It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Colum Eastwood). I want to speak in favour of the Lords amendments, particularly amendment 44, relating to immunity.
Towns and villages in St Helens—like those in your constituency, Mr Deputy Speaker—have strong and historic links to the Army, particularly the Cheshire and Lancashire Regiments. I have a significant, active and very supportive armed forces community locally, and I hope that veterans and their families would say in return that I have always respected, represented and worked hard for them. But I am also honest with them when we talk about the issues in this Bill or about Northern Ireland more generally, because there are not legions of veterans being paraded before the courts. There are no vexatious complaints. There is no witch hunt. It is a myth, and it is a dangerous and disingenuous one.
I want to be honest with the House and with myself too. I sometimes think we should just draw a line under this whole thing—that it would be the easiest thing to do—and then I realise how selfish of me that is. I say to myself, “How dare you be so selfish?” and I ask myself, “Easy for who?” I remind myself that I have no authority, politically, legally and, most of all, morally, to tell anybody to forget, to move on and to put it all behind them—none of us do. What I have learned is that, while legacy is spoken of as something historical, it is not just history; it is something lived by the victims and their families in the present, every day.
I have spoken before in this House of things that were done where I grew up in South Armagh, the place I love and am so proud to be from: Kingsmills and the Reaveys—too much and too many. There is the realisation for me that, even now, as Christy Moore sang in “North and South”,
“There is no feeling so alone
As when the one you’re hurting is your own.”
We can all point to those cases that are beyond tears because of their awfulness, their brutality and the sheer human cost, but it is those that we do not often recall and that are only remembered by those who knew and loved them that are affected by the Bill—like Martin Rowland, who was 26 when he was shot dead on 5 October 1979, his body left on the Quarter Road in Camlough. He is remembered by locals as a quiet, inoffensive fella. His family said at the time,
“He was an enemy to no man.”
No one ever got any answers about why he was murdered, never mind who killed him, although it is widely suspected that there was a strong element of collusion between loyalists and Crown forces. Martin’s sister and brothers are dead now. Does that mean he should be forgotten or that he does not deserve the truth?
I told my father, Pat, who knew Martin, that I intended to mention him, and he was pleased, but he—a lifelong Republican and former Sinn Féin councillor—said,
“there was also a UDR man from Bessbrook shot dead… that morning. It would be disrespectful to mention one neighbour without mentioning another.”
So I rang my friend Danny Kennedy, a former Minister and deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist party, who told me about George Hawthorne, a 37-year-old father of three who had left the UDR the year before and was murdered on his way to work as a forklift driver at the timber yard in Newry. His wife, sadly deceased, worked with my mother in the furniture shop in the village. They were quiet, civil people. Should that be forgotten or dismissed? I do not tell these tales together to be self-righteous or to tick the dreaded what-aboutery box. I tell them to illustrate that this stuff is complicated, it is personal, and it still affects us all, because it happened to all of us or to people we know and people we love.
When I take my kids to South Armagh now from St Helens, they take great joy in winding up their uncle and their granda as we travel from the airport in Belfast by cheering when they see a Union flag flying in some of my hon. Friends’ constituencies. You do not have to look very hard at this time of year—there is constant noise all the way down the motorway. They say, “Look, dad, there’s our flag. They’re welcoming us home,” because kids are great.
When we pop in for a cupán tae—a cup of tea—in McCooey’s in Newry, or I see my friend Michael O’Hare in Whitecross, the conversation often turns to Majella O’Hare and what a great girl she was. They talk about her as if she were here today—playing out the front, happy and without a care in the world, like my two—but she was 12 years old when she was shot by a soldier of the Parachute Regiment in 1976. In 2011, the Government apologised for her unjustifiable killing. That was welcome, but what is it worth if this Bill becomes law, and how can there be any justice or peace for her family when the files relating to her death have been closed until 2065? The O’Hare family—like almost every family, survivor and victims group—oppose the Bill. That speaks more about it than I ever could.
5 pm
When I was a cub doing my A-levels, I worked the late shift doing the taxi radios in Camlough. One night, after we finished, me and one of the aul-timers—one of the drivers—had a late drink in the Lough Inn. He started to talk about when the village had high walls and gates around the pubs, because it had been blown up so often, and about all the various altercations and disturbances, about the policemen and the soldiers, about the Gaelic Athletic Association members and the locals who had been shot or killed, and about Raymond McCreesh and the hunger strike. As little more than a schoolboy at the time—and as Richard Moore from Derry said on the telly recently—I thought he was talking about a film, or that it was like cowboys and Indians. I said to him, “It must have been dead exciting.” He gently put his glass down, looked me dead in the eye and said, “You’re lucky you weren’t about.” It was as simple as that.
I am lucky that I was not about then. But I am about now, and we are about now. We owe it to the people who were about then to ensure that they get to remember their loved ones and find out the truth about what happened to them, and have the justice and the peace that they deserve and that we, in this place of all places, should demand.