State Violence

by Raymond Murray

  ‘Fr Denis Faul and I tried to break through on this many times: we had to resort to writing our own pamphlets – on the murders of Leo Norney, Peter Cleary, Majella O’Hare, Brian Stewart, for example ... the eleven men killed by the SAS in the past year. Which of the media has undertaken that? They are guilty by their silence and omission. These are the big sins of the British media.

  ‘We are convinced that a D notice was served on the British papers at the time of internment and the torture of the hooded men in August 1971. The Sunday Times was given statements on the cases of the Hooded Men weeks before they printed it. John Whale then got the scoop of the year – and was honoured as journalist of the year – although this information was available weeks before it was printed.

  ‘On the question of torture and brutality one could only break through occasionally in the British media (nothing to compare with the immense time and orchestration of media for the Peace People). Again one had to resort to one’s own pamphlets – The Hooded Men, British Army and Special Branch RUC Brutalities, The Castlereagh File, The Black and Blue Book.

  ‘Catholic papers like The Tablet and The Catholic Herald would print little or nothing. The Tablet refused information from me, even though I got a letter of recommendation. The Belfast Telegraph also refused copy on torture.

  ‘The first time the BBC television approached Fr Denis Faul was six years after the ‘troubles’ had started – and then for a programme on abortion. He asked them where they were for the last six years.

  ‘The same is true now on prison conditions. The British media still accept Mason’s lie that the punishments in H Block are self-inflicted (as they accepted that torture was self-inflicted despite Strasbourg and the Amnesty Reports). So we resort to our own publications on the prisons – Whitelaw’s Tribunals, The Flames of Long Kesh, The Iniquity of Internment, H Block.

  ‘In short, only occasionally and at a late stage do the media take an interest in the serious problems of violations of human rights in the north of Ireland. On the rare occasion they do act it is of infinite value – for example, Keith Kyle’s programme on Bernard O’Connor, ITV’s A Question of Torture, and the recent Nationwide programme on H Block.

  ‘Truth is a pillar of peace. The media have failed us utterly over ten years’.

  The Royal Ulster Constabulary

  After the Metropolitan Police the RUC is the largest police force in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In 1970 the force had 3,500 officers. Its full establishment in 1992 is 13,450 officers, of whom 8,500 are regular members, 3,250 full-time reserve officers and 1,700 part-time reservists. Fewer than 8% of the RUC are Catholic, a lower proportion than at the start of the conflict in 1968. This is not acceptable.

  There are probably between 200 and 300 RUC officers in Armagh city. I could not name one and I doubt if a dozen Catholics would know a single RUC officer in the Armagh district.

  The RUC station is a forbidding place – a barracks. Millions of pounds have been spent in barricading police within protected compounds. Only utter necessity would persuade any Catholic to call there. Is physical force the only way to protect the RUC against the IRA? Could the millions of pounds have been spent in breaking down prejudice barriers rather than setting up ugly fortresses in ‘Indian’ territory?

  The last thing a nationalist in difficulty in Armagh city wants to do is to seek the help of the RUC. Necessity – arising from prosecution or as an insurance requirement, forces some contact. It is common knowledge in the area that the police do not want to be called out to deal with a fatal road accident, a burglary, a stolen car, a hijacking or a domestic dispute. There are instances of their refusal to operate in these cases. The RUC assume that one should understand the danger they might face and therefore they do not always act.

  There are no invitations from any of the Catholic schools in the Armagh area to the local RUC to address them, even on such vital matters for children as road safety. Career officers in the schools offer no encouragement to students to join the RUC, male or female.

  What is wrong? Is it just that Catholics are afraid of being shot by the IRA? There is fear of intimidation but Sir Hugh Annesley and other RUC representatives suggest that this is the only factor.

  The most important point is that Northern Ireland is made up of two strong cultural traditions, a British one and an Irish one. The RUC caters only for the British tradition. A man can not join the RUC and express his Irishness.

  First of all, there is the weight of Protestant numbers drawn often from very loyalist backgrounds. There are elements of the Masonic and Orange orders in the RUC and these are anti-Catholic. Some Catholic police complain that they suffer from misunderstandings, mockery, taunts and bigotry. The trappings of the RUC are all British, union flag, name, crown, poppy-flaunting, music and games.

  Above all, the RUC has traditionally been the defence force of the Northern Ireland statelet, a state which practised discrimination against Catholics for fifty years. It is regarded in this way by the Protestant leaders and their churches. An Irishman joining a police force in the north ideally should be able to fully express his or her religion, nationalism and cultural tradition, proudly and without offence or constraint.

  The gulf between the Protestant RUC force and the Catholic public has been widened by the counter-insurgency methods of the RUC and British army. In the 1970s, this involved one-sided internment of Catholics and torture of detainees in Holywood, Girdwood, Ballykelly, Castlereagh and Gough barracks, and in police stations like Omagh, Strabane, Strand Road Derry, Armagh and Dungannon. The courts were corrupted by acceptance of forced confessions and the word of ‘supergrasses’.

