
of the word; you are poisoning.
Q447 Mr Hepburn: It has been suggested
to us that one of the possible, very serious consequences of digging
into the past and putting pressure on police officers is that
one of your retired members may snap and blow the gaff and start
to mention these things such as he informed this or he informed
that, or he did this. Have you had any representations from retired
police officers who have suggested anything in this way?
Mr White: I am not entirely following
you.
Q448 Mr Hepburn: We have taken evidence
where it was suggested that one of the possible dire consequences
of keep probing into police officers and how they did this and
how they did that could be to put an extreme amount of pressure
on them. If you have somebody who is 70 he may turn round and
say, "I'll tell you everything. Joe Bloggs down the street
was an informer and this one did this." Have there been any
suggestions from the members of your organisation that this could
happen?
Mr Lamont: No, not that we are
aware of. Recently for all police officers in Northern Ireland,
especially those who served in the Royal Ulster Constabulary,
there has been a campaign almost of demonisation in certain sections
of the press and through some of the highly contentious reports
that have been publicised. So there has been a whole process of
demonisation and there is no doubt that many of members are suffering
from stress and some of them may crack and indeed you could end
up with suicides and all sorts of things, but not for the reasons
you are suggesting because what you are suggesting almost predicates
the fact that there is something there for them to blow the whistle
on. It would be our Association's strong contention that that
is indeed not the case. There are many, many conspiracy theories
out there. We would contend that they do not have the reality
that many people are attributing to them. There is a lot of stress
on retired officers and a lot of stress on their families at the
present time, but I do not think it is likely to bring that outcome.
Q449 Chairman: Can we move on to
this whole business of covert sources? You appear to suggest that
the Police Ombudsman's publications would lead to the identification
through a process of elimination and what you described as interrogation
by terrorist godfathers. Can you just develop that a little?
Mr Lamont: One of the big dangers
here is that there an awful lot of people talking about intelligence
who have very little experience in the intelligence arena. People
who have worked with intelligence for a long time within terrorist
organisations with highly sophisticated security teams and highly
sophisticated mechanisms have their own ways of sitting down and
reading everything that is published and trying to join the dots
as to who the informant is. Your previous speaker alluded to a
system for public interest immunity and said that the chief constable
has the ability to ask for public interest immunity. In many court
cases as soon as you ask for public interest immunity the terrorist
organisations know straight away that there was an informant involved
and you are actually protecting the informant. Straightaway a
security investigation inside that terrorist organisation is initiated.
I would also suggest that there have been examples in some published
reports where it would be possible to follow—if you have
the inside knowledge in the terrorist organisation—a chain
of events back to who you believed the informant was. For me there
is a significant danger as we move forward with the public inquiries
and some of the inquests that are coming because I think we would
be naive to assume that everybody is looking to know who the informants
were for honest reasons. There will be those who will be looking
to exact revenge; there will be those who are looking to know
who betrayed them so that in some way they can make their lives
or their families' lives much more difficult.
Mr White: You asked for examples
and I think we would simply quote here Operation Ballast that
has already been referred to. As part of Ballast one agent provided,
shall we say, live explosive material which was neutralised and
returned and was subsequently planted in a bomb. Obviously the
bomb was not going to explode. As part of the police reaction
to that no arrests were made; it was an effective bomb as far
as the paramilitary members were concerned. The Police Ombudsman's
report published in detail the fact that substitution had taken
place and then castigated the police for not making a suitable
response and arresting people. If we had arrested in those circumstances
I would have been duty bound to serve on the persons arrested
a statement from the forensic science service saying that this
was a neutral device with no explosive content. Immediately the
charges that I would have preferred would have had to be set aside
and any paramilitary organisation reading that report would know
immediately what it referred to. They knew to whom they had delivered
the explosive device and they knew then subsequently who had basically
assisted in the planting of that. It does not take Einstein to
make the deductions, especially when you work in a cell structure.
