Richard Benyon is a Tory MP with an overheated imagination. He is keen to prevent “bogus” legacy cases from breing investigated and those responsible charged. It’s hard not to agree with Mr Benyon. If a case is bogus, it has no place in a court room. The only thing is, how does Mr Benyon know bogus cases from valid ones? He doesn’t tell us. Instead, in what sounds like a modern-day version of a Victorian meleodrama, he talks of former servicemen being “hounded into old age”, ” taken from their families in the early hours and flown to Belfast.” The horror.
Let me explain, Richard. Whatever about guilt, pain does not go away with the passage of time.The pain suffered by the relatives of the ten Ballymurphy massacre vicitms continues, including those of the priest shot dead when trying to administer last rites to a wounded man and a mother of eight shot in the face. The same applies to the families of the Bloody Sunday victims; it’s nice that David Cameron, after decades of stalling and lies by the British establishment, delivered an apology. But if your brother was shot dead, would a simple “Sorry” be enough for you? It wouldn’t for me.
And of course we haven’t mentioned perhaps hundreds of victims of collusion, notably between loyalist paramilitaries in the notorious Glenanne Gang, MI5 and the British army. As Patrick Corrigan of Amnesty International has said:
“…We’re not talking about a security policy we’re talking about a murder policy. There must now be a full, independent investigation into the scale of the policy where the police, army and MI5 worked with illegal paramilitary groups,”
The fact is, the forces of law and order should have been the defenders of innocent citizens, not their murderers. That’s what they’re paid – by us- to do. And attempts by the likes of Richard Kenyon to pump out a mist of purple prose about “our solders” doesn’t change the fact that we’re talking about what may be killers posing as guardians. Is the British army to be exempt from the process of law, not even questioned about crimes to which they are linked? Such a notion is breath-taking in its arrogance.
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