With the Saville report on Bloody Sunday, the Police Ombudsman's report on the Claudy bombings and the MacLean report into the murder in prison of Billy Wright, 2010 is set to go down as the year of inquiries into Troubles-related deaths. Of the three, the Saville report has been the most successful in complementing the Hillsborough Agreement's achievement, which put into place the last piece in the jigsaw of the peace process, to use the metaphor widely employed at the time.
Whatever might be said critically about the Saville report as a work of historical scholarship, it has been remarkably successful in providing an account of the massacre widely acceptability to those who matter most. The Billy Wright inquiry has generated controversy over its eye-watering cost, especially in the light of its incapacity to answer basic questions, such as how the gun that was used in the killing was smuggled into the prison. It has also failed to convince critics that there was nothing to the allegations of wider complicity in the killing. The Police Ombudsman's report on the Claudy bombings raises disturbing questions about the value of inquiries into the past while highlighting the special dangers that the process of truth recovery may be prone to.
The basic story of the Claudy bombings is starkly gruesome. No warnings were given for a series of bombs in the village on the morning of 31 July 1972 that led to the deaths of nine people and injured many more. Further, while no organisation claimed responsibility for the bombings, it is widely accepted that the bombings were carried out by the Provisional IRA and also that it had been the intention of the bombers to give a warning. Loss of life because of breakdowns of communication resulting in a failure to deliver or receive any warnings has occurred on a number of occasions during the Troubles. So Claudy was not entirely exceptional in this respect. And the same might be said about the fact that no-one was ever charged in connection with the events that took place in Claudy on that day.
Added force was given this failure by a longstanding suspicion that a Catholic priest had played a central role in the bombings. Support was given to the proposition that Father James Chesney had taken part in the bombings by a 2002 letter purporting to come from a fellow priest. This asserted that Chesney had confessed to involvement in the bombings before he died in 1980. There are strong reasons for thinking that the letter is not genuine, as Al Hutchinson the new Police Ombudsman in fact makes clear in his report. The letter, nonetheless, appears to have achieved its purpose in prompting his inquiry.
Hutchinson establishes that Father Chesney was suspected of involvement in the bombings virtually from the outset of the police investigation. In particular, he was judged to have provided a false and pre-arranged alibi for a man arrested in connection with the bombings. But it is worth stressing that this man was never charged. The inference that might reasonably be drawn from this would seem to be that the police did not believe that they then had sufficient evidence to sustain a successful prosecution. And it might seem reasonable to suppose further that in that case they were unlikely to possess sufficient information to charge Father Chesney himself. Having intelligence about Chesney's involvement in the Provisional IRA was not the same as having the capacity to prosecute him or at least to be able to do so without putting at risk the sources of the police's information.
The efforts of Willie Whitelaw to seek the assistance of the church authorities to secure Chesney's removal from Northern Ireland seem entirely comprehensible in these circumstances. But this is now being read as calculated and cold-blooded collusion among senior police officers, the Catholic Church and the British government to prevent the charging of a priest with serious offences so as to protect the reputation of the church. In the light of the paedophile scandal, this charge has a measure of credibility in relation to the church. If the church authorities were willing to protect priests who abused children, so the argument might run, then it is not much of a stretch to think they would do likewise for IRA priests.
But while that nicely corresponds to Unionist prejudices about the Catholic Church, it scarcely fits with the historical record of the church's relationship with physical force republicanism over the years. And the notion that Willie Whitelaw, of all people, would have taken the view that the prosecution of a Catholic priest was to be avoided because of its putative impact on relations between the two communities seems decidedly improbable, as does the notion that senior police officers would have concurred with such a course of action on this ground.
That the case against Chesney might have been pursued more vigorously is simply a truism that might be said about the cases of dozens of members of paramilitary organisations who escaped prosecution for their crimes. The readiness that the Claudy report exemplifies to believe the worst of the dead, who cannot defend themselves or explain the motivations for their actions, does not augur well for 'truth recovery' in this or other cases.
December 24, 2010