The second example is in relation to the killing of Mr Restorick,
the last soldier to be killed in Northern Ireland. Extensive details
were released as part of that investigation into the methodologies
that had been used, and currently are being used, not only within
the jurisdiction of the UK but elsewhere. It was a case where
the MoD and others had to lobby the Ombudsman to have the report
taken off the website simply to try to preserve the viability
of that methodology. It is quite often a case, with the retrospection
industry that we are now under, that the overseer of the practitioners
downgrades the position of the specialist, to one that is subordinate
to their own judgment and where they supplanted it with two instruments,
one of total transparency and the other of total accountability
as being the mechanisms by which they demonstrate that they have
fulfilled their function. The victim of that process is that secrecy
and applied intelligence becomes subordinate or else they are
overlooked altogether. That is the fear we have. We have not yet
had any examples of the effects of the Inquiries Act 2005 as to
how it will work. All we can do at this moment in time is look
back to see how others with an oversight requirement have applied
it.
Q450 Sammy Wilson: You heard the
evidence of British Irish Rights Watch who claim that the Inquiries
Act has got all of the safeguards in it which are required to
ensure that intelligence methods and sources are not identified.
Can you elaborate how you think the Inquiries Act is defective
insofar as it could well lead to either police methods or police
informers being identified?
Mr Lamont: The very simple one
is the impact that it will have on the current CHIS within the
police service. One of the big concerns we have as an Association
is that we have many members who have worked in the intelligence
field who now fear they are not going to have this technique in
the PSNI, in the future, because you cannot offer some sort of
reasonable guarantee to those who have information. I was interested
in your interchange with the previous speaker when you mentioned
about Sunday school teachers. The reality of working with informants
is that you need someone who can actually tell you what is happening
within the terrorist group so they have to be on some peripheral
capacity at the very minimum to be able to pass on the intelligence
you need. No-one in my long years of experience working in that
field is going to come forward and give you information unless
you can offer then some reasonable guarantee about how they will
be protected. The first thing every potential CHIS—as they
are called nowadays—wants to know is: "If I speak to
you what are the implications for me? Am I going to die as a result
of trusting you and passing information on?" The sad reality
in Northern Ireland is that there have been around 60 deaths that
have occurred during the troubles could be attributed to people
who, it is alleged, were informers. So there is a well established
fact in Northern Ireland that if you inform there is an ultimate
sanction that you pay. That is the biggest problem, that we do
not know yet what will come out of the inquiries that could have
an impact on the capacity to get agents to pass intelligence on.
I also think there is a second dimension to that because I also
think that the demonisation that has occurred is not encouraging
many young members of PSNI to move into the field of intelligence
as a chosen career path because there is a stigma attached now
to working in that area. So not only will you have no CHIS, you
may end up in the future with no police officers to actually work
any CHIS that you may have because they are shying away from it
as it is a difficult, contentious and, at the present time, political
part of policing that many young officers do not want to know
about.
Q451 Kate Hoey: We are all immensely
grateful to you for coming in and we are all aware of the heavy
price that your members have paid over the years for the protecting
of people in Northern Ireland. On this whole question of informers
and covert intelligence, do you see any double standards in terms
of the way we are treating Northern Ireland and the historic inquiries
and our attitude perhaps on mainland UK to terrorism and information
and covert intelligence? Do you think there is something that
is slightly hypocritical about the way we are acting?
Mr White: Absolutely.
Mr Lamont: Perhaps I could give
you a personal experience. I was still serving at the time and
I was coming across to a meeting in London. It was after one of
the bombings here on the mainland, one of the al-Qaeda attributed
bombings. I remember picking up the newspaper and reading the
recommendations that the Home Secretary was putting forward for
things that should be applied here on the mainland. Every one
of them was familiar to me because they had been tried and rejected
at some stage in Northern Ireland, but the knee jerk reaction
here seemed to be that this was the way forward. If someone had
been asking my advice, I would have said that none of those methods
that you are proposing are going to work because as soon as you
go to Strasbourg to the Court of Human Rights they will all be
protected. I very much think that there has been a double standard.
