Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Currie for bringing the motion to the floor of the House and for being so gracious and reaching out to get cross-party support for it. I thank also Senator Ó Donnghaile for telling such a powerful personal story to communicate the impact this amnesty would have. It is clear the British Government's proposals for dealing with the past are preventing prosecutions for conflict-related offences and any future investigations, civil actions or legacy inquests. It is simple: no individual, group, organisation, state forces, agents or people who colluded can be immune from prosecution of war crimes. We can imagine the horror that would come from the British Government, or from our Government, if Serbia, for example, decided to give an amnesty to somebody like Radovan Karadži. Even today, people in Germany who were guards at Auschwitz in 1945, including a 100-year-old man who was a guard at Sachsenhausen, are standing trial for their collusion in the war crimes of the Third Reich.

Due process for people is a right. Without it, the families of victims are denied truth and justice and the wounds of the conflict remain forever fresh. We need to demand investigations that are compliant with Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. To have no investigation and no explanation for bereaved families weighs heavily. For decades, the rights of families to effective independent investigations have been denied by the British Government; with this proposal, they will be denied forever. Without investigations, we would not have heard of the harrowing story, referenced by Senator Ó Donnghaile, of the Ballymurphy massacre, where ten people were murdered by the Parachute Regiment of the British Army. Those murdered were entirely innocent and unarmed. Had the massacre been investigated at the time, it might have prevented the killing of 14 civilians on Bloody Sunday by exactly the same Parachute Regiment in Derry in 1972. These are just a few of the thousands of stories of atrocities committed by the British Army and state in colluding in sectarian killings.

Approximately 3,500 bereaved relatives of those killed during the Troubles wrote an open letter earlier this year in which they called on the British State to seek assurances that their rights as victims would no longer be disregarded or denied. The British Government has a clear choice. It can decide to be a state that continues to cover up and collude in human rights atrocities in Northern Ireland or it can commit to a human rights-based legal framework that allows the conflicts of the past to be investigated. Political parties on both sides of the Border are unified, and not even the Good Friday Agreement could unify all the political parties, to reject this proposal for an amnesty. It must not be ignored. I know the Government, particularly through the Minister, will continue to press for justice for people in Northern Ireland and this State.