Frances Black (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I offer my full support to the motion before us today, and I commend Senator Niall Ó Donnghaile and his colleagues on bringing it forward. I also welcome Mr. Liam Shannon to the Visitors Gallery today. More than anything, I want to let the people involved know that I am fully behind them. The hooded men and their families have my full support in their search for justice, no matter how long that may take. I commend them on their bravery in pushing forward with this.

I am a member of the Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. A big part our work is to look at the legacy of the conflict in the North and the lasting impact it still has on our communities. It has been devastating to hear many of the stories from victims and survivors, and to see the level of unresolved trauma that we are still dealing with now. Speaking to people, one can feel the weight and the burden that is being carried, and how that can result in enduring intergenerational trauma unless it is properly addressed.

I also see this in my work with the RISE Foundation almost every week. In the area of addiction, unaddressed trauma can have such a huge impact on families and children, passed on through generations. In all cases, we have a responsibility to help those involved address what has happened, and this is no different. After the court ruled in March, Francie McGuigan bravely spoke to the thejournal.ie and said: “There were 14 of us – four of the lads are dead but their families still there, so it’s not just about us." That is such a powerful point, and something we should all remember. There is such a large network of people around these 14 men, including families, friends, and their wider community, that is still waiting for justice and dealing with this. We have a responsibility to all of them to provide our support.

I was re-reading some of the old case files this morning. What these men were put through really is unimaginable. On top of brutal beatings and death threats, the men were subjected to the now infamous "five techniques", including hooding, wall-standing in stress positions for hours, subjection to white noise, sleep deprivation, and deprivation of food and water. None of the 14 men involved was ever convicted of any criminal offence. They were simply interned, tortured and abandoned.

I want to put it on the record of this House again that what happened to those men over seven days in Ballykelly in 1971 was torture. It was torture by the definition of the European Convention on Human Rights in 1976, and it was torture by any reasonable person's reading of the brutal, inhumane techniques that were used. When we hear that a man was hooded and thrown from a helicopter to make him feel that he was about to die, we do not need to equivocate. That is torture.

The European Court of Human Rights made a mistake in 1978, and it missed a huge opportunity to atone for it in March. Amnesty International expressed its disappointment at the ruling, saying that it focused on a narrow legal technicality instead of engaging with the substance of the torture claims. This is an important point. Ultimately, the court debated whether the information released in 2014 would have led to a different ruling in 1978, not whether the techniques themselves would be judged as torture in today's society. In fact, the court specifically referenced case law highlighting how our understanding of what constitutes torture has expanded and become more humane as the decades have passed. This is really important, and it speaks volumes about the decision taken in 1978. That initial ruling was an injustice not only to the 14 men and their families, but also in its broader impact on the world in the years since. Amnesty International has documented how since that decision was handed down, many countries, including the United States and Israel, have relied on it to justify an aggressive, horrific legal interpretation of what does or does not constitute torture.

When the world recoils in horror at what was done to human beings in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, we should remember that the US Government specifically referenced this verdict in its legal defence of its actions. What was carried out, it claimed, was not torture but "enhanced interrogation". This is an insult both to language and to human dignity.