I think one of the dangers of that is that many people working
in Special Branch and in the security service nowadays will think
about whether they will be sitting here in 20 years time before
your successors, explaining why they carried out certain activities
against Muslim extremists here in GB.
Mr White: There is a moral ambiguity
which those who do not work within the field of intelligence gathering
find quite incomprehensible at times and very difficult to deal
with. You do not destroy a terrorist organisation by retrospective
investigation of offences or making public calls for witnesses
to come forward and give evidence. Terrorist organisations are
destroyed almost like a cancer; you destroy it from within it.
The people who provide that information are two-legged individuals
like ourselves. I would like at this moment in time to put on
record my admiration for those who did act as informers or agents
or CHIS or whatever you wish to call them throughout the Northern
Ireland campaign. There are an immense number of people alive
today as a result of the work that those people did. Anybody who
seeks to draw a comparison between somebody who acts as an agent
in the intelligence world and an agent in the drugs scene is in
error, they are as different as chalk and cheese. I certainly
would not take on the role of being an informant, not from the
point of view that I would have any loyalty to a spurious paramilitary
cause, simply because I am a moral coward in that respect. I could
not live the double life that these people live. I think it is
an aspect for which retrospectively some government minister needs
to put on record an acknowledgement that these people were human
beings who made a moral choice. They may have had blood on their
hands at some stage, but they took the courageous step of acting
as informers on behalf of everybody who lives in Northern Ireland.
There would be no peace process today without such people.
Q452 Chairman: What would you say
to our previous witness? I do not know whether you heard what
she said about informers; she recognised the need for them and
suggested it was all done for money.
Mr White: Any examination of the
public record in respect of what informers were paid will show
that the money would hardly have kept you in beer and cigarettes
in respect of what you were getting. Money would never drive me
to live a life as a model terrorist with all the risks that were
associated with it in terms of discovery by the security team,
with the constant 24-hour awareness that I would have to have,
where even the most innocent of requests to attend at a given
venue would result perhaps in me never being seen or heard of
again because I could be destroyed by the organisation itself
simply on mere suspicion. As I say, on behalf of those who did
put their trust in police handlers and then allowed the information
they provided to be used in such a way that people were made amenable
before the courts, I have full admiration. There is probably a
massive misunderstanding in relation to actually what happened
and how many people are involved. Every operation that resulted
in somebody being arrested in relation to information used, resulted
in the intelligence service having to make available to the Director
of Public Prosecutions a full picture of the involvement of the
informant, so that he could satisfy himself that the police did
not act in a way of agent provocateur, or else in a way where
we had incited or procured the informant to act in a principal
role in that respect. Before he would even consider charges he
needed to be satisfied. As I say, it was a rigorous test that
was applied before it went forward. You then had the issue of
disclosure in terms of the police case to the defence and you
run a risk there in terms of what actually was said. Within the
system there was a standard process of accountability that went
on each time the information from an informant was used and one
could argue from an intelligence perspective that quite often
you actually lost a little bit each time you used an informant's
information. If it happened to be the second or third time you
were using that information you had to be extremely selective
in what you actually did act upon, because you were leaving a
trail behind that quite easily, by deduction, would identify who
the informant was. That has been a contentious area with those
who have stepped in to look at certain activities, and they have
seen evidence of intelligence left on the books and not acted
upon, and that has brought serious criticism of evidence not being
disclosed to CID which allegedly amounted to collusion or concealment,
a failure or almost a willingness not to accept that it had to
be left there for source protection.
Q453 Chairman: You have made your
point very effectively about the importance of informers and protecting
them. In what way is the existing system deficient in protecting
them? What should we, as a Committee, be recommending to ensure
that the protection that these people have is watertight and enhanced
in the future?
