Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming in to respond to this important topic.

The purpose of this Adjournment matter is to query the response from the British Government in respect of the requests for release of the files on the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. I am aware the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has said it will continue to talk about the issue, but that is not the same as releasing files. Those files have been in secure locations for the past 40 years. As stated recently in this House by me and others, if my country was accused of mass murder, the first thing I would say is that we had nothing to do with it, we have nothing to hide, we have information that might be of assistance and if we can be of assistance in identifying the perpetrators we will assist our neighbours. One cannot say on the one hand that we have improved relations with our neighbours, as we have in many areas in the past 40 years, while on the other hand they are accused of the largest killing in one day where collusion is suspected. Many reports, including the Barron report, have said it is most likely that the British security forces were involved. The question is whether it had sanction. Was it cleared at the highest level?

The next issue is the shootings that took place in Ballymurphy where ten unarmed civilians were shot in the space of 72 hours by the Parachute Regiment which, a few weeks later, went to Derry to carry out the killing of unarmed civilians there in a matter of minutes. What is the British Government doing in respect of seeking justice for those who were killed? I posed the question in the House on the day I raised the issue. In Ballymurphy a mother of eight was shot in the face and died. Those children of Joan Connolly are entitled to know who killed their mother. They are not seeking revenge. I fear justice would elude them but they are entitled to the truth.

The next issue on which I seek a response is on the military reaction force which was uncovered by a BBC Panorama documentary which highlighted the that this was an official undercover unit, sanctioned by the British army, which would go around west Belfast into Catholic areas and shoot civilians. Its intention was to shoot armed men at checkpoints but that did not always happen. Innocent civilians were killed. The former British Prime Minister, Mr. Ted Heath, at Downing Street was shown a memo. BBC Panorama uncovered the document which stated that the Prime Minister had asked that the next unit being constructed after the military reaction force should operate within the law, which is a clear admission that he was aware that the military reaction force had operated outside the law. As a Prime Minister being aware that his own army was acting outside the law in going around part of a territory to which he had a claim, one would imagine he should have taken action if it had not been sanctioned. Unfortunately, as we now suspect, it was sanctioned at the highest level.

The last issue is the most serious as it has consequences for citizens around the world. It concerns the RTE documentary about the hooded men and the case taken by the former Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, to Europe.

The Government pursued the British Government for the torture of those citizens, disputed or otherwise of Ireland. It won the initial court case, but on appeal the judgment that those hooded men were tortured was overturned. It was said that while the torture tactics employed - the use of stress, the hooding of the men, their subjection to white noise and interrogation for hours on end without a break - was a case of enhanced interrogation techniques, it was not torture. It decided that because the evidence provided by the British side in regard to the effects on the men in question was such that it could not be construed as torture. However, what was uncovered by the RTE documentary was that the effect was traumatic. Lives were shortened, suicides occurred and these men were never the same again after being detained and tortured by the British Government.

In light of this new evidence and of the fact that the Government is now entitled to revisit the case, will it do so? I ask this not because of the historic nature of the offences that occurred against these citizens but in view of the fact that the ruling made by that European Court of Human Rights is now used by states and democracies around the world. They say that because Ireland took this case, those forms of interrogation are legitimate, because a European court has said they did not have an adverse effect on the people subject to them. We now know, because of RTE's excellent report, that they had a hugely traumatic, debilitating and life-changing effect and that, by any measure, the forms of interrogation used were torture. It is beholden on the Government now, in light of this new evidence, to set the record straight, so that no democracy can use the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, which is false because of the evidence withheld from it by the British Government at the time.

I raise this not because of the historic nature of much of what I have talked about, but it is important the record is set straight on this issue.