  It is difficult for the RUC to win respect when cases of ill-treatment recur and there are doubtful court cases like those of the ‘Beechmount Five’ and the ‘Casement Park Accused’. Worst of all is the shoot-to-kill policy, with the debacle of the Stalker Inquiry, and the collusion of RUC elements with loyalist gangs in the murder of Catholics and Sinn Féin members. There is great suspicion of British intelligence and elements of the RUC Special Branch and divisional mobile support units.

  Furthermore, there has been a long history of complaints of verbal abuse and harassment of Catholics by members of the RUC. Nationalists unfortunately refuse to distinguish between these problems and the force as a whole. They feel that community policing can not exist while such problems continue.

  This argument was advanced in 1973 by the Central Citizens’ Defence Committee in Belfast, in The Black Paper: Northern Ireland – The story of the police. The argument is still valid. The book said: ‘All the wishing in the world will not achieve the impossible. There is no way out of this torturous dilemma but the more difficult way that must be faced up to sooner or later. Law and order will not return to Northern Ireland on any basis but one. It will have to be seen to apply equally and fairly, to everyone in the land, whatever their position, even if they wear a uniform or hold a seat in parliament. Only when that is seen to be happening will the laws gain the respect from the community upon which its validity rests. This respect had been lost in Northern Ireland. It must be regained and strengthened. When those who make the law break the law in the name of the law there is no law.’

  Catholics think that Sir Hugh Annesley and other senior RUC officers should attend meetings of Catholics and listen to what they have to say, not presume that they know why Catholics will not join the RUC.

  In justice the sheer weight of the Irish Catholic nationalist tradition demands a change in the structures of the RUC. The recent census shows a 43% Catholic population, a growing one. In numbers the Catholic religion is the principal religion. Catholics comprise half of all young people in the north and a majority in most of the physical area of Northern Ireland.

  It seems ridiculous that young RUC men from Larne, Coleraine, Comber, and Ballymena should police south Armagh and east Tyrone, west Belfast or Derry. In 1920 the number of Catholics and Protestants in the RIC in Belfast was almost equa
l. What a contrast to today’s inequality!

  Even from an economic point of view the combined forces of the RUC, Royal Irish Rangers, together with other security jobs and ancillary workers, entail very substantial employment, overwhelmingly for Protestants. This offends against social justice and the principle of power-sharing.

  The Anglo-Irish Conference should spearhead a radical change in the police force in the north. There should be serious study of the possibility of regional divisions, or perhaps a second line police force that would separate the ‘paramilitary’ division from an unarmed civilian police force – the latter comprising all religions, culturally tolerant and carrying out the routine business of police work outside of the military conflict.

  On 26 August 1969 an advisory committee was appointed by the then Minister of Home Affairs, R. W. Porter, ‘to examine the recruitment, structure and composition of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and their respective functions and to recommend as necessary what changes are required to provide for the efficient enforcement of law and order in Northern Ireland’. Lord Hunt who was chairman of the committee underlined the essential problem in his report: ‘Policing in a free society depends on a wide measure of public approval and consent. This has never been obtained in the long term by military or paramilitary means. We believe that any police force, military in appearance and equipment, is less acceptable to minority and moderate opinion than if it is clearly civilian in character, particularly now that better education and improved communication have spread awareness of the rights of civilians’ (paragraph 81).

  Over two decades later, this objective remains to be fulfilled.

  Some of the ideas in this paper were originally outlined by me in a plan for the restructuring of the RUC at a sociological conference in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, in 1991. This text was submitted to Initiative ’92 and the Opsahl Commission. It was subsequently published in Fortnight magazine and as a separate broadsheet.

  The Repatriation of the Executed

  Introduction

  On 2 September 1942, Tom Williams, a member of the IRA, aged 19 years, was executed and buried at Crumlin Road Prison, Belfast. He had accepted responsibility for the death of Constable Patrick Murphy of the RUC. It is now over fifty years since his burial and the National Graves Association, following consultation with surviving relatives, have deemed it an appropriate time to request the exhumation of his remains and their reburial with full religious rites in consecrated ground where relatives would have dignified access.

  There have been a number of precedents of similar nature:

  1. The celebrated repatriation from Pentonville Prison of the remains of Sir Roger Casement in 1965.

  2. The repatriation and reburial on 5 and 6 July 1967 of the remains of Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, executed at Wandsworth Prison on 10 August 1922.

  3. The repatriation and reburial on 8 July 1969 of the remains of two IRA members, Peter Barnes and James McCormack, executed at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, on 7 February 1940.

  4. The repatriation from India and the reburial of the Connaught Rangers’ mutineers on 2 November 1970.

  In the High Court in Belfast on 5 May 1995 three judges ruled that the Secretary of State has power to exercise the prerogative of mercy and order that Tom Williams be exhumed and handed over to be reburied. The decision to release his body is now an administrative one. I write these words in the hope of persuading the Secretary of State to graciously accede to the request of relatives and a concerned committee who have sought to have Williams interred with dignity in a cemetery. Tom Williams was 18 years of age when he was involved with others in the fatal shooting of Constable Patrick Murphy.

