Whataboutery

Whataboutery describes a reflex that repeatedly redirects scrutiny of one atrocity toward another. In the book, its chain of counter-accusations captures a central difficulty in Northern Ireland: the past remains politically charged, but there is no agreed mechanism for accounting for it. Invoking another victim or crime may raise a real question about fairness; it may also displace the particular harm under discussion. The term names that tension without making the cases interchangeable or resolving who should be held accountable.

Meaning and rhetorical operation

The book illustrates the pattern through a sequence of competing references. Mention Jean McConville, and someone might turn to Bloody Sunday; a reply could point to Bloody Friday, followed by Pat Finucane, the La Mon bombing, the Ballymurphy massacre, Enniskillen, or McGurk’s bar. Each new example shifts attention from the previous one, and the repeated demand to consider another case can prevent any single case from receiving sustained attention.

That pattern is not the same as asking whether investigations are consistent or whether victims receive equal treatment. The distinction matters: comparisons can expose omissions, while whataboutery, as the book presents it, can make one allegation a reason not to address another. The resulting exchange turns historical accounting into a contest over whose suffering may be named first, and whose claim is treated as an evasion.

The book connects this exchange to a wider boundary around sympathy. A scholar cited in its discussion describes the ideal victim of the Troubles as a passive civilian rather than a combatant. Jean McConville—a widow and mother of ten—fits that description for many people. Others treated her as a combatant by proxy, alleging that she had courted her fate. The book makes clear that even accepting the allegation for the sake of argument would not justify her murder and disappearance. The dispute over how to classify a victim can shape public attention, but it cannot make the killing morally permissible.

A peace without a shared account of the past

The expression acquires force in the book’s account of what the Good Friday Agreement did and did not establish. Its negotiators concentrated on the future and created power-sharing arrangements, but the agreement provided no truth-and-reconciliation process through which people could give an account of the preceding decades. Nor did it create a general exchange of testimony for legal immunity, such as the model attempted in post-apartheid South Africa. That model had its own critics, who considered its accounting incomplete and political, but at least it attempted an accounting.

Northern Ireland, the book observes, emerged from the conflict in a stalemate rather than with an obvious victor. The agreement provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners held at the time and capped at two years any future sentences for Troubles-related crimes. It did not establish a general amnesty in exchange for testimony, or a process for deciding how the conflict should be understood and commemorated. The Royal Ulster Constabulary was rebranded as the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and much of the structural discrimination challenged by civil-rights protests had gone away; those changes did not settle the competing memories of violence.

The legal consequences were substantial. Unsolved killings remained open criminal cases, and former paramilitaries and soldiers could still face prosecution. The limited exception concerned the 1999 legislation intended to help recover the bodies of the disappeared: people who voluntarily supplied information about those cases could receive a limited amnesty. The murders discussed in the book were not prosecuted as war crimes, since the Troubles had never formally been declared a war. In the absence of a broader settlement for the past, questions of truth, immunity, and prosecution returned through individual investigations and court cases.

Equality, investigation, and the hierarchy of victims

That case-by-case approach left the question of equal treatment unsettled. Peter Corrigan, speaking for Ivor Bell, asked whether British soldiers who shot unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday would receive the same justice as others pursued for conflict-related offences. With no common mechanism for addressing past atrocities, investigations, inquests, police-ombudsman inquiries, and government investigations proceeded separately. The Police Service of Northern Ireland maintained a legacy unit devoted to Troubles-related crimes, with a backlog of nearly a thousand cases.

Impartiality was disputed from opposing directions. Barra McGrory, the senior prosecutor, said investigations of terrorist atrocities far outnumbered cases against the state. Critics could still ask whether that numerical imbalance itself showed bias, or whether a one-to-one ratio was the only acceptable measure. The book presents no easy arithmetic that settles the issue: the affiliation of victims and perpetrators influences public outrage, while the state’s legal monopoly on force raises a separate question about whether soldiers and police should be held to a higher standard than paramilitaries.

The phrase hierarchy of victims gathers these pressures into a single problem. If attention is distributed according to political affiliation, comparisons risk becoming a way to rank grief rather than examine conduct. Yet refusing comparison altogether could obscure unequal treatment. The book’s discussion keeps both risks in view: bringing up another atrocity may be necessary to ask whether justice is being applied consistently, but it does not answer the specific question raised by the case already under scrutiny.

The expression in the book’s account of contested evidence

The controversy over the Boston College interviews gave the argument a practical setting. After police sought recordings relating to Jean McConville’s killing, some accused the Police Service of Northern Ireland of bias against Gerry Adams and the republican movement. They asked why police were not also seeking loyalist interviews. Boston College itself said that ignoring interviews with members of the Ulster Volunteer Force supported the charge that the subpoenas were politically motivated. The British government then sought a loyalist interview, that of Winston Churchill Rea, a former member of the Red Hand Commando. His recordings were handed to police after his legal challenge failed; he was later charged with offences including conspiracy to murder two Catholic men in 1991.

This episode does not make the claims of bias identical, or establish that requesting additional recordings resolved them. Instead, it shows how demands for even-handedness became entangled with access to testimony and the prosecution of old crimes. More broadly, the book describes the past as an active part of present-day criminal justice: Belfast papers reported new cold cases, while detectives worked through decades-old events with limited resources and amid suspicions about their motives.

The book also acknowledges its own limits as an account. It says it relied on four years of research, seven trips to Northern Ireland, and interviews with more than one hundred people, while noting that some people refused to speak or withdrew. It describes memory as unreliable and says it sought corroboration, presenting the most plausible account in the main narrative and discussing disagreements in the notes. It further acknowledges that it hardly addresses loyalist terrorism, directing readers seeking a broader account to other works. Those disclosures matter to the subject: in a history shaped by disputed recollection and partisan interpretation, naming what an account leaves outside its frame is different from using that omission to erase the matter already under examination.