22 December 2016
More Historical Enquiries
Irish DPP to prosecute OAP veterans for IRA activist’s death 44 years ago.
by Lynda Goetz
Last week I wrote about IHAT and the ‘hounding’ of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Only days after publication, it was announced that two former paratroopers, now aged 67 and 65, are to be prosecuted for the killing of an IRA activist 44 years ago. A senior leader in the Official IRA, Joe McCann, then aged 24, was shot and killed in Belfast on 15th April 1972. He was shot as he attempted to flee a security checkpoint and his death sparked days of rioting and the murder by the IRA of three more British soldiers. The three paratroopers, known only as soldiers A, B and C, were told at the time that they would not face prosecution, even though McCann, it transpired, was unarmed. This assurance was reiterated in 2010 after soldiers A and C cooperated with the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) set up in 2005 (and closed down in 2014). Soldier B, who was abroad at the time, refused to cooperate and has since died.
After the closure of HET, the file was handed back to McCann’s family and then to the Department of Public Prosecutions of Northern Island. After two years of investigations by the DPP the two have been told they will be charged with murder; the victim, Joe McCann, was himself accused of the murder of at least one British soldier and the attempted assassination of a leading Ulster Unionist politician, Lord Kilclooney. Neither he, nor anyone else, ever stood trial for any of these cases.
This situation raises the prospect of more British troops who served in Northern Ireland being prosecuted decades after the events and has caused anger amongst many. Anne-Marie Bankier, the daughter of the British soldier, Corporal Robert Bankier, allegedly killed by McCann, has said she is appalled that the paratroopers are being pursued “….for doing their job 44 years ago.” Her use of those words is interesting and crucial. When soldiers are ‘doing their job’, they know there are standards to which they have to adhere. There are laws to obey, as well as officers. Failure to do so will mean a court martial and possibly an ignominious end to their career. In this case, the paratroopers were acting on the orders of police with the Royal Ulster Constabulary who had identified McCann at the checkpoint. They were summoned to detain him as he fled. (Since, if detaining simply meant ‘grabbing hold of’, the police could have done this themselves, we are presumably talking about an order to shoot). They were serving their country and conducting themselves, it would appear, as ordered. How can it be right, over four decades after the incident, to accuse them of murder and expect them in retirement to fight through the civil courts to clear their names?
Our Government, under Tony Blair, gave assurances to IRA killers that they will not be pursued. It should, at the very least, be supporting our soldiers who put their lives at risk when doing their jobs. If the rules of civilian life can effectively be applied to soldiering with no time limit for prosecutions, who will be foolhardy enough to go into the Armed Forces? This lack of support is surely going to make recruitment even harder than it apparently already is. With the U.S threatening under Trump to reduce its support for NATO, we will in all likelihood need to keep our military up to strength. They will need to believe they have their government’s support.
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