Inquiries hobbled
At the same time as emasculating Cory's recommendations, the Blair Government took steps to hobble public inquiries generally.
Lord Saville commented on the introduction of the 2005 Act that if the measure had been in force at the time the Bloody Sunday Inquiry was established he would have refused to chair the Tribunal.
He went on to say that he believed it would be contrary to the judges' oath to take part in an inquiry under these terms.
Clearly, Lord MacLean took a more amenable view.
What Saville and a number of other establishment figures objected to was that the act allowed the Home Secretary not only to set an Inquiry's terms of reference but to dictate what witnesses could be called; what documents could be compelled; which, if any, parts of the proceedings could be held in public; and so on. How could an inquiry restricted in this way be considered "independent"?
But the act sailed through parliament anyway. A number of Tories and independent Lords argued against it on libertarian grounds, but the bulk of Labour MPs trooped tamely into the lobbies to ensure it went through.
Manipulation and semantics
What's clear from all this is that the British authorities not only have no intention of allowing the truth of their role in past atrocities to come out, they are willing to achieve this by changing the law when the law doesn't suit them, manipulating those elements of the judiciary who are open to manipulation, and indulging in shabby semantics about the meaning of words they find ominous.
We should keep all this in mind the next time we hear the oleaginous Owen Patterson talking about the right of bereaved families to know the truth.
Everything said here about the British applies, too, to Dublin Governments from 1974 onwards in relation to the Dublin-Monaghan bombs.
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Saturday 25 May 2013
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