A Review Essay by Christopher Stanley of “Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place” by Martin Doyle. Published by Merrion Press (€24.99/£22.99 Hardback) 368 pages..
Christopher Stanley is Litigation Consultant, KRW LAW LLP, Belfast and was a Legal Aid Practitioner Group/Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year Public Law Lawyer of the Year Nominee 2017 and Times Lawyer of the Week 8 February 2018
“You have to first heal the dead before you can begin to heal the living” (cited in OPERATION DENTON NPCC Homicide Working Group January 2021 Executive Summary and Conclusions page 1)
[i]
EA/2023/0267 is a Case Reference.
It has been allocated by the UK General Regulatory Chamber (Information Rights).
This Tribunal arbitrates upon disputes arising from the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) and similar data regulation provisions.
FOIA was introduced in the UK by the Labour Government at the same time as the legislative slew that included the direct incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) into domestic UK law by way of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA98).
Until 2000, even though UK had contributed to the drafting of the Convention (some English jurists maintain the ECHR is a legal instrument of Common Lawyers), it had no direct effect in UK courts.
The UK had signed the Convention and had so become a High Contracting Party to it, and a member of the Committee of Ministers (CoM) of the Council of Europe (CoE), the supranational political organisations with oversight of the ECHR and its court at Strasbourg, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
The point regarding the signing ‘of’ out-with the incorporation ‘in’ of the ECHR was not lost on civil rights lawyers in Northern Ireland during the Conflict.
These lawyers worked to develop the ECHR as a legal form to secure the rights of their clients in the face of the challenges of the repressive legal regime which was an inherent part of a counter-insurgency policy-strategy of the British State commenced in Northern Ireland with the implementation of the Kitson experiment.
The mechanisms of this repressive military-political regime included inter alia Diplock Courts, internment without trial, the deployment of rubber and then plastic bullets, and restricted police station rights.
These Northern Ireland civil rights lawyers sought redress for their clients before the Strasbourg Court. This legal agitation was much to the chagrin of those charged with the prosecution of the control of the Conflict in Northern Ireland.
Applications to Strasbourg such as that made in McCann and Others v UK caused international embarrassment to the British government in its management of force Conflict-strategy.
Similarly, the Irish government, offended by the violent tactics deployed against internees in the North by British Security Forces, deployed the ECHR to ‘try’ the British before the Strasbourg Court, in the landmark inter-state application of Ireland v UK.
(Irony (1): the Irish government is now pursuing a second inter-State application against the UK regarding the imposition of Northern Ireland Troubles (Conflict and Reconciliation) Act 2023 (the Legacy Act 2023) which is, many maintain, incompatible with the ECHR and therefore in breach of the UK’s obligations under the ECHR to which the UK is still a signatory and member of the CoM of the CoE).
(Irony (2): As the righteous Dublin politicians were testing the sovereign patience of their Westminster counterparts in Ireland v UK, in the police cells of Garda Síochána Stations flagrant breaches of the ECHR were being inflicted upon the Sallins Men and the ‘operations’ of the police detectives constituting the Garda ‘Heavy Gang’ were leading to widespread miscarriages of justice and institutional corruption including in the cases of the murder of Una Lynskey and the killing of the Kerry Babies).
The HRA98 was legislated for at the same time as the Northern Ireland Act 1998 pursuant to the Good Friday Agreement 1998 (GFA98).
The GFA98 entrenched a commitment to human rights and the ECHR, cross-border obligations, and international scrutiny, in both letter and spirit.
The Irish government followed suit regarding incorporating the ECHR into domestic law as per the obligations of the GFA98 by way of the European Convention of Human Rights Act 2003.
In contrast to the UK, Ireland has a written constitution which already incorporated limited rights for Irish citizens. British subjects have rights until they are told they do not have rights.
[ii]
Tony Blair regrets introduce FOIA even more so that the HRA98.
“Freedom of Information. Three harmless words. I look at those words as I write them and feel like shaking my head till it drops off my shoulders. You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it … Once I appreciated the full enormity of the blunder, I used to say – more than a little unfairly – to any civil servant who would listen: Where was Sir Humphrey when I needed him? We had legislated in the first throes of power. How could you, knowing what you know, have allowed us to do such a thing so utterly undermining of sensible government?” (Tony Blair: A Journey (2012))
However, it was Prime Minister Blair, in the shadow of John Major, who claimed the laurels for ‘achieving’ the GFA98, which remains core to a peace in process. The GFA contains both a commitment to and is ideologically underpinned by the ECHR. The GFA98 is reliant upon cross-border co-operation and engagement and has international treaty recognition status. Human Rights are mentioned 21 times in the Agreement.
