Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Since January, the families of more than 30 Irish citizens have received reports from the Police Ombudsman in the North. These reports detail actions by RUC officers and members of the British Army that range from the distribution of weapons, the provision of intelligence documents, the destruction of evidence, the deliberate failure to warn persons of a threat to life in the weeks before they or their loved ones were murdered, and the protection of agents involved in murder from investigation or prosecution to the contemporaneous criminal wrongdoing of state actors being known and actively covered up. In any society this should cause a national emergency. Unfortunately, it barely caused a ripple on the benches across from me and in this State.

These reports are not just accounts of trauma and grief. They also give rise to fundamental questions about British state involvement in murder. The fallout equally spotlights the lack of British state accountability for crimes, the limits of the Office of the Police Ombudsman and the plight of victims and survivors across the community. How can it be that we see decisions from inquest courts with routine findings of wrongful killing by members of the British Army in the case of the Ballymurphy massacre in 1971 and the killing of 14-year-old Francis Rowntree with a plastic bullet? How can it be that the Police Ombudsman has now found state collusion or collusive behaviours in Mount Vernon, Loughinisland, the north west and south Belfast, yet the prospect of state accountability remains elusive or even contested? All these victims were Irish citizens, yet these reports and findings continue to be treated with minimal interest, perfunctory statements and tea and sympathy. Victims' rights are being routinely abused.

The Irish Government must be more robust in its support of victims of the conflict and its calls for accountability for the policies and practices of collusion and British state violence, just as robust as it is in calling out harms by non-state actors. The Minister should listen to the calls from the United States congressional hearings and victims' groups such as Relatives for Justice and establish an emergency summit on dealing with the past, where questions of victims' rights, human rights compliance and accountability are placed on the political agenda instead of treating these most grave matters as a routine matter of community relations.

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