Dealing with the past

Dealing with the past is the unresolved work of establishing what happened during the Northern Ireland conflict, deciding who can be held accountable, and determining how its history can be acknowledged. The Good Friday Agreement brought a political settlement built on power sharing, but it did not create a comprehensive truth-and-reconciliation mechanism. Instead, criminal cases, official inquiries, oral-history projects, and competing memories became parts of an unsettled process in which neither side could claim victory and no shared account was guaranteed.

Settlement Without a Truth Process

The Good Friday Agreement concentrated on securing peace and addressing the future. It provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners held at the time of the agreement, and stipulated that future sentences for conflict-related crimes would be capped at two years. It did not establish a truth commission, a general amnesty in exchange for testimony, or a formal means for Northern Ireland to examine and commemorate the previous three decades of violence. The Royal Ulster Constabulary was rebranded as the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and much of the structural discrimination challenged by the civil rights movement had receded, but institutional change did not itself settle the record of the conflict.

The absence of an agreed process reflected the conflict’s inconclusive ending. In the South African example discussed in the book, truth-telling could be exchanged for legal immunity, though critics considered that process incomplete and politically shaped. Northern Ireland had no comparable victor and no equivalent bargain. The settlement’s power-sharing structure reflected that stalemate: neither side had emerged triumphant, and there was no common authority empowered to define a single public reckoning.

The agreement did contain a narrow exception relating to the disappeared. Under 1999 legislation intended to help recover their bodies, people who voluntarily gave authorities information about the cases could receive limited amnesty. That protection was specific to information that might help locate remains; it was not a general immunity for conflict-era crimes. The distinction left a basic tension intact: testimony could assist bereaved families in finding the dead, while other admissions might expose former paramilitaries or soldiers to prosecution.

Criminal Justice and Uneven Accountability

Outside that limited provision, murders from the conflict remained open criminal cases. The conflict had not been formally declared a war, so murders and killings facilitated by the state were not to be prosecuted as war crimes. Former paramilitaries and former soldiers could nevertheless face prosecution under ordinary criminal law. In 2012, the British prime minister, David Cameron, acknowledged “frankly shocking levels of state collusion”; the acknowledgement did not supply a general mechanism for investigating or resolving such cases.

The resulting approach was case by case. Police investigations, inquests, the Police Ombudsman’s inquiries, and special government investigations all dealt with aspects of the past, while the Police Service of Northern Ireland maintained a legacy unit devoted to conflict-related crimes. That unit had a backlog of nearly a thousand cases. Its work therefore unfolded amid practical limits—reduced budgets and the obligation to police the present—as well as deep disagreement about whether investigations were fair. Some former soldiers described prosecutions as a witch hunt; prosecutors insisted there was no imbalance in the distribution of cases. The controversy was not only about the outcome of individual investigations, but about whether a system without an agreed framework could be trusted to apply justice equally.

Ivor Bell’s prosecution illustrates how the evidentiary problem could turn on the interpretation of a recorded account. A voice analyst testified that the Belfast Project speaker identified as Z was likely Bell. The defence argued that Z explicitly denied involvement in Jean McConville’s murder; a Police Service of Northern Ireland detective who had heard the interview said the recording acknowledged a critical role in aiding, abetting, counselling, and procuring the murder. Meanwhile, allegations that Gerry Adams had ordered the killing were judged insufficiently corroborated for prosecution. The contrast sharpened the perceived asymmetry: an interview that implicated its speaker could support a prosecution, while allegations against another person might not.

The case also exemplified a broader question about equal treatment. Bell’s lawyer, Peter Corrigan, asked whether British soldiers who shot unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday would receive the same justice. With no common process governing cases from decades earlier, each investigation could appear selective to those whose community or former comrades were under scrutiny. In the book’s account, the legacy unit’s officers could find themselves working in the present while repeatedly returning to old years of violence, with no final point at which the past was simply closed.

Oral History as Record and Legal Evidence

The Belfast Project arose from the gap between peace-making and historical accounting. Its organizers sought interviews with former paramilitaries from republican and loyalist backgrounds, preserving accounts that had not been gathered through a formal truth process. The project was kept secret because of the sensitivity of its subject matter. Unlike South Africa’s truth-and-amnesty arrangement, however, it offered no legal immunity; its promise was that interviews would remain sealed until participants had died. The recordings therefore sat uneasily between historical testimony and potentially prosecutable evidence.

That conflict became concrete when authorities sought recordings associated with Jean McConville’s disappearance. In one legal dispute, a judge reviewed transcripts of republican interviews and authorized the release of recordings associated with five participants. Ed Moloney had maintained that Dolours Price’s fifteen hours of interviews with Anthony McIntyre did not mention McConville. That statement was technically accurate about those recordings, but another set of recordings in the archive contained Price’s detailed account of the disappearance. Moloney had interviewed her separately, after the Belfast Project had concluded, and agreed to safeguard her account on the same terms: it would not be released until after her death. The difference between the two interviews mattered legally and exposed how easily a narrow, literally correct description could obscure the fuller contents of an archive.

The recordings did more than preserve recollection: they could become evidence, and their disclosure could place confidentiality commitments against the demands of criminal investigation. The scandal surrounding the Boston tapes made the question of who controls testimony inseparable from the question of what truth-telling can safely mean. Without an agreed framework for collecting testimony, protecting witnesses, granting immunity, and pursuing crimes, a historical archive could become part of a criminal case without resolving the larger history that produced it.

Memory, Corroboration, and Unsettled Accounts

The difficulties are not confined to institutions. The investigation into Jean McConville’s disappearance shows how family recollection, police records, and former paramilitaries’ accounts could point in different directions. The children believed she was abducted on 7 December 1972, after an earlier episode in which she was questioned, beaten, and returned home. A police log discovered by Nuala O’Loan recorded a woman named Mary McConville—clearly identified by the address as Jean—found beaten and warned to stop giving information to the military. But the log dated that encounter to 29 November, seven nights earlier than the date the children associated with it.

If the log and the children’s date of abduction were both accurate, more than one night separated the warning from Jean’s removal, a chronology that would make Brendan Hughes’s account more plausible than the family’s remembered sequence suggested. Yet the children had been young, living in a war zone and struggling to find food after their mother was taken; their early accounts, beginning in January 1973, consistently placed the abduction in early December. A further discrepancy concerned their memory of a wounded British soldier whom Jean had helped at Divis Flats: army records consulted by O’Loan showed no evidence of a soldier wounded nearby. Such conflicts do not settle the truth by themselves. They demonstrate why the book distinguishes recollection from corroboration and presents alternative accounts where evidence diverges.

The author describes the work as narrative non-fiction based on four years of research, seven trips to Northern Ireland, and interviews with more than one hundred people. The account seeks corroboration where possible and acknowledges that some episodes remain contested or subject to divergent interpretation. That method mirrors the larger problem of dealing with the past: facts must be tested against records and competing testimony, but no single procedure has been established to settle every dispute. In the absence of such a procedure, memory remains both indispensable and vulnerable, while criminal justice continues to carry the burden of a history that the peace settlement did not formally resolve.