Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I support the motion before the House wholeheartedly and I commend Senator Currie on championing it and affording us the opportunity to speak on this very important issue.

When the British Government speaks about amnesty, it all sounds very philosophical and abstract.It is a language far removed from the lived experience of people's lives and losses. It is cruelly disrespectful of the people who were subjected to the most heinous atrocities and the families who must to pick up their lives and live with these injustices all their lives.

I have the honour of knowing Kathleen Gillespie. She is Kate to us. We meet at family occasions involving my husband's and my godchildren. I know her as an activist for peace and reconciliation, a grandmother and a gifted knitter. She knitted a beautiful cardigan for my daughter when she was born. Kate has lived all her life in Derry. She was 16 when she met Patsy Gillespie and she married him when they were both 20. They lived in Bishop Street in Derry city. It was a quieter spot, that she describes as being reasonably removed from the Troubles. They had two sons and a daughter together. Patsy ran his own business, which, unfortunately, went bankrupt. To support his family and to pay his bills and his way in life, he took a job in the British Army camp, rendering him in the eyes of "some in the IRA [what they] considered [...] a “legitimate target”.

Everything changed on the night of their son's 18th birthday in October 1990. Patsy Gillespie was abducted from his home by the IRA. Kathleen and her children were told that he would be back soon while they were being held at gunpoint by masked men. In her words:

They took Patsy away that night and they left men in the house, armed and masked men, with me and my family. They stayed with us from midnight to 4 o’clock. At 4am, the phone rang and the boys that were there ran out and we heard an explosion. Afterwards, we found out what had happened. Patsy was chained to a van, to the steering wheel and the pedals, and he was instructed to drive into the army checkpoint, where the bomb was exploded by remote control.

The IRA detonated the bomb remotely, killing Patsy and five soldiers. Patsy was identified by a piece of flesh on a zip that was found on the roof of a pub a great distance from the site of the explosion. Let us be clear here. No cause justifies that type of barbarity. It is unthinkable to imagine the suffering experienced by that man in his last moments, knowing what was ahead of him but not knowing the fate of his family. Equally, that family heard the explosion that snuffed out the life of the man who was their husband and father. He was also a son, a brother and a friend. No cause justifies it and, equally, there is no objective that justifies the closing off of the opportunity to investigate it and to those vile perpetrators to justice.

Kathleen embarked on a mission of peace and reconciliation to keep herself sane and to be a role model to her children, fearing that they would be radicalised in the pursuit of vengeance for their father. She has spoken with world leaders and at workshops. She is the most extraordinary woman who pursues dialogue, peace and reconciliation. Her pursuit of peace, however, should never be mistaken as her waiving her right to justice. She has worked with the HET, a unit of the PSNI set up in September 2005 to investigate the 3,269 unsolved murders committed during the Troubles, specifically between 1968 and 1998. She worked with that team in an attempt to find out the who and the what regarding her husband’s killers. There is strong evidence of collusion and that knowledge of the atrocity in which her husband was killed was known to the intelligence services. At the winding up of the HET, Kathleen was told that there were boxes of information and evidence relating to her husband’s murderers.

She was able to give a description of the clothes worn by five of the people involved that night. Five men were arrested and the clothing she described was found in a safe house. Those five men were later released without charge, and some of those people took a case and were paid compensation for being wrongfully imprisoned. The HET was wound up in September 2014, when the PSNI was restructured due to budget cuts. That, in itself, was an amnesty by stealth. The strangulation of the funds being provided to those investigating the truth is just another means of stopping the processes. The current proposal from the British Government will protect Patsy Gillespie’s killers from prosecution and even from investigation. It is vile and unjust to leave families hanging without answers, without investigations and, ultimately, without justice. The dead matter. Their voices cry out for justice. They are not mere collateral damage for a British Government trying to buy votes in the shoring up of prosecutions in respect of the actions of the armed forces. Those are just one cohort of people that should have been brought to justice. The murdered and their families deserve resolution, investigation and prosecution of these cases. Where there is no justice, there can be no peace. I commend the motion to the House and congratulate Senator Currie.