A history of shame

Lethal Allies British Collusion in Northern Ireland

Anna Cadwallader is a former journalist who has delved into the grim history and much of the detail of the murders in Northern Ireland, particularly between 1970 and 1978. Her book says only one thing; that successive British governments colluded with loyalist paramilitaries in whatever form they took.

Case by case, we are helped to imagine what it must be like to be in your own home watching something happily banal on television when live bullets are fired through your door, your house, and then… you. No one will ever read a book that illustrates more vividly, in sequential gore, what it must be like to be murdered or, worse, to see your wife and child randomly slaughtered.

If you have grown up seeing news broadcasters listing the acronyms that depict various units in Northern Ireland: police, military, parties, freedom fighters or whatever — many representing an extreme view that justifies cowardly carnage — you may also have found these reports grey, intrusive, cold and depressing. All British governments positioned themselves as honest brokers between “two irrational religious tribes”, when they were undeniably locked in to the loyalist protestant cause, and pitted against the republican catholic one. The police were lax in their investigations, the military not only bred but wooed the killers and the judiciary did not prosecute effectively and handed down sympathetic sentences which were invariably reduced.

The British are not the first nation to make active use of surrogates when carrying out the dirtier aspects of conflict. But they were extremely adept at it. They had plenty of practice in Kenya with the Mau Mau where insurgents were turned against their own side. And in the Yemen where Lt Col Colin Campbell, also known as Mad Mitch, wreaked havoc by letting the 1st Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders loose against ‘dirty smelly people’, which “translated in practice into sniper-shooting anyone who looked like a threat”.

Many of the senior appointees in Northern Ireland were also former British colonial officers or officials and it is not surprising that similar tactics were used in Northern Ireland that had proved effective elsewhere. The HET (Historical Enquiries Team) that reported to the PSNI (Police Service in Northern Ireland) may have made more credible retrospective judgements, but proper truth and reconciliation has never really taken place. One of the killers, Robin Jackson, was the beneficiary of multiple legal rulings enabling him to pursue a career as a contract killer throughout the ’70s and ’80s before dying peacefully of lung cancer at the age of 48.

A jolly Christmas read this is not.