My name is Ciarán MacAirt and I’m the founder of the charity Paper Trail (Legacy Archive Research). Paper Trail exists to offer free and independent advocacy support to victims and survivors of the conflict across these two islands.
It is a great privilege for me to speak here tonight in Pettigo.
During the course of my work, I meet families from across the community who have had to suffer so much but have received so little support from the authorities. What I have learned is that no community has a monopoly on suffering as we all bleed and grieve the same.
I am daily inspired by families who somehow find the strength not only to raise loving families after such trauma but also to campaign and persevere for justice even in the face of a monolith of state lies and grave injustice.
What drives these families, again, is the same in us all. It’s love.
So, despite all of this hurt and suffering, I don’t take home the horror and the terror of every death. What stays with me and what keeps me strong are the human love stories.
Michael Leonard was a much-loved member of his family and his community. He was getting groceries for his mother when RUC officers murdered him before he reached the sanctuary of the border. He was an unarmed civilian and he was an Irish citizen. The British Armed Forces lied to Michael’s mummy and daddy, to the public, to the Irish Government and to the Coroner at the original failed inquest.
This injustice remains. Michael’s love story overshadows it. His story stands out, not for what his family lost and what they suffer. But what remains, what flourishes and grows.
It has been my great honour to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Michael’s family as they have travelled the length and breadth of Ireland to tell his story. They have marched with thousands of other families in Belfast, and they have knocked on doors in Dublin so loudly that Government ministers have taken heed and now know Michael’s story.
What drives Michael’s family is love. And what nourished them and kept them safe from those dark days in 1973 is the love of friends, family and the local community.
We are lucky tonight to enjoy the company of many of those who kept and keep the Leonard family safe. Our local politicians from across the party-political divide,
including close family friends, the legal team who worked with the great Pat Fahy; our churches and local community groups; and you – your presence here tonight is testimony to that love. Never underestimate it.
For while Michael’s family has been campaigning with dignity, the perfidious British government has been rushing through a Legacy Bill that is designed to bury its war crimes in Ireland and protect its killers in uniform – killers like the RUC gang that murdered Michael.
Half a century is too long for any family to fight for truth, justice and acknowledgement.
So, your support is needed just as much now as the British state knows the game is up and it needs to legislate laws that would embarrass tin-pot dictators in so-called third world countries.
If the last ten years have taught us anything – never mind the last fifty – the British state has no shame.
This is what the Leonard family face today and what they have faced for fifty years since Michael was ripped away from their loving embrace.
Nevertheless, Michael’s family will not take home the bitterness and hatred in the hearts of those who murdered Michael or those who would deny them equal access to due process of the law.
They will take home with them great strength and hope from your support tonight. They need it now again just as they did half a century ago, but they will prevail once
more despite the cover-up and intransigence of the British authorities.
I believe the love of the Leonard family and the support they have from you are more powerful than anything the British state can throw at us. The British state is running
scared, and it is running scared because of the indomitable strength of families like Michael Leonard’s.
Right is might. And Michael Leonard’s family is right.
It has been a great honour for me to attend this commemoration and celebration of Michael’s life as I am surrounded by love. His family, like other families I have been honoured to meet, are my heroes.
I think everyone here tonight will agree with me that they have done Michael proud and have shown the world just how much he is loved and missed.
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