[iii]
When a human right as fundamental as the right to life – Article 2 ECHR – is denied the exposure to truth and understanding – “Why did my Daddy get killed?” – because of a ‘freedom’ of information legislative regime, that right and the right to truth about the death is both denied and silenced.
When a fundamental to a peace process (and a process is an activity – a peace in progress) is reconciliation achieved in part through information-retrieval and truth-recovery then the issue of what ‘they’ – the State, the Establishment, the Mandarins, the Chiefs of Staff – want kept secret is both compelling and a breach of the consensus demanded to achieve that just and peaceful reconciliation in order to for a society to progress.
Reliance to achieve peaceful reconciliation in this transitional process – it is not all over, over there – then rests upon a consensus of the voices of the dead being spoken through the loss and grief of and by their loved ones and those sympathetic interlocutors and other witnesses and mourners.
This is what Martin Doyle achieves in Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place.
He is a sympathetic interlocutor because the violent deaths he describes and the loss and grief he seeks to give both expression to and to ventilate, are the deaths of those he knew – his family knew, his neighbours knew, his school friends knew – lost, members of his community gone, and those who are left have endowed and enable him, because of this knowing of person and place, to become their voices through his “speech marks”.
Those voices of the dead and their bereaved cannot be silenced by a simple imposition of a legal prohibition. This maybe it by way of the imposition of a FOIA ‘exemption’ or by way of the way of mechanisms of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023.
The Legacy Act 2023, and specifically its creature the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR), will neither salve nor suture the Legacy of the Conflict or promote reconciliation. It has even before its recent enactment sown anger and dissent, opposition and Ireland v UK (No 2)) lodged with ECtHR in January 2024.
Martin Doyle reminds his reader – us who remain, who survive, who now near witness – and those, that they, who seek to impose silence – that those who suffered a violent death by bomb or bullet and their loved ones will not be so silenced. This includes those ‘own’ lost lives – the victims of suicide and their families – unable to bear the grief of violent loss.
This is a compelling, eloquent, at times beautiful and necessary – vital – account.
It is a needful telling of a narrative – stories of the families, their lost loved ones, of neighbours in Conflict, of fractured communities failing to reconcile deep rooted religious, sectarian, and economic divisions upon the Narrow Ground.
It is part of the competing narrative to that which ‘the State’ seeks to coerce and cleanse into an ‘official account’ for the ‘public record’ all other – including this one?- being pernicious.
[iv]
EA/2023/0267 is the Case Reference allocated to an application made by the family of Margaret Campbell to have disclosed a document in the possession of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
The PSNI have previously refused to disclose this document to the journalist Phil Miller.
Under FOIA an application is for information to be disclosed to the public and not just to the applicant
The decision of the PSNI to withhold the request information was upheld by the Information Commissioner Office (ICO). The ICO is the statutory authority charged with the regulation of the FOIA regime in the UK.
The GRC (Information Rights) Tribunal upheld the decision of the ICO to uphold the decision of the PSNI in a determination given the case citation of EA/2019/0183V and taken in the name of Phil Miller who had applied for the contested document.
The GRC (Information Rights) Tribunal is the judicial body which has jurisdiction over the ICO and data-holding/controlling statutory authorities and bodies – including the PSNI – and ‘polices’ the FOIA and other information-rights regimes.
Phil Miller is an investigative journalist (as the Tribunal said: ‘so a kind of social watchdog’) who has extensively researched and published on the Conflict in Northern Ireland, specifically on collusion and other counter-insurgency policies, strategies and practices and their genealogy from their development in the post-war post-colonial uprisings across ‘Empire’ (including Ireland – from Belfast to Basra via Borneo and beyond).
Phil Miller applied for the information in his capacity as a journalist and a commentator on the Conflict in Northern Ireland but also as an individual.
Margaret Campbell applied for the same information in her capacity as a widow of a victim of the Conflict in Northern Ireland but also an individual.
Both would agree that that there should be no hierarchy for those seeking truth be they interlocutor or victim.
