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1 February 2017

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‘No welcome for British ministers at GAA games till legacy issues addressed,’ say Relatives for Justice


THERE SHOULD BE NO WELCOME for British Government ministers at GAA games or other civic events “until the British Government stops insulting the relatives of those they killed and begins a process of addressing the legacy of their involvement in the conflict”, the head of Relatives for Justice says.

“Instead, they need to be challenged,” RFJ Director Mark Thompson writes on the organisation’s website.

There needs to be a “clear and unambiguous message that adopts a zero tolerance of the current behaviour” of Westminster’s unelected representative to the North, he says.

On Saturday, James Brokenshire became the first British Secretary of State to attend a GAA match north of the Border but there was criticism of the fact that he only took his seat in the stand after the playing of Amhrán na bhFiann.

Mark Thompson

Mark Thompson (pictured) writes that, two decades after a peace process, the Westminster Government is still intent on denying investigative and inquisitorial accountability for the use of lethal force, summary executions and shoot-to-kill.

He declared:

“Distraction, denial and delay are at the core of the NIO agenda.”

Mark Thompson continues:

“The denial of funding for legacy inquests, the regular assault on the Police Ombudsman, and (more lately) assaults on the judiciary and Director of Public Prosecutions appear to frame the NIO-inspired campaign. It is a campaign that is factually inaccurate.”

He referenced a number of newspaper reports in December “vilifying three Belfast law firms representing, among their diverse client base, the bereaved of state violence”.

One headline carried pictures of three prominent lawyers, details of where they lived, and included in an additional online section comments from a person stating “these lawyers should be shot like the scum they represent”. The paper in question refused to remove the comments.

Rosemary Nelson

Despite being fully aware of the circumstances in which lawyers such as Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson were murdered during the conflict, the Secretary of State refused to condemn the articles, Mark Thompson says.

That the articles started to appear after a speech by James Brokenshire in Parliament on 7 December on legacy about “balance” and “proportion” – prompting comments such as the “unfair treatment of soldiers” – could suggest some form of choreography that continued in the Sunday Telegraph last weekend, he argues.

Brokenshire’s statistical claims on culpability for conflict deaths and conflict ‘investigations’ are factually inaccurate, the victims group head says: “They are baseless.”

Mark Thompson says there has been no contextual understanding of the issues of impunity that accompanied the overwhelming 367 direct state killings by the British Army, UDR and RUC – the majority of whom were unarmed civilians, including women and over 60 children or the fact that around 90% of those killed were Catholics, “underlining the sectarian nature of that campaign of violence”.

Several hundred people were seriously injured too and they live with the daily scars, physically and psychologically, the victims’ spokesperson says.

“Of those combatants killed, many were unarmed yet no effort was made to effect safe and secure arrest under the rule of law. In other incidents, an abundance of resources were deployed in pre-planned, pre-meditated ambushes rather than preventative actions that would have involved less resources and avoided the loss of life.

“Decisions to deploy ambushes were political and taken at the highest level of Government.

“Perhaps this explains the NIO policy position on legacy and the need to distract through false and misleading statistics.”

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