Hierarchy of victims

The hierarchy of victims is the struggle to decide whose suffering counts, which perpetrators should be pursued, and whether different kinds of violence should be judged by the same standards. In the aftermath of the Troubles, these questions were not settled by a common truth-and-reconciliation process or a consistent system for dealing with historical crimes. Instead, legal cases, public arguments and competing memories repeatedly turned the recognition of one victim into an apparent challenge to the recognition of another.

A peace without an agreed reckoning

The Good Friday Agreement concentrated on the future and established power sharing, but it did not create a formal process for establishing a shared account of the previous three decades. It provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners held at the time and capped future sentences for Troubles-related offences at two years. It offered no general mechanism for granting amnesty in exchange for testimony, and the conflict was not declared a war, so murders committed by paramilitaries or state agents were not prosecuted as war crimes. Most unsolved killings therefore remained open criminal cases in which former paramilitaries and former soldiers could still face prosecution. A limited amnesty applied only to people who voluntarily supplied information to help recover the bodies of the disappeared.

The contrast with South Africa’s post-apartheid process made the omission conspicuous. That process connected testimony with the possibility of legal immunity, although it was criticized for incomplete and politically shaped accounting. Northern Ireland had no equivalent framework, and its conflict ended in a stalemate rather than an obvious victory for either side. Institutional change followed, including the replacement of the RUC by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, but there was no agreed procedure for understanding or commemorating the violence. The result was not simply an absence of answers: it was an ongoing argument over who had authority to ask questions, which cases deserved attention, and what equal treatment would mean.

The contested figure of the victim

The idea of an ideal victim sharpened the dispute. One account of the Troubles defined that figure as a passive civilian rather than a combatant. Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten, could therefore appear to be an exemplary civilian victim. Yet some people portrayed her instead as a combatant by proxy, suggesting that she had knowingly courted danger by informing. The distinction was politically consequential: it could shape how audiences understood her death and the IRA’s claim to have acted against an informer.

The book does not treat that contested label as a moral justification. Even if McConville had been an informer, the allegation could not justify her murder and disappearance. The dispute exposes a more basic instability: people may classify victims through their affiliations and alleged conduct, rather than beginning from the harm done to them. The same atrocity can consequently be treated as a tragedy by one community and as a secondary matter, or even a deserved outcome, by another. Recognition becomes conditional, and the victim’s status is argued over long after the violence itself.

The narrative also makes that uncertainty concrete through competing accounts and records. The McConville children remembered her being questioned after an incident at a bingo hall and believed she was abducted on 7 December 1972. A police log reviewed by Nuala O’Loan recorded a beaten woman, identified as Mary McConville but linked to Jean’s address, who had been warned to stop giving information to the military. The entry dated that encounter to 29 November, complicating the family’s chronology and the account Brendan Hughes gave of a warning followed by renewed informing. The children’s recollections and the documentary record did not align neatly. Their divergence demonstrates why a contested history cannot be resolved simply by selecting the account that best fits a political position.

Unequal justice and competing claims

The absence of a settled framework left criminal justice to carry the burden of historical accountability. Inquests, police-ombudsman investigations and government inquiries proceeded separately; the PSNI maintained a legacy unit with a backlog of nearly a thousand cases. Prosecutors said investigations of terrorist atrocities far outnumbered cases involving the state. That claim did not end the dispute: if one side’s crimes produced more investigations, some asked whether the disparity itself showed bias; if authorities pursued state personnel, others accused them of a witch hunt. The question was not only whether the police acted in good faith, but whether any incomplete and uneven process could persuade rival communities that it was fair.

This argument also raised the question of standards. Should soldiers and police be treated more leniently because the state possesses a legal monopoly on force, or held to a higher standard precisely because they exercise it? Neither a numerical balance between prosecutions nor an assumption of state innocence could answer that question by itself. The hierarchy of victims names the political pressure built into the effort to compare cases: what counts as imbalance depends partly on which violence is made visible and whose suffering is accepted as the measure.

Whataboutery is one expression of that pressure. Mention Jean McConville, and the conversation may turn to Bloody Sunday; raise that, and someone may answer with Bloody Friday, the murder of Pat Finucane, the La Mon bombing or the Enniskillen bombing. Each case brings real victims and different circumstances, but the sequence can divert attention from the case under discussion without resolving any of the others. The repeated counter-question makes recognition feel like a limited resource: attention to one atrocity is treated as an accusation against another community, rather than as a reason to examine more than one history.

The argument over the Belfast Project

The dispute reappeared in the legal struggle over the Belfast Project recordings. After the PSNI sought tapes related to McConville’s killing, critics accused it of pursuing republican interviews while leaving loyalist testimony aside. Boston College argued that ignoring tapes of UVF members reinforced the allegation that the subpoenas were politically motivated. The British government then sought a loyalist interview as well, and the recording of Winston Churchill Rea, a former Red Hand Commando member, was handed to police after his legal challenge failed. He was later charged in connection with a conspiracy to murder two Catholic men in 1991.

The effort to include a loyalist case did not settle the question of fairness. Ed Moloney denounced the move as a cynical attempt to demonstrate even-handedness, while Anthony McIntyre argued that prosecuting people for speaking about the past could deter the very testimony needed to understand it. Their opposing concerns reveal the dilemma: an oral history might supply evidence for a prosecution, but the prospect of prosecution could also undermine the conditions under which people would speak. In this way, the hierarchy of victims extends beyond the allocation of sympathy. It shapes which histories can be investigated, how testimony is handled, and whether accountability is understood as a route to truth or as another weapon in an unresolved political contest.