[v]
Margaret Campbell was the widow of Patrick (Pat) Campbell who was killed by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) at their family home in Banbridge on 28 October 1973. Pat Campbell is Entry 952 of Lost Lives (pages 397 – 398).
Pat Campbell was murdered by Robin Jackson, a member of the UVF, a co-worker at the same shoe factory they were employed in.
Robin Jackson was a part-time member of Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) (Service Number: 242289963 – page 103).
Pat Campbell was a Catholic, a civilian, and a leader within his community and active in the leather worker’s union.
Jackson, who died of natural causes in the same year as the GFA98, now travels through the narrative of the Conflict by way of the sobriquet The Jackal.
The murder of Pat Campbell was described at the time (Lost Lives) as a paramilitary assassination.
In fact, given the stench of collusion clouding this execution it was a state-sponsored extra-judicial killing by a rookie recruit to the British Security Forces and a disposable tool of the counter-insurgency policy-strategy. A bastard child of Kitson.
The sobriquet and the description The Jackal both romanticise and tempers the act of murder without mitigation. A murder in cold blood as an almost intimate act as Campbell and Jackson knew each other, they were proximate to each other.
Similarly, Troubles denotes a little local difficulty ‘over there’ (alluding to Edmund Burke’s ‘geographical morality’) in opposition to Conflict.
There are obvious political reasons for these choices of words and phrases and for the deployment and development of narrative and counter-narrative (pernicious or not).
When stripped of the conceit of a linguistic artifice, Robin Jackson murdered Pat Campbell in cold blood and with the knowledge of, the protection of, the equipment of, and the will of the British State.
[vi]
The murder of Pat Campbell is the subject of Chapters Six ‘Dreadful Symmetry’ and Chapter Seven ‘Protecting a Killer’ of Martin Doyle’s book “Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place”.
Robin Jackson as a state-sponsored serial killer is a malignant presence throughout much else in Doyle’s account of his own childhood growing up in Tullylish, five miles from Banbridge and on the road to Portadown, a personal history through the long agony of the Conflict in Ireland – North and South.
Martin Doyle’s book assumes its rightful place – and at the right time because of the UK Legacy Act and instability in Irish-Anglo relations post-BREXIT – amongst the literature of the Conflict most recently supplemented (as acknowledged by Doyle) in works by Anne Cadwallader, Ian Cobain, and Margaret Urwin, in poetry and in prose and in compelling academic contributions including Mark McGovern’s Counterinsurgency and Collusion in Northern Ireland (2019).
What distinguishes Doyle’s book is clear from the subtitle The Troubles in My Home Place. This is an autobiography and a biography. It is about the life of the author and about his place and his home. His sense of place – his home returned to – is acute because he understands the processes of geographical-historical formation of both the physical and psychological landscape that surrounds and embraces, excludes and expels his border-community.
This is both the inner landscape – the psyche – of emotions, beliefs, ideologies – violently moulded or begotten by economic forces, religious intolerances and political exigencies and expressed in the prolonged and sustained violence of a shattered outer world reality – The Troubles as ‘a little local difficulty’ upon a Narrow Ground here circumscribed to a handful of rural parishes – the ‘Murder Triangle’ of Newry, Lurgan and Dungannon ‘ the cockpit of the Troubles’ (page 7).
It is also the landscape as a bloody signification of a violent Conflict across the Island of Ireland, from Claudy to Banbridge to Belturbet, from Derry to Omagh, from Enniskillen to Dublin, from city to city, town to town, village to village, graveyard to graveyard.
Doyle has not written the history of the Conflict in Northern Ireland. Doyle has written a history of the Conflict in Northern Ireland in his pocket of Ireland – the village of Laurencetown, 25 miles north of the border, in the County Down parish of Tullylish, within the murder triangle (“or Lawrencetown – we can’t even agree on how to spell it” (page 1)).
It is his history about aspects of his life, his space-place, his family, the family next door, his school and their church, a social club and their sports venue, his community and all its graveyards and memorial stones.
Because he writes of what and where he knows, Doyle can listen, record, and understand and communicate as much as an anthropological field recording made solid and in unadorned prose (and that is praise not criticism).
