British troops conduct street searches of people entering Londonderry in
1972. (Photo: PA)
Any fair-minded person would have been sickened by the contrast in the treatment of IRA/Sinn Fein terrorist murderers and
soldiers who risked their lives in protecting people against
them.
Bringing to an end an armed insurrection and the making of a lasting
settlement was bound to involve some hard-to-swallow deals. What has bedevilled
that process in Northern Ireland is an extraordinary naivety on the side of
successive ministers, and the scarcely suppressed Foreign Office view that
Northern Ireland, like the Falklands, would be best dealt with by a surrender to
violence – which would also improve our relations with the powerful anti-British
lobby within the Democratic Party, personified by the Kennedy clan.
Had Airey Neave not been murdered within the precincts of the Palace of
Westminster by Irish Republican terrorists, that would not have been so. He was
absolutely clear that the defeat of the armed insurrection was the essential
first step towards a constitutional settlement.
The irony and the tragedy of events was that even the politicians within
the Northern Ireland Office did not understand that despite their defeatism, the
Army and security services had the IRA by the throat and on its knees, and that
was why it sought a ceasefire and negotiation of a settlement.
As we all now know, our security service had informers in the highest
councils of IRA/Sinn Fein. Inevitably that meant that even with the knowledge of
a planned bombing the security services could not always act to prevent it
without giving away the identity of their informers.
What they could do, and I understand did do, was to methodically acquire
the evidence with which one very senior IRA/Sinn Fein killer was to have been
charged with eight killings.
I suspect that it was that which precipitated the IRA/Sinn Fein plea for
talks. All that has now been exposed about the secret letters which in effect
gave immunity from prosecution to a number of the "On The Runs" makes me wonder
about what understandings were give before the senior IRA/Sinn Fein terrorists
took their seats at the table to agree what is commonly known as the Good Friday
Agreement.
Although it sticks in my throat to see among them those who planned,
financed and commissioning of the bombing, which has left my wife in the prison
of her injuries for almost 30 years with no possibility of release except into
the grave, I have to accept that it has saved many other innocent
lives.
What turns my stomach is that our soldiers who risked their lives to save
so many others should, unlike the terrorists they fought, now be at risk of
prosecution.
That I will not accept. Norman
Tebbitt.
