Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 12 October 2017

Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement

Legacy Issues Affecting Victims and Relatives in Northern Ireland: Discussion

2:00 pm

Ms Anne Cadwallader:

On the Police Ombudsman's budget, 0.2% of the overall criminal justice budget goes to the ombudsman. Of that, only 22% or 23% goes to legacy issues. If I drew a line on the map, it would be wider than the actual section on the diagram. It is absolutely minute and, as far as we are aware, none of the DUP's money is going to that area.

Regarding weapons, we have a document dating back to 1973 that says that most weapons in the hands of loyalists originated from the UDR. All Loyalist modern weapons, including submachine guns and automatic weapons like that, originated from the UDR. All the murders carried out by loyalists at that time that used submachine guns therefore involved weapons that originated from the UDR.

The British Army's own internal assessment was that between 5% and 15% of all members of the UDR, the largest regiment in the British Army at the time, were also in the UDA and the UVF. The British kept very accurate accounts routinely every month of all the weapons that were being taken month by month and where collusion was suspected. Hardly a month went by when weapons did not go missing. There was never any investigation into the weapons going missing. One example is one weapon that was taken from Glenanne UDR base in south Armagh which was used to kill 11 people over a period of 11 months. Nineteen children lost their fathers as a result and five children were orphaned by that weapon. There was no investigation. The platoon was not stood down and there was no internal inquiry about how this weapon went missing. The same could be said of all the hundreds of weapons that went missing - "missing" in inverted commas - from the UDR. They simply did not care. Collusion was referred to right from 1972 onwards. They knew those weapons were not being taken to be hidden or used for any purpose other than sectarian murder.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.