Said the Spider to the Fly

By AM Friday, October 18, 2013

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During the year I jotted down a few notes about the self serving PSNI claim to be tackling the past in a way that is judicious and by implication not politically selective. The intended piece fell through the cracks. But watching the antics of the force trying to bamboozle its way through the trial of Brendan McConville and John Paul Wooton, caused me to revisit it.

Whatever hopes many may have had about a new beginning to policing, continue to be dispelled by the PSNI inexorably moving back into RUC mode. Now seemingly driven by those who cut their incisors in the days when the force was led by Ken Newman, the PSNI seems hell bent on exacting retribution from those who in the midst of violent political conflict broke the laws that the RUC was tasked with enforcing. On example is its April decision to press charges against a North Belfast man, Michael Burns, for attempting to kill a prison officer in 1977. A long time ago and many wonder why the cops bothered. If there is consistency it is to be found only in the consistency of the force’s political bias.

1977 was a violent year. Gerry Adams had just been released from prison and was reshaping the IRA in order to render it fit for purpose to fight a long war. Prior to Adams becoming the IRA’s chief of staff, the British queen visited the North in circumstances where IRA leaders were not fawning over her. Prison staff were being targeted in response to the decision by the British government to remove special category status. The violent gusto with which the prison service set about the job didn’t endear them to the comrades of imprisoned republicans. The regime galvanised IRA volunteers into exacting a price for prison staff brutality. Strangely, one of the more enlightened members of the prison service to lose his life was Desmond Ervine, who was gunned down shortly after expressing a view on television that it was hard to see the prisoners in his custody as criminals. There was not much nuance about IRA target selection.

It is clear that the PSNI is not, contrary to what Matt Baggott suggested, intent on exclusively investigating fatalities rooted in the Northern conflict. Michael Burns was not charged with killing anyone. Despite the category of non fatal offences against the person now subject to investigation as well, the probes are as usual one sided and politically directed.

Ian Cobain in his startling book Cruel Britannia demonstrates very clearly that in 1977 - the year in which Michael Burns is alleged to have committed his offence - the RUC thug Bill Mooney was orchestrating a policy of torture that was being conducted on a daily basis in Castlereagh. MI5 secretly recorded the torture which means there is evidence. This could show that there are innocent people who had confessions brutally extracted from them.

But there is almost certainly no investigation into this. Nor is there likely to be one. The PSNI is deliberately policing the past of others but not the past of its own. It is trying to confer legitimacy on RUC behaviour and is seeking to erase the fact that a major component of the political conflict was law enforcement.

So when we are asked by the great and the good to both respect and defer to the rule of law, we should recall the view of the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis expressed in the 6th century BCE: the law is like a spider’s web - strong enough to catch the weak but too weak to catch the strong.

The rule of law or the law of the rulers?