This is writing with understanding and understatement and without unnecessary adornment or embellishment, and where Doyle enables and allows the voices of the community – his neighbours – to speak. Therefore, he is a conduit or an interlocutor for their expressions of loss, grief, anger, anguish, betrayal, and despair.
Doyle therefore achieves what Ian Cobain accomplishes in different voice with a single violent incursion (the murder off-duty RUC Photographer Millar McAllister in Lisburn on 22 April 1978 (Entry 2017 of Lost Lives (page 754)) in Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death on a Divided Island (2021).
This is what the magisterial – and regretfully out of print – Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (1999) achieved complete with its inevitable factual inaccuracies and flaws (which apparently the defunct PSNI Historical Enquiries Team (HET) strove to correct).
[vii]
“I run out into the hall and … it was just carnage” (page 89).
This is the voice of Donna Barry as told to Martin Doyle. She is describing the murder of her father, Pat Campbell. Doyle takes the murder of Pat Campbell and places it within the history their family, from before, to then and to now.
He places it within the community of Banbridge. He places it within the Legacy of the Conflict in Northern Ireland, and he places it within the fragile out-workings of this peace in process through the attempt and failure to reconcile the past with the present and the future, which the pernicious Legacy Act 2023 seeks to terminally undermine by denying the past through the imposition of a (pernicious) ‘official’ story.
Martin Doyle draws upon the Anglo-Irish critical historian-cultural theorist Benedict Anderson:
“The dead, far from being gone remain as a powerful part of the community. How we think about the dead, and the stories we tell about the relation between the dead and the living, are central to imagining new forms of community and/or narratives of nationhood” (Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities (1983) page 15).
Benedict Anderson’s statement is also used to introduce the Irish Linen Memorial into Doyle’s text – that of 400 white Irish linen handkerchiefs. The names of those killed between the years of 1966 – 2006 of the Troubles are printed and overstitched with embroidery, and spotted with sewn hair, onto each handkerchief. The Linen Memorial is a:
“creative project that has now spanned almost 20 years and has travelled to multiple countries, been constructed in churches, galleries, and libraries. it is an ongoing site‐conscious memorial which seeks to re‐narrate the almost 4,000 deaths which took place during the fraught period of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland.”
As Martin Doyle’s publisher notes “Doyle skilfully weaves together the two strands of history, with the decline of the local line industry serving as a metaphor for the descent into communal violence, but also for the solidarity that transcends the sectarian divide.”
Doyle calls his book Dirty Linen. He is also aware of the position of the British State (in the form of successive governments, entrenched civil servants, and military-security chiefs of staff and grey men and women – including a Girl named Sue, former Newry publican and former director-general of propriety and ethics in the Cabinet Office) not to have this linen washed in public when it is steeped in the stench of collusion between terrorist paramilitaries and British Security Forces.
Hence Case Reference EA/2023/0267.
[viii]
The family of Margaret Campbell applied to the PSNI for the release of the Morton Report to be released to them and into the public domain in Spring 2023.
Phil Miller had previously requested its disclosure in 2019.
As noted, Phil Miller made his request in his capacity as a journalist.
Even though the FOIA regime technically has no restriction on the capacity of the individual making the request, it has implicitly created a hierarchy of applicants by way of the doctrine of locus – whose rights are proximate enough, near enough, legitimate enough?)
Margaret Campbell made her request as the relative -the widow – of a victim of the Conflict – her husband, Pat Campbell:
“We request an unredacted copy of a report compiled by John Percival Morton CMG OBE, also known as Jack Morton. In 1973, Jack Morton produced a report, referred to as the ‘Morton Report’, which contained advice on the relationship between the RUC 1 and the Army. Specifically, the report would consider the structure, function role [sic] of RUC Special Branch”
PSNI responded on 7 March 2022. It confirmed that it held the requested information but refused to disclose it. The PSNI applied the exemption at section 23(1) of FOIA (security bodies).
Following an internal review PSNI wrote to the ‘complainant’ (no longer an applicant but now a complainant) (Margaret Campbell) in April 2022. PSNI maintained its decision to refuse the request under section 23(1) of FOIA:
“Information held by a public authority is exempt information if it was directly or indirectly supplied to the public authority by, or relates to, any of the bodies specified in subsection (3)”
This is an absolute exemption and covers security bodies – in his instance the British Security Service (MI5). An absolute exemption means that there can be no qualification to its imposition by way of a proportionate balance of a public interest test.
