Moving encounter should lead to rebirth of forum for reconciliation

DERMOT HACKETT was 37 years of age when, on May 23, 1987, he was gunned down as he drove his bread van along the Omagh to Drumquin road. He was hit by 15 bullets from a sub machine gun and was killed instantly.

The man later convicted of Dermot Hackett’s murder was Michael Stone. Stone was a United Freedom Fighters hit-man and is most notorious for the gun and grenade attack he launched on mourners at an IRA funeral in Milltown Cemetery in 1988, killing three people.

Stone was subsequently convicted of the murders of six Catholics including Hackett and the attempted murder of six others. He was sentenced to a total of 684 years in prison. However he was released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement having served just 12 years.

In the late autumn of last year the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, spent a week in Northern Ireland as part of a project for the BBC. This involved filming six face-to-face meetings between victims of the Troubles and perpetrators of some of the murders and bombings. Tutu, who oversaw the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, was assisted in these Northern Ireland hearings by two experienced facilitators: Donna Hicks of Harvard University and Lesley Bilinda whose husband was killed in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Three of the encounters were direct face-offs between victims of particular incidents or their surviving relatives and those who perpetrated the attack in question. The other three were exchanges between people who suffered atrocities and those who committed similar offences.

The six encounters were broadcast as three television programmes under the title Facing the Truth last weekend. The most dramatic encounter, which took up the full length of the third programme, was an encounter between Michael Stone and the widow and brother of Dermot Hackett.

Stone said in the programme that the murder was carried out after he and other UFF members had participated in a meeting at which Hackett was identified to them by what he called his organisation’s intelligence unit as an IRA activist. He says he was involved in three or four dummy runs which tailed Hackett on his bread round and that he had tested the weapon used. He said that he was diverted to another operation on the day in question and he himself did not actually participate in Hackett’s killing. However he was not denying moral culpability for the death. He told Mrs Hackett that in 1985 he had admitted to the murder in order to protect another, younger UDA volunteer.

Stone spoke in particular about how he deliberately avoided anything which might humanise the victim in his mind. So when his associates gave him a file on Hackett he says he avoided reading details of the man’s family. In the hours and days after the killing he deliberately avoided listening to radio, watching television or reading the papers because the reports of his murderous handiwork would inevitably include details of the murdered man’s family. He said that for him it was essential to dehumanise the person he was setting out to kill. He trained himself to see them purely as targets rather than as people.

What Stone had avoided at the time was now sitting in front of him. Donna Hackett set out in emotional detail how Stone had robbed her of her husband, and her two children of their father. She was pregnant at the time of her husband’s murder and she had to be hospitalised until the birth. The murder had a traumatic effect on her own mother who died six months later and she told Stone bluntly that she held him responsible for this also. Donna Hackett also got into financial difficulties and her house was threatened with repossession.

Even starker than Donna Hackett’s words was the intensity with which her loss was still etched on her face, more than 18 years later. Indeed one of her daughters who had originally come into the hearing room to participate in the confrontation with Stone had to withdraw in tears because she was overwhelmed by the sight of her father’s killer.

Much of the encounter was taken up with the family rejecting the claim - suggested by the UDA at the time, and reiterated by Stone - that the man he killed was in the IRA. His family has always trenchantly denied this, the IRA also denied it at the time, and Hackett’s brother reminded Stone that he had no real basis for this suggestion.

THE television programme was powerful. It left one disturbed and discomfited, dislodged from the complacency or indifference that many of us in the Republic have towards victims of the troubles.

There was some criticism at the idea behind the programmes - although that was muted after they went out. Some critics have described it as an exploitation of the victims for voyeuristic reasons - a kind of reality TV gone mad. It was, however, a striking example of the appropriate use of the powerful medium that is television. Its real strength was the fact that it just let the victims tell their story.

Some of the most reasoned criticism has been that these encounters should have been done privately and not in front of televisions cameras. But - and I can only speak here as a viewer from the Republic - it is precisely because these encounters were televised that they are so significant.

As Desmond Tutu repeatedly reminded the participants, by agreeing to participate, they were offering assistance to those similarly affected and to the wider Northern Ireland society.

For those of us who watched it from the Republic, it offered a rare opportunity to see and appreciate the extent of the human damage which the troubles have left behind. As such it was timely. Its broadcast did much more to improve the understanding of the plight of the victims of Northern Ireland than any number of marches down O’Connell Street could have done.

More than half of the murders in Northern Ireland remain unsolved today. A very small fraction of these are, or have been, the subject of tribunals, investigations and even Dáil committee enquiries. One of the difficulties for the Republic’s audience in getting a real picture of the scale and nature of the killings has been that there has been no consistent basis to the selection of those incidents which are judged worthy of further investigation or media attention. The criteria have been as diverse as the scale of the incidents, the professions of the persons killed, or the extent to which collusion or cover-up is alleged. Some of them have been chosen as pawns in a struggle which has now moved to the political sphere - a struggle over who wins the battle for truth and history.

Another difficulty is that the suspension of moral judgement necessitated by the peace process has led to a further dehumanising of the victims. Consideration for the victims and of the human damage caused during the troubles - some of it by those now most directly involved in the peace process - has been diluted for fear of impinging on the process.

Last weekend, the SDLP leader Mark Durkan suggested that as an alternative to O’Connell Street marches, Dublin’s Forums for Peace and Reconciliation should be recalled as a venue for the victims of the troubles to communicate their story.

It is an idea whose time has come.