Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 500-519)

SIR HUGH ORDE, MR ALISTAIR FINLAY, MR PETER SHERIDAN AND MR JOHN BRANNIGAN

13 MAY 2008

  Q500  Chairman: Thank you for that, and thank you and, through you, to all your officers for what they do to ensure that this place is as normal as possible. As you rightly said, the universal condemnation of this appalling act and the community assistance rendered to the stricken officer does itself indicate how far we have come forward even since this Committee has been coming over in the last three years. Sir Hugh, as you know, we are looking at HET. I would like to thank you for making it possible for us to have that visit. Mr Cox and his colleagues could not have been more helpful or welcoming. They gave us the opportunity to meet a random selection of victims' families who, of course, had different views on the outcome but were unanimous, I might say, in praising the sensitivity of those who had handled their cases. That is something that has come up again and again in our conversations, both public and private. Thank you for that. One thing we were very surprised to learn, Sir Huge, when we went to the HET headquarters was that all cases are being investigated, even those where there have been prosecutions and where families have never requested further information. I even came across one where the victim had been a very old man when he was killed in the 1970s and a bachelor with no known relatives. I think the Committee does just wonder whether this is a justifiable use of resources, both financial and human. I wonder if you would like to say a word about that.

  Sir Hugh Orde: I will make some very brief comments and hand over to Alistair or John. I think we made a decision early on in terms of reinvestigating every one that it was around recognising whilst many were solved, they were not solved in the holistic sense, someone may have been convicted but there may be other people outstanding. There is also the harsh reality that these people were not killed by individuals or maverick activity, these were organised killer gangs, serial killers, going around, so to miss one out means you could miss a series of crimes where this was a critical element, so it was around joining them together. As far as the families are concerned, I think the odd case may seem a bit strange and if someone does not want investigation we do not want to make it worse for them but, again, doing the basic reinvestigation which was described to you does enable us to make sure we do not miss perhaps critical elements of a series of crimes. Interestingly, and I am sure Dave will have mentioned this, a number of people, whilst they do not engage at the beginning, one of the reasons we may overrun is when they hear we have done it they want to engage at the end. In other words, the questions we would like to get before we start the review we get at the end. I do not know if Alistair or John would like to add anything to that.

  Mr Finlay: I think that covers most of it, the interconnections between the different cases. The other thing to be remembered is where you either have no family or no family engagement it generally means that the scope and size of the amount of work that is done is smaller. A lot of the work is the unanswered questions that come from victims' families and those are the answers they are looking for. Those who do not have family engagement are probably smaller in scope but it means we have then got the complete picture and we have joined up that tapestry of interconnected incidents some of which, until you revisit them, you do not know are interconnected. John deals with the intelligence so maybe sees a bigger picture.

  Mr Brannigan: What we would like to do is get it right once and not to have to go over cases again. We find that where you get fragmented families, and we do get grandchildren coming along enquiring as to the death of their loved one much later after the process has started, and that is all through the media where they hear of HET and we get letters from as far away as Australia and America enquiring about their distant relative and the fact they have no near relatives, we feel that it is necessary to open each case and go through all the different areas within that investigation and have it complete and it is there forever. We will place that file within the central store and it is there for anyone to pick up in future years.

  Q501  Chairman: Obviously what you say is on the record and people will be able to reflect on that, and the Committee will. We were told by the Retired Police Officers' Association, Sir Hugh, that some families have been, as they put it, "re-traumatised" by the investigation. Are you aware of this? How common a reaction is that?

  Sir Hugh Orde: You will have met my Family Liaison Officer or someone at the HET, so I will leave it to the experts to talk about it. Generally speaking, my gut reaction is that would be highly unusual. I do remember a case when I was on Stevens where we had to reinvestigate a case which to say we re-traumatised the family would not be right but it was a family that went through some pain because of what we were doing, which in a way lends itself to the wider debate about how you deal with the past, I think. We recognised we were only ever going to be one bit of it and now, according to Denis Bradley's inquiries moving on, that is a hugely positive step to offer closure for families. We never claimed this was a universal solution, but what we are saying is at least we are doing something which we think is quite legitimate and on balance is bringing more success. I do not know if there is any hard evidence.

  Mr Brannigan: From my knowledge of HET, we have not experienced too many complaints of people being traumatised by us approaching them, but we have had a number of cases where people have clearly said that they do not want anything done. Equally, we have had fragmented families where some members of the family have said, "We don't want anything", but other members have come along saying, "Yes, I do want an investigation". We have no clear evidence that people are being traumatised by our investigations.