The ICO issued a Decision Notice (IC-173342-D4D8) upholding the decision of the PSNI following an application made on behalf of Margaret Campbell the same to the ICO the same month.
On behalf of Margaret Campbell, the ICO Decision Noice (IC-173342-D4D8) was appealed to the General Regulatory Chamber (Information Rights) and given the Case Reference of EA/2023/0267.
From widow to applicant to complainant to appellant.
[ix]
Martin Doyle describes the engagement of the family of Pat Campbell with the British criminal justice system from the point of his murder through the arrest and charge of Robin Jackson and the decision not to prosecute him at that time.
Doyle then examines the family’s engagement with the PSNI Historical Enquiries Team (HET) and their civil action against the PSNI (on behalf of the RUC) and the MOD. This civil case resulted in an out of court settlement for an undisclosed sum – with no admission of liability or apology for the collusion which lead to the murder of Pat Campbell by an agent of the British Security Forces/Services (pages 112 – 113) – in this instance the British Army (UDR) and RUC Special Branch – Robin Jackson (pages 109 – 114).
The application made by Margaret Campbell and her family for the Morton Report, held by PSNI, is another step in the painfully slow journey to expose the truth about one violent death during the Conflict.
[x]
The Morton Report was commissioned by the then head of MI5, Sir Michael Hanley. He suggested to then RUC Chief Constable Sir Graham Shillington that a senior security service officer conduct a review of RUC Special Branch in June 1973.
The MI5 officer appointed was Jack Morton. He was a former colonial police chief in India. The ICO has confirmed how significant the Morton Report could be for understanding the history of policing during the Conflict in Northern Ireland.
The Tribunal determination in Miller v ICO and PSNI (EA/2019/0183V) describes the background to the commissioning of the Moton Report:
“20. There is an extract from minutes of a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee held on 11 June 1973 which records that the terms of reference of the report were to review ‘the organisation, staffing and equipment of the RUC Special Branch, and to make recommendations.
21. There is a letter from M.B. Hanley who we were told was head of MI5, also dated 11 June 1973, to the Chief Constable of the RUC in which Mr Hanley states that he has selected ‘Mr J.P. Morton who retired as one of our Directors last summer’ as a ‘senior officer to undertake a review of the RUC Special Branch’.
22. A letter from M.T.B Clayton, Director of Establishments, dated 15 June 1973 was sent to Mr Morton offering him ‘special duties in Northern Ireland’ and setting out terms of appointment including that ‘the pension which you receive from this Service will be totally abated during the period of appointment.’ On 18 June 1973 Mr Morton replied to Mr Clayton to accept the appointment.”
The ICO Decision Notice in response to Phil Miller’s request for disclosure gives the following chronology regarding communication between the ICO and the PSNI on the Morton Report:
“10. The Commissioner is aware that the information held by the PSNI which falls within the scope of the complainant’s request consists of a report which is over 45 years old. In responding to the Commissioner’s request for submissions, the PSNI has verified the provenance of this report with the Security Service. The Security Service confirmed that the report was directly supplied to the then Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) now known as the PSNI, by MI5.
11. The PSNI has informed the Commissioner that, in June 1973, an RUC Chief Constable accepted an offer from the then Director General of the Security Service for a senior MI5 officer to conduct a review of and report on the RUC Special Branch organisation and its functions. Jack Morton, a serving MI5 officer, carried out this work on the instruction of the Director General of the Security Service.
12. The Commissioner, having asked the PSNI whether the information was supplied directly or indirectly to it by one of the security bodies listed in section 23(3) of the FOIA, was informed that the information was supplied directly to the PSNI, then the RUC, by MI5, which falls within section 23(3)(a) of the FOIA.”
Even if the Morton Report concluded “Ok, chaps, carry on – you might try waterboarding” based on Jack’s colonial adventures, it would add to the narrative fabric being stitched together by journalists, academics, civil society organisations and others (including Ciarán MacAirt, a relative of Kathleen (Kitty) Irvine, a victim of the McGurk’s Bar Bombing 1971, and the founder of Belfast-based social-initiative Conflict-related archival resource The Paper Trail) on behalf of the thousands of relatives of victims and survivors, including the family of Pat Campbell.