  I also hope that the IRA will be likewise persuaded to restore to their families the bodies of victims murdered by them in the last 25 years. They are buried in secret graves. One calls to mind, for example, Captain Robert Nairac of the British army abducted by the IRA on 14 May 1977 and presumed dead.

  ‘Sleeping with my fathers’

  In the Holy Bible there is a passage in the Book of Genesis, 47:27–31, which the Jerusalem Bible translation calls ‘Jacob’s last wishes’. We read that although Jacob had prospered in Egypt, he asked Joseph to promise not to bury him there but in Canaan. He says, ‘When I sleep with my fathers (i.e. when I die), carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their tomb’. Joseph promised to do this and his father died in peace (49:29–33; 50). When the time comes for Joseph to die in Egypt, he says to his brothers there, ‘I am about to die, but God will be sure to remember you kindly and take you back from this country to the land that he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’(50:24). The text continues, ‘And Joseph made Israel’s sons swear an oath, “When God remembers you with kindness be sure to take my bones from here”’ (Genesis 50:25–26; cf. Exodus 13:19).

  The Jewish expression for dying was ‘sleeping with my fathers’ or ‘being gathered to my fathers’; for this reason, burial among their own people was very important.

  ‘Those who sleep’

  Before rising from the tomb where he has freely ‘gone to sleep’, Jesus has expressed by signs his mastery over death, and over sleep, which is its image. He commanded the daughter of Jairus and his friend Lazarus to rise from their sleep, thus prefiguring his own resurrection to which the baptised will be mystically united. Jesus, St Paul says (I Cor. 15:20), rose ‘as the first-fruits of those who sleep’.

  We who ‘sleep in the tombs’ also hope to rise again. The hope of immortality and resurrection which comes to light in the Old Testament has found a solid foundation in the mystery of Christ. For not only has union with his death made us live with a new life, but it also has given us assurance that ‘He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give new life to your mortal bodies through his indwelling Spirit’ (Romans 8:11).

  Community of saints

  While putting an emphasis on the salvation of the individual, Catholicism also puts a great emphasis on the ‘kingdom’, the ‘church’, the ‘community’, the ‘people of God’. This is carried on from the Old Testament. In the Old Testament the image of resurrection is used to express the collective hope of the people of Israel. God triumphs over death for the benefit of his people. Following this tradition, all the communal aspects of Salvation in Jesus Christ interest the Church. The baptised as a community have a vital union with Christ. St Paul says, ‘We are all baptised in one Spirit to form one Body’. The baptised constituting the Church are, therefore, ‘one Body of Christ’ (1 Cor. 12:13). This unity is symbolised in the term ‘communion of saints’. The church is the unity of the living on this earth with the faithful departed, those who sleep, who rest in peace. The Eucharistic bread is the bond of living cohesion. Therefore at Holy Mass there is a special commemoration of the living and the dead: both are united spiritually in Christ as the ‘communion of saints’. Hence the use of the beautiful phrase for the Eucharist – Holy Communion, and the emphasis in Catholicism on praying for the purgation of the dead, praying with the dead, revering their memory at Easter, the feast of the resurrection of Christ, and in November. The dead are laid to rest in graveyards, in ground that is specially consecrated, like a congregation symbolically ‘sleeping’ around the building of the church; united to the people praying in the church who greet their memory as they pass their graves.

  Community graveyard

  With this understanding one can see then that the executed belong to a community church in life and in death. Tom Williams and Captain Robert Nairac are brothers in the family of the faithful. That Williams is buried in isolation in a prison yard and Nairac in unconsecrated ground is a total contradiction of the community dimension of the faith they professed and a source of deep hurt to their surviving relations and to the people from which they came. They should be symbolically united with their brothers and sisters in a community graveyard where the ‘church’ sleeps in a great dormitory awaiting the arousal call of the Lord. The biblical idea of Christ as the bride
groom, who loves his Church as his bride and who will bring her resplendent to himself, expresses beautifully the idea of the corporate nature of the Church, a single entity. These men should be buried among their own people, their ‘bones resting with their fathers’.

  A glorified body

  Corruption in a tomb is a transitory state only, from which man will re-arise as one awakes from a sleep into which one has slipped. Ephesians says, ‘Awake, sleeper! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon you’ (5:14). This fundamental conviction of resurrection of the body, the human person, whole and entire, dominates the whole Christian existence. It superimposes itself upon our thoughts in these cases of Tom Williams and Robert Nairac. We are mindful that all people are sinners. Tom Williams, aged 19 years, made a holy preparation for death in the company of Fr Patrick McAlister and he went to death holding his crucifix and praying. Cardinal Hume, former Abbot of Ampleforth where Robert Nairac was a student, made an appeal for the safe return of Captain Nairac when he disappeared. At least his body can be returned to ‘rest in safety’. The religion of these two victims stretches beyond the grave. It would be fitting to respect the community nature of their religion, Catholicism, and the dignity of their bodies as individuals created by God and brought to a new creation by Jesus. Both men, like all Christians, lived in hope that their bodies would be transformed from present misery to a glorified state.