  Q502  Chairman: We, of course, will have to address all of these issues of how the past should be dealt with and we are meeting with virtually everybody who has an involvement in this. I would just like to ask you one more question before I bring in Lady Hermon, and that is this: we were told when we visited the HET headquarters that it was unlikely that the project would be completed within the initial planned six-year period. What are your views on the overrun? How long is it likely to be? Is it going to be adequately resourced?

  Sir Hugh Orde: When we started it, it was a sort of unique step into the dark, frankly, no-one had ever tried this, to my knowledge, anywhere in the world. It is quite interesting, having given evidence in Strasbourg to the Secretariat raising some specific cases, I fear we are now going to be in demand in other places looking at their history as a model of best practice. That is a huge statement around what the Secretariat thought of what we were doing, and they would have had a presentation very similar to the one you had. It may overrun, but much of that is around the families wanting to know more. Our determination was to be victim-focused, so we feel obliged to do that. Alistair or John may have some scope on time. It is a finger in the air, frankly, because we are at 1972-73 at the minute and as you get closer to the end of the game, does that make it more complicated or less complicated. There may be more questions, there may be more completeness in the files, as one would expect, as we get to the more modern ones. All of that having been said, what we are delivering is petty cash compared to other methods, a more legalistic approach to dealing with the past. Government has given us £32 million or £34 million, I lose the odd million here or there.

  Q503  Chairman: What is that between friends!

  Sir Hugh Orde: At the minute, essential. I have said on record that I am committed to keeping this going as long as it needs to keep going because I think it is adding far more value than it is costing in terms of hard fiscal cash. The reality, of course, is if there is no more additional money that, like everything else, will be drawn out of my current budget. This is different from public inquiries because I am funded for this separately by Government. I do not know if Alistair has got a point on that.

  Mr Finlay: The other point is public inquiries is a single victim essentially and we are looking at 3,265 deaths. The range of victims, if you like, are the families left behind and if you multiply that by a factor of whatever, we are dealing with a huge number more. In terms of scoping how long this is going to take, I do not have a firm figure that I can give. I think part of this is we have done this process of gathering papers and such like together, but until you start the family engagement and know what the questions are and look for the interconnections you maybe do not know the size of it and it is not one-size-fits-all. It is very difficult to project at this stage other than to say I think there are somewhere in the region of 1,100 cases that are already opened. So of the 3,265—

  Q504  Chairman: Roughly a third.

  Mr Finlay: Are opened.

  Q505  Lady Hermon: May I just follow on from that point, Alistair. Of the 1,100 cases that have been opened, one of the reasons you gave for identifying and reinvestigating every single death, not just unresolved deaths and murders was that you "could identify interconnected cases". Has HET identified any interconnected cases?

  Mr Finlay: Yes. There are numbers of series.

  Q506  Lady Hermon: Are you able to say publicly which cases those are?

  Mr Brannigan: I am not able to say with any great detail what they are, but what I can say is a number of cases are connected. We were able to link those through intelligence, through weapon history and general circumstances.

  Q507  Chairman: These are cases that you did not previously think were connected?

  Mr Brannigan: We did not know if they were previously connected.

  Q508  Lady Hermon: These are early cases?

  Mr Brannigan: These are early cases that are connected.

  Q509  Chairman: These are not cases that have been taken out of sequence?

  Mr Brannigan: No, but in cases that have been taken out of sequence we see a clear pattern there and we see them as linked.

  Q510  Lady Hermon: Are you hopeful of prosecutions in those cases?

  Mr Brannigan: Every case we have to treat on its merits and what evidence we have. It is really a case of digging down into the circumstances and evidence.

  Mr Finlay: One of the great advantages that we have now that we did not have before is the range of techniques. The role of the crime analyst and the computer tools that are available to the crime analyst to map out a picture showing the interconnections is a facility that we have available to us today that detectives in yesteryear did not have, and maybe did not have the opportunity through more electronic means and assessing of information to join the pattern together in a way that we are able to do now so you can see where, as John says, the linkages are and make connections between them. It is an evolving map of interconnected events that tend to emerge from HET.

  Q511  Chairman: I was interested in what you said about the out of sequence cases. Does that mean that some of those also connect with the very early ones?

  Mr Brannigan: Not particularly. If we look at some of the cases that happened in the 1990s, there was no relevance to something that happened in the 1970s in terms of personalities who may have been involved. To give you an example: in 1972 there were 470 deaths due to the Troubles and of those, as Alistair said, there was no real analysis done in those early days to the depth that we do now and we are seeing patterns that we can connect.

  Q512  Lady Hermon: I am sorry to repeat myself, but is HET hopeful of prosecutions in those linked cases?

