My Lords, I would like to mention one factor which may be naïve and maybe I just cannot see it, but we appear to be talking about amnesty for individuals who have committed a heinous crime of some type. I wonder whether noble Lords understand what actually occurred in practical terms? This is from my own experience of living there and serving there.
Early on in the Troubles there were cowboy shoots. There were people who went out just to murder a person. But after a certain time, I would like to think that the security forces not only became better, but they also became much more numerous. There were patrols all over the place. How was it that these people—supposedly individuals, as we seem to be talking about—were not caught? I will tell you why: after several years of the Troubles, no one except a madman carried out an incident on his own. It was not one person; it was a group of people.
When they went into Derryard checkpoint and reversed a lorry in and used flamethrowers, there were about—I am not sure—six people involved. Forty people were involved in that incident in total, and they were accomplices to murder. On every occasion, there were other people involved. Sometimes there was a change of gunman at the last minute. Does that make the other person any less guilty?
What I am really coming to is this: what is the evidence the commission will ask for in order to give immunity to a person? What can he say without giving
evidence on some of the other people involved? Is he expected to do that, and how would it work? What evidence does the commission require to say that it knows he is telling the truth? If the commission asks how many were involved and he says, “Nobody. I carried a Mark 5 mortar on my back, crawled down the road and blew up the police station”, which is patently rubbish because you cannot do that, what is the proof it will require? What is the threshold of admission? Does that admission include any other names? If so, what is going to happen to these other people? Can the commission take it any further? This is really getting down into the practical side of how on earth this will work.
We talk about reconciliation—the noble Lord, Lord Browne, mentioned it a minute ago—saying that the truth would lead to reconciliation. Rubbish. What on earth are we talking about? There are people there who have lost loved ones and their families, and friends, who are equally hurt. In our case, in Fermanagh—I am talking about victims of all types, but these are my examples—every single one of my soldiers who was killed was killed off duty. They were killed feeding calves in the backyard; delivering vegetables; visiting a wife who happened to be Catholic, on a housing estate which was more Catholic; driving a lorry; leaving home in the morning.
How did they kill them? It was not the next-door neighbours; it was somebody close. If he is going to tell the truth, he is also going to say that his accomplice was his next-door neighbour. Do you call that reconciliation? Let us be realistic about this. There is a big hole here. How can you give immunity to individuals when there were multiple people in every incident who are equally guilty? Sometimes more so, because the gunman could be somebody who is instructed just to do it and is told: “I will drive you there and we will make sure that there are no patrols”. They did it to such an extent that they might have laid it on five mornings previously, one after the other; but lo and behold, there was a patrol and somebody said: “Don’t do it. They are closer to you than they can be”. The gunman, although he may have pulled the trigger, may never have done it without 20 people behind him, without the planning, without everything else.
Maybe I am being naïve but I just do not know where we are going with this at all, and I agree with everybody else that it is going to create rubbish and as far as reconciliation goes, which I would like to see in my own area, it is further from completion than anything I have ever heard.