Mr White: The duty of care is
there and the chief constable has acknowledged that. The Regulation
of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) certainly puts it on the chief
constable to provide that. The dilemma occurs for him obviously
with the Inquiries Act 2005 and the knock-on impact that that
might have. I am content in my own mind that there is, shall we
say, a system in place. The problem is that we have recently seen
an outing of alleged informants. I am sure the headlines are familiar
to yourselves. This is one of the most recent ones: "Agent
was Scap's ally in IRA `nutting squad'". That gets itself
repeated in the News Letter: "Focus back on IRA as
spy flees Ulster". Every one of those headlines is a result
of some disclosure having taken place. You do not have to look
far beyond the death of Denis Donaldson to see that, but where
is that information coming from? Who has released it? Our problem
with this large body of inquiries is that they are not focussed
on considering the issues relative to article 2 in relation to
any informant. The message needs to be brought home to those people
that there is a requirement to take on board very seriously what
the chief constable has asked him to do and to cull their press
releases and their release of documentation to make absolutely
sure identities are protected. Once these people are outed, it
is a life sentence, it is banishment and you do not come home
for anything. You live abroad; you live outside the family support.
We think there should be a stronger duty of care emphasised in
that respect.
Q454 Dr McDonnell: I listened with
interest to your comments there, but I would have to add a question
in that I think the serious public concern is not about the use
of informants and about the lives they saved, but it is about
the fact that some of the informants—I could go through
a whole litany of examples—committed murder while under
protection in circumstances when they were under supervision and
they used their informant status to some extent to escape the
penalty. How do you balance that? What are the rights and wrongs
there?
Mr White: I can only answer in
respect of my own stewardship. No informant that we had on the
books was there in the full knowledge that he had or she had been
involved in murder. The rules and procedures were such that if
we had that intelligence that was given to CID and CID had the
capacity to arrest and interview those people. In the aftermath
of that capacity being exercised by CID to see if they could put
those people before the courts, it was not necessarily the case
that we abandoned them entirely and did not use those informants.
Terrorist organisations do not exist for any charitable purposes;
they exist with one thing in mind and that is murder. Every individual
who is in a terrorist organisation is a potential murderer. So
do we draw down the shutters and say that absolutely nobody who
is in a terrorist organisation should be capable of being recruited
and handled? There certainly is a taint of blood on the hands
of any intelligence officer who is handling people within a paramilitary
organisation but what I can categorically say to you is that to
my knowledge no member of the RUC handled any informant under
my stewardship who had live intelligence in front of him that
said that this individual had committed murder and had not been
questioned or dealt with in that respect. The moral ambiguity
is there: do you deny yourselves the intelligence from that individual
if he decides to turn over and provide information? Do you close
your eyes to that? In relation to 9/11 people ask themselves,
if they had had the opportunity to recruit somebody who was a
member of that organisation, would they say no? Would you take
that person on board? This is a dilemma that we all faced in that
respect. The rules were quite clear internally within the organisation:
nobody who had the capacity to have intelligence against them
was allowed to remain on the books if they had not been dealt
with by CID.
Q455 Chairman: You make your points
very clearly. You had had an hour of giving evidence in public,
before I close the public session do you wish to have a private
session with the Committee or are you content with what is on
the record?
Mr White: We are here to facilitate
the Committee.
Chairman: Are there any other questions
that colleagues wish to put to our witnesses?
Q456 Lady Hermon: The mood within
the Retired Police Officers' Association is obviously one of feeling
rather humiliated and demoralised.
Mr Lamont: I think you are being
very polite; I certainly subscribe to those sentiments. I think
a number of our members are feeling very much under siege at the
minute and have felt like that for a growing period of time. When
the Good Friday Agreement was signed people were promised the
opportunity to move on but it would certainly be the contention
of a good many of our members that they are not being allowed
to move on because they are constantly being taken back. A lot
of them are in employment but have to take days off to go and
be interviewed by solicitors and public inquiries. It has a knock-on
effect in terms of welfare issues in that time when they should
be with their families they are having to give up to be interviewed
by the Ombudsman's Office and by various inquiries. There are
a core number of people who, because they worked in a difficult
and contentious area of policing—and were brave enough to
work in a difficult and contentious area of policing—are
now disproportionately being brought to these inquiries and being
asked questions. As I say, it does have an impact on them and
their families.
