Northern Ireland Veterans: Prosecution
Douglas McAllister Excerpts(3 days, 8 hours ago)
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John Lamont
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. There is no equivalence between a terrorist—somebody who sets out in the morning with murderous intent—and a soldier who is defending democracy and our country. Sadly, we seem to be creating some sort of equivalence, which should not be allowed to happen.
Dennis Hutchings was a former member of the Life Guards Regiment. He was a terminally ill, 80-year-old veteran who was dragged to Northern Ireland during the pandemic in 2021. He died of covid just three days into his court case. Dennis was hounded for several years—told he was cleared, and then not—and then forced to fly to Belfast to stand trial. There was no new compelling evidence, and it was simply not in the public interest. It was a barbaric way to treat an elderly man who had served our country. His lawyer said that the case contributed to his death, and that it was likely that he would not have died at that point if he had not been forced to go to Northern Ireland to stand trial for an incident that occurred in 1974.
It is all too easy for us to sit here, look at the evidence and try to justify why a trial is in the public interest, but doing so fails to recognise the instant, life-or-death decisions that these soldiers in Northern Ireland had to take every single day. It is a rewriting of history. Decades on, people sit and judge events in retrospect, with little new evidence, and come to conclusions entirely at odds with the legal investigations at the time. The Government cannot and must not lose sight of their moral responsibility and commitment to our veterans, and to the armed forces covenant.
Douglas McAllister (West Dunbartonshire) (Lab)
Can the hon. Member confirm that the unlawful nature of the legacy Act meant that investigations into the deaths of more than 200 Operation Banner soldiers were shut down, against the wishes of soldiers’ families?