Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

What we have here in black and white in the Police Ombudsman's report is the very significant evidence and confirmation of repeated collusion by the British state with loyalist paramilitaries in murdering people. The point has been made that this is far more than a few bad apples. It is or was clearly government policy. It was systematic, deadly, has been covered up and continues to be covered up, and those responsible continue to have impunity.

It is worth going through some of the cases, and many have been mentioned, to bring out the horror of this behaviour by a supposedly democratic state. In particular, the report into 11 murders by loyalist gangs found there was police involvement and police inclusion. It should also be mentioned, because people may think this is something that happened in the dim and distant past, which even so would obviously not make it okay, that we are talking about atrocities that go into the 1990s. On the Sean Graham bookmakers killings, the Police Ombudsman found the police colluded in the massacre at the bookies in 1992 where five people were killed, including one 15-year-old. The Police Ombudsman found the police deliberately destroyed files on this attack protecting those responsible. In other cases, the RUC quite literally handed guns to loyalist terrorists, guns with which they went on to commit murder. That is the definition of collusion. This is a criminal conspiracy of state forces working hand in hand with terrorist gangs. State-sponsored serial killers is what the former Police Ombudsman called some of the police agents in loyalist and republican groups. Individuals were allowed to kill with impunity so long as they remained of use to the British state.

One example from 1971 is the loyalist bombing of McGurk’s bar, which killed 15 civilians and injured 17 more. Years later, a member of the covert military reaction force admitted it had supplied the explosives and encouraged the attack, believing the bar to be a republican hotspot.

In another case the Police Ombudsman highlighted the 1993 killing of Damien Walsh, a 17-year-old young man shot dead by loyalist paramilitaries. The report found significant investigative failure by the police amounting to collusive behaviours. It said Walsh's killers were provided with information by a police officer and British intelligence which informed their attack. Damien’s mother, Marian, had campaigned for nearly three decades, questioning the role of the police in her son’s shooting. The ombudsman’s report found that police had also failed to capitalise on investigative opportunities, including failing to arrest suspects, and had made a deliberate decision to disregard intelligence about the threat. In another case last year, a judge found that “until late 1973, an understanding was in place between the RUC and the Army whereby the RUC did not arrest and question, or even take witness statements from, soldiers involved in shootings such as this one”. The judge added, “This appalling practice was designed, at least in part, to protect soldiers from being prosecuted and in very large measure it succeeded.”

Now the Prime Minister of Britain, Boris Johnson, wants to stop any more investigations such as this to stop more horrors being uncovered. They are proposing to close down all investigations into the collusion between the British military and police forces and loyalist terrorist groups and are planning to end all inquests into killings that have been ordered by the Attorney General for Northern Ireland as well as all investigations by the Police Ombudsman, even those where grave and exceptional new evidence of police misconduct has emerged. On top of that they are seeking to end all civil actions being pursued through the courts by families seeking disclosure from the Ministry of Defence and others on evidence of collusion between state forces and paramilitaries, as well as investigations being conducted by the legacy investigation branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland which considers historical cases of killings. This includes cases such as soldier F who has been charged with murders on Bloody Sunday in 1972 and the death of a man with mental disabilities killed by soldiers. The UK Government proposals will leave families who may already have attended up to 30 preliminary hearings to be told the inquest itself cannot now go ahead. This is a cover-up, plain and simple.

I will finish with a reference to another cover-up, which are the attempts to protect General Mike Jackson from prosecution for his role in the Bloody Sunday massacre. He was second in command of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment and would later climb up the ladder of the British Army to become the chief of staff at the time of the invasion of Iraq. I was at a demonstration in Derry to mark the 50th anniversary of the murder of 14 people. Immediately after the Bloody Sunday massacre, Jackson interviewed his soldiers and drew up a shot list of where the shootings had occurred. It was a piece of fiction but it became the basis of the Report of the Tribunal appointed to inquire into the events on Sunday, 30th January 1972, the Widgery Report, which whitewashed the Parachute Regiment. The mood of the protest I was at a couple of weeks ago was focused on the call for the prosecution of this man, General Sir Mike Jackson. Not only did he help to organise the massacre but he was also the key figure in covering it up. That is why he must be brought before the courts to answer for his crimes.

There is an important political point here where the British establishment likes to portray the conflict in the North as a war between two tribes where their army becomes, supposedly, piggy in the middle. Bloody Sunday arose because of a cold-blooded decision of the British establishment to suppress a mass movement for civil rights. Correctly, everybody is agreed there must be no immunity given to the soldiers involved, but the real criminals are those who gave the orders to shoot. Let us start by putting them in the dock.

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