“Our shared duty is to ensure that trauma does not pass to another generation,” Harris said at the joint press conference with Benn at the U.K. secretary’s official Hillsborough Castle residence outside Belfast.
The Legacy of the Troubles agreement covers the entire three decades of bloodshed over Northern Ireland that claimed more than 3,600 lives before the U.S.-mediated Good Friday peace accord of 1998. That death toll includes nearly 250 people killed in bombings and shootings in England and the Republic of Ireland.
While ceasefires by the rival Irish Republican Army and so-called “loyalist” paramilitary gangs have largely held since the mid-1990s, veterans of those outlawed groups have refused to come forward to admit their role in specific atrocities. Their steely silence reflects, in part, a desire to avoid imprisonment for admitting crimes, as well as the risk that their victims could use any confessions to sue them for damages. The Provisional IRA, in particular, imposes a code of omerta — silence — on its members.
No immunity
The strengthened fact-finding body being proposed in Friday’s plans, to be called the Legacy Commission, will not, however, offer conditional amnesties for ex-militants to come forward and tell the truth. That approach would have opened reputational dangers for both governments — because those militants might finally reveal the extent of their collusion with police, soldiers and intelligence puppet-masters.
A range of British and Irish anti-terrorist agencies recruited and directed agents within all of the illegal groups — and, some victims’ groups contend, played a leading role in deciding who lived and died while maintaining their agents’ cover. The plans published Friday leave unclear the extent to which the new Legacy Commission will pursue investigations into allegations of state collusion with terrorists.
It’s a can of worms that the U.K.’s previous Conservative government tried to bury for good with its own, unilateral Legacy Act that ended Troubles-era criminal investigations and judicial inquests. That 2023 law was drafted principally to shield former British soldiers from potential prosecution for decades-old killings.