It would be a narrative which former military intelligence officers including Fred Holroyd and Colin Wallace have tried to expose and ventilate. It is a narrative which historians of modern history have attempted to explain. It is a narrative which has been described as pernicious by some politicians, but which goes to the dark heart of British counter-insurgency policy-strategy as implemented by the Mandarins of Whitehall and the Chiefs of Staff and their subaltern lackeys including Frank Kitson and Robin Jackson (Service Number: 242289963). No hierarchy of terror there.
As Robin Jackson is now acknowledged as a founding and then leading member of the ‘notorious’ (another soubriquet) Loyalist paramilitary UVF Glenanne Gang and that the murder of Pat Campbell was his first assassination, any ‘official’ examination of intelligence policies, systems and operations including those of RUC Special Branch at the time of his murder would be great significance to his family and the families of other similarly violated families as described by Martin Doyle and others including Anne Cadwallader in Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland (2013) and Margaret Urwin in A State in Denial: The British Government and Loyalist Paramilitaries: British Collaboration with Loyalist Paramilitaries (2016).
It should be noted that The Report of the Independent International Panel on alleged collusion in Sectarian killings in Northern Ireland by members of the Centre for Civil and Human Rights Notre Dame Law School (2006) mentions the paramilitary activities of Robin Jackson 29 times and links him to multiple killings including that of Pat Campbell.
[xi]
The ‘official narrative’ history of the Conflict in Northern Ireland – which is now being legislated for by way of sections 49 and 50 of the Legacy Act 2023 – to be collated and curated by suitable ‘designated persons’ (section 56) – had already been undermined and challenged by (then) available state-sanctions/sponsored mechanisms.
The PSNI HET Review Summary Reports (RSRs) did, on occasion provide insights into the collusion within the policing and criminal justice processes throughout the Conflict.
The Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI) thematic investigations of historic RUC complaints were starting to expose the extent of that collusion.
Operation Kenova (Barnard Review) – and specifically for the family of Pat Campbell – Operation Denton – within that inside-outside criminal justice investigation might have further exposed the unholy alliance of interests between RUC Special Branch, the UDR and the Glenanne Gang (page 113).
The publication of the Operation Kenova (Denton Report) is scheduled for 17 May 2024 – the 50th Anniversary of the Dublin-Monaghan Bombings.
Whether that happens or not because of the dead-hand grip of the Legacy Act 2023 is now in doubt.
The above mechanisms out-with Operation Kenova (although that did emerge from the ashes of the HET debacle via the Edward Barnard litigation) – PONI, PSNI HET together with Legacy Inquests – were part of the Committee of Ministers Package of Measures – accepted by the UK pursuant upon the McKerr Group of cases found against the UK by the ECtHR.
They were therefore initiatives of the Council of Europe and the ECHR – and monitored by the Committee of Ministers – and therefore an increasingly dangerous and subversive irrelevance to the successive British governments seeking to deny the truth of its counter-insurgency operations in Northern Ireland and to impose an official history on the Conflict whilst increasingly viewing the ECHR, and its Court as a BREXIT-related infringement on UK sovereignty – the right to govern in the way we want without interference from European institutions (EU or not).
The Legacy Act 2023 offends the ECHR, it will seek to stop cross-border co-operation in Conflict-related cases including the Dublin-Mongahan Bombings 1974 (another Glenanne Gang violation) (a further argument for an inter-state application by Ireland to the ECtHR – before the UK derogates from the ECHR by way of asylum-seeker flights to Rwanda), has stopped the work of PONI regarding historic complaints against the RUC, has stopped criminal justice investigations by the PSNI Legacy Investigations Branch (LIB) and closed down on Legacy inquests.
Further, the Legacy Act 2023 ousters the jurisdiction of the courts in all civil actions emanating from the Conflict, such as the that taken by Margaret Campbell in the name of her husband Patrick Campbell which settled at the doors of the court.
Those civil law challenges taken by the relatives of victims against statutory authorities and their agents – official or not – cannot happen again – saving agencies such as the MOD, NIO and PSNI both money and the demand to disclose in evidence information and material – for example, the Morton Report – establishing the truth under Court discovery orders.
[xii]
EA/2023/0267 is a Case Reference.
It refers to an appeal before the GRC (Information Rights) Tribunal now in the name of Margaret Campbell v ICO and PSNI.
It will be heard by a lawyer and two laypersons (both of whom are designated persons in the sense they have security clearance) sometime in 2024.