Q457 Sammy Wilson: Is that not the
difficulty in persisting with the Historic Enquiries Team, the
Ombudsman or whatever we call it, this is bound to be a one-sided
process? All of the documentation, all of the knowledge that can
be delved into will be in relation to state organisations such
as the army or the police who have records of terrorist organisations.
Is this not a consequence of having any kind of inquiry type system
at all, that it will be a one-sided process?
Mr White: Exactly, and that sort
of tiredness is there amongst the officers, many of whom have
given 35 years of service. They feel that this re-writing or revision
that is going on is a desire almost to come up with some form
of equivalence between deaths that occurred at the hand of the
state and those that were carried out by terrorists. The simple
answer to that is no police officer ever rose from their bed in
the mornings saying, "I am going to kill someone". We
did our duty and it was a duty that, by and large, was focused
on providing a regular police service and on top of that an anti-terrorist
service each day. When we had to use firearms we used them in
defence of ourselves. The records would show that the RUC was
responsible for 55 deaths. They are not police statistics; they
are statistics provided by the University of Ulster. In that sense
all this retrospective looking seems to be occurring around state
issues and we feel it is to try to provide some sort of equivalence
of responsibilities. In other words, if we could only get the
RUC and military to admit to wrongdoings on their part, then perhaps
that might be a mechanism through which we can invite the coroner
of these to make a partial apology or admission that they were
wrong, perhaps in what they did, and then when those two agencies
have done that, everybody can move on. That is a let-out clause
for the paramilitaries. You know as well as I do that paramilitaries
did not act in a vacuum; they acted within communities. Communities
colluded with them to provide safe houses, to provide protection
for firearms, to provide vehicles, to target people they thought
were members of the opposition in terms of being police officers
or whatever. People who lived in communities commissioned the
paramilitaries to punish other people in their communities by
kneecapping and whatever else and those that were kneecapped,
through their silence and their refusal to identify who dealt
with them, bought their way back in. If people want to look at
what was involved, do not just keep it an issue between the police,
military and the paramilitaries. If Northern Ireland wants to
come to terms with itself, then look at the collusion that communities
on both sides of the fence were engaged in.
Q458 Chairman: You open this up in
a very graphic way. I now want to draw this session to a close
by asking you a question similar to the one I put to our previous
witness. You talked about a line in the sand.
Mr White: Yes.
Q459 Chairman: She talked about a
ten year period being necessary as the limit if we were going
to have a limit. A number of our witnesses have said that if Northern
Ireland is to enjoy the promise of a bright new future something
has to be done to bring to an end the delving into the past. You
have made the point that it should be possible to go back on specific
things at the particular request of a victim, but what would your
limit be? Do you think we should be coming to a close very shortly?
Do you think we have to acknowledge that we have another decade
of this? What do you think?
Mr White: I think, on a realistic
acknowledgement of the situation, there is neither the political
will nor, shall we say, the professional capacity or reality to
effectively investigate the vast majority of those issues that
are outstanding simply because of the technical difficulties from
the police perspective. It is misleading to perpetuate the myth
almost that the retrospective investigative process is a mechanism
for dealing with the past. I think that the corner has to be turned.
It will not bring closure to a lot of people who still hanker
after justice, but is there justice for anybody that would be
brought before the courts today? You could spend a quarter of
a million pounds on a court trial that would last for three weeks
or more at which a judge would pronounce that the most heinous
of crimes had occurred, and the defendant would simply say, "I've
done six months on remand; I'm entitled to remission. Can you
order a taxi to take me to wherever I can appear before the Sentence
Review Commission and get my release document now?" Is that
justice? There is an ambiguity there in terms of what already
exists. We are simply saying: face up to those issues; draw that
line in the sand; take on board what the majority of the people
we hope will tell Eames-Bradley and that is to be forward looking
and only allow retrospective investigation where you can come
up with credible information that will show on the face of it
that there is a case to be answered here and you apply a public
interest test to it to ask is really worth the while. If you must
retain a re-investigative capacity, then control it, limit it
and make it applicable to all in an equal fashion, in other words,
paramilitaries and the police, not the police alone.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
That is very clear and we are grateful for your evidence.
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