  Sir Hugh Orde: No is the short answer. Do I see the HET as prosecuting lots of people? No, I do not. Does that mean there will be no prosecutions? No, I think there may be some but the opportunities by definition are limited, certainly in the 1970s' cases. I think the more modern we become probably the greater the chances as we come up to the more modern where exhibits and things are more likely still to exist, but in the older cases, no. I have been roundly criticised for setting it up on the grounds that this is nothing to do with the police. I happen to think that victim care is something to do with the police and the feedback we are getting to date is that this is of value. I am not being defensive about it but success for me is not the number of prosecutions; success for me is we have allowed some people to move on in their lives to a degree that they would not have been able to move on if HET had not existed and given them that interaction and opportunity to ask questions they have never had before because simply people were too busy at the time.

  Q513  Lady Hermon: Can I put just one other matter. We have looked at the families and we have looked at the victims, but can I just ask about the impact on police officers who will be asked by HET to cast their minds back to the 1970s and 1980s and the trauma that is caused to retired police officers and their families. What concern does the Police Service have about them?

  Sir Hugh Orde: An awful lot. In fairness, I think it would be fair to say they are keen to engage.

  Mr Brannigan: Yes. We have found that a lot of ex-police officers are keen to engage and have left their phone numbers. Some others have said they do not want to be contacted. We do write out to them as opposed to door stepping them and we give them the opportunity either to co-operate or not. Some people do not respond, but by and large we have found good co-operation from retired officers.

  Q514  Lady Hermon: Thank you.

  Mr Brannigan: We do respect their wishes in that if they say "no" we will not harass them to get that information but we will do it in a courteous way.

  Q515  Chairman: Sir Hugh, before you came we had Sir Alasdair this afternoon and he gave in public evidence the comment that to date only one case had actually been referred to him. He did not make any complaint about this, but he—

  Sir Hugh Orde: I bet he did not!

  Q516  Chairman: He merely gave it as a statistic. How many do you reckon he is going to get?

  Sir Hugh Orde: I think that is an impossible question, Chairman. I understand why you are asking it. In the older cases, not a lot. I am not going to put on Sir Alasdair's plate stuff which we could not make decisions on. It is easy to say, "We have got something here, give it to the DPP", but that is not fair. We have got to be comfortable that we have got a case that we think in our professional judgment has some chance of life before we hand it over to the Director to direct on. I think it would be unfair just to offload everything on him to say we did not make a decision. John may have a better view, but I do not think we are looking at huge numbers.

  Mr Brannigan: I do not think there will be overall. Perhaps in the cases towards the end of the process we will have more that will go towards—

  Q517  Mr Murphy: Why then was the decision made not to start with the latest cases and work the other way, given that time is moving on and people are retiring? Surely it would have been much better from an evidence point of view to investigate the later cases first.

  Mr Brannigan: If we look at the family issues and the cases from 1969-70, the people, relatives and the victims' families by the time we get to look at their cases would be much older. It is a big, big issue that we have and I do not think there was any easy answer as to where to start. I think within our process the integrity of a lot of documents, including exhibits, will be more intact than they were for the 1969-70 cases, so they will still be there in the systems that we have.

  Q518  Chairman: But basically your reason was compassion for the ageing?

  Mr Brannigan: It was a judgment call, yes.

  Sir Hugh Orde: It could have gone either way, frankly. There was a long debate about it.

  Q519  Dr McDonnell: We have explored that quite a bit. Some people have suggested that there is significant overlap between the Historical Enquiries Team's inquiries and the Police Ombudsman's inquiries. Do you agree with that? Do you see them as different animals?

  Sir Hugh Orde: They are certainly very different. The Ombudsman has a very limited remit. The Ombudsman cannot investigate ordinary, for want of a better description, murders outwith any suggestion of police malpractice; it is as simple as that. It may help if Alistair talks on how we operate jointly.

  Mr Finlay: There is a lot of co-operation and joint working that goes on between the Ombudsman and HET over those cases where there is joint interest, if you like. I do not see it as a duplication of effort over the same cases, they are coming at it from different aspects. There is routine co-ordination and exchange of views on a regular basis, is that not right, John?

  Mr Brannigan: Yes, indeed. We have monthly meetings with the Ombudsman to discuss cases that are of mutual interest and we exchange material. The Ombudsman is legally obliged to investigate some of the cases where the police have been involved in the shooting, so those cases have to be passed to them. Other cases where there is some doubt or where there are allegations of collusion or ineffective investigations we do discuss in some depth with the Ombudsman. I cannot speak for the Ombudsman, but certainly they would be strapped for resources and finance to deal with the volume of cases that we have for even the minor complaints of maybe an ineffective investigation in the 1970s.


 
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