Northern Ireland Troubles: Legacy and Reconciliation
Debate between Calvin Bailey and David Davis(1 week, 6 days ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
David Davis
That is part of what my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) was describing earlier about trying to rewrite history. This goes right to the core of what the Secretary of State has already done. We know that he has promised Mairead Kelly that there will be a coroner’s inquest for Loughgall. Why? Because her brother, Patrick Kelly, was killed at Loughgall. He was a victim, except he had killed at least five other people previously, including two UDR officers. He and his gang of eight were attempting to blow up—well, they were not attempting; they did blow up the police station, with soldiers and policemen inside. It was a 400 lb bomb, and they had heavy weapons, G36s—my hon. and gallant Friend will recognise them—to shoot through the walls and kill policemen. If we want to see the rewriting of history, Kelly’s family have already attempted to rewrite history, claiming that at Loughgall he
“went out to blow up, not to kill”,
despite his long and bloody track record proving otherwise. He obviously designed a bomb that only hits bricks, not people.
I do not aim to make light of this, because it is incredibly serious. As with the 120 cases already mentioned, Kelly’s family have already brought legal action against the Ministry of Defence. They are not the only ones, so let us look at other IRA terrorist “victims” who have brought civil cases. In 2011, Aidan McKeever, the getaway driver at the Clonoe incident in 1992, in which four IRA terrorists were killed, was awarded £75,000 for injuries sustained when fleeing the scene. He is not a victim; he is a terrorist, and he got £75,000. The IRA tried to pretend that it was a killing operation, but the SAS, or the soldiers on the scene—whoever they were—actually gave him first aid to save his life because he had been shot and injured, yet he gets £75,000 from the state. In 2023, the family of Stan Carberry tried to sue the Ministry of Defence for his death in 1972. Carberry, an IRA volunteer, was killed after a soldier returned fire at the vehicle that he was shooting from.
David Davis
Forgive me but I will not, as I want to get to the end of this. As we know, Gerry Adams is already preparing legal action, challenging the decision to prevent him and others from being compensated for being interned during the troubles.
The surviving IRA terrorists and their families will benefit from what we are doing today. There will be some civil claims brought against IRA killers—the Secretary of State mentioned some of them—but they will be rather special circumstances. Omagh is one of those; I could explain why, but we do not have the time. There will be a few of those, but very few compared with thousands of deaths, tortures and murders. That is largely because Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell accepted, as part of the Good Friday agreement, not to allow decommissioned weapons to be studied for forensic purposes. They also precluded recovered bodies from being examined for forensic purposes. The families of people who have been murdered, where the body has been recovered, are not even allowed to use the bullets in them to see who killed them. That is how this justice works. And, of course, there will be no witnesses to the IRA crimes. The IRA themselves will not give witness, and I am afraid that anybody else will be taking their life in their hands.
I will finish by saying this: today’s remedial order will allow the IRA to further its campaign of rewriting the history of the troubles, portraying our brave soldiers as state-sponsored killers, and falsely representing themselves as victims and heroes, neither of which is true.