Member

I want to talk about amendments 44 and 47 and new clause 21. Amendment 44 is about following orders. I was a teenager when I deployed during the troubles, and I spent 18 months in Belfast. I was not naive, but I did not know about the political situation. It was completely irrelevant to me. I knew what I had to do. I knew the rules of engagement. We have heard about the training that I would have had as a teenager, and the intelligence briefs I had would have been the best available at the time. I was a young lad, but I was experienced and everybody around me was the same. We knew exactly what we had to do. I did not think, “Is that person a republican or a Protestant? Are they part of the IRA or the Irish National Liberation Army?” Whatever it was, it did not matter: if that person walked around the corner with a rifle, the same rules of engagement applied, no matter what their beliefs or what they were trying to do. There was no politics in it for me.