The Tribunal will not hear any facts about the murder of Pat Campbell.
It will not consider any context giving rise to why the family of Pat Campbell have requested disclosure of the Morton Report.
It will not consider the Morton Report in the context of the history of the policing (in its broadest sense including intelligence operations in the context of counterinsurgency polices-strategies) of the Conflict in Northern.
It will not consider that the statutory authority that commissioned the Morton Report (the RUC) no longer exists.
It will not consider the statement of ‘apology’ made by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2012 (if he in fact understood what he was apologising for) to Geraldine Finucane, the widow of Patrick Finucane, assassinated by state agents in 1989 regarding the extent of collusion throughout the Conflict:
“Both Lord Stevens and Judge Cory made it clear that there was State collusion in the murder. This itself was a shocking conclusion and I apologised to the family on behalf of the British government when I met them last year. But despite these reports, some twenty-three years after the murder – there has still only been limited information in the public domain. The whole country and beyond is entitled to know the extent and nature of the collusion – and of the failure of the State.” (12 December 2012)
It will not examine the Morton Report in terms of its potential role in the processes of truth-recovery and information-retrieval and the wider public interest of the out-workings of the Legacy of the Conflict.
The Tribunal will not ask to see the Morton Report.
The appeal will rest on a legal argument not previously argued before the Tribunal.
The appeal will, apart from the arguments made on behalf of Margaret Campbell be heard in CLOSED.
The PSNI, if it chooses to appear, and the ICO, will be inside.
The family of Margaret Campbell will be outside.
[xiii]
Insisting on the right to truth by way of a right to freedom of information may become an important mechanism in truth-recovery and information-retrieval when the work of the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recover (ICRIR), the primary creature of the Legacy Act 2023, commences.
The ICRIR will operate to deny truth-recovery and information retrieval as part of the intent of the Legacy Act 2023 is to coerce an ‘official’ narrative of the Conflict in Northern Ireland.
The ICRIR cannot work to the human rights standards demanded by the jurisprudence of ECHR as developed by the ECtHR and other international human rights and humanitarian legal instruments.
The ICRIR will not be able to co-operate in accordance with extant mutual assistance treaty standards between Ireland and UK regarding the intelligence and information in relation to Conflict-related deaths and human rights violations.
The Legacy Act 2023 seeks to silence forever those who seek to express a competing narrative based upon the voices of both the living and the lost.
Martin Doyle is one of those important interlocutors whose book challenges the intentions of the Legacy Act 2023.
I have taken one ‘loss’ from his book – the killing of Pat Campbell – and placed it in the context of a specific legal challenge to the intent of the British State, a FOIA application at the time of the Legacy Act 2023.
Families of the dead will continue to quest for truth, justice, and accountability. Dirty Linen contributes to that quest. Martin Doyle contributes in what he calls a “polyphonic work, communicating different perspectives through many voices” (page 15).He concludes: “Bereavement comes with a whole-life tariff, grief without any promise of reprieve or redress. I find I have become an inveterate collector of words of wisdom about grief and loss.” (page 339).
The bereaved, Martin Doyle writes, ask only that their loss and their grief not “be inflicted on a new generation. They have done such heavy lifting for us all.” (page 340).
[xiv]
Margaret Campbell, the widow of Pat Campbell, died in the Autumn of 2023. She was 85. Her husband, Pat, was murdered in 1973. He was 34.
Frank Kitson died in January 2024. He was 97. He is survived by his wife of 62 years.
An application has now been made to the Tribunal to transfer the name of the Appellant (Margaret Campbell (deceased)) in EA/2023/0267 to another relative of the victim of the Conflict.
That application is yet to be determined. The proposed Appellant is the son of another victim of the Glenanne Gang. Patrick McNeice was murdered by a member of the UVF outside his house at Adress, Loughgall on 25 July 1976.
Should a determination be made that National Security exemptions should not have been applied to the Morton Report because of its historic provenance and its contemporary relevance to the truth and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland then the process started by Margaret Campbell will have been worthwhile.
Should the Tribunal uphold the decisions of the PSNI and ICO then the value of the FOIA process will have exposed as a subservient mechanism to the out-workings of the ICRIR. It will be left to relatives of victims and survivors, and to writers including Martin Doyle, to speak for the dead of the Conflict.