David Davis

I am trying to do as much damage as possible. [Laughter.] I stand to speak principally to amendment 51 and, to some extent, to amendment 49, which would stop existing paused inquests going forward. Amendment 51 would address directly the paused inquest relating to Loughgall. I picked that event out because it is the most controversial and central to what the IRA were trying to achieve. It is emblematic of many of the reasons why we should not pursue any of these inquests, but should put them in their proper place with the legacy commission, which could deal with them dispassionately. Before I go any further, I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and not just this year but in previous years. They relate to the fact that I was the trustee of the SAS Regimental Association for well over a decade—I cannot remember how many years. All parties in the debate so far, yesterday and today, have quite properly focused on the need to get closure for victims and, at the same time, to deliver justice for our veterans. Nobody can argue with those two aims. I am focusing mostly on getting justice for veterans by preventing them being punished by the process, but, before I pursue that line in detail, I will address some of the words and definitions that we are using, particularly the definition of “victim” in the operation of inquests in Northern Ireland. We all have in our minds a fairly clear idea of what a victim is, but unfortunately it is a little different in Northern Ireland. The difference arises from a deliberate decision taken by the Blair Government in article 3 of the Victims and Survivors (Northern Ireland) Order 2006, which changed the definition of “victim” and ruled that anyone affected by the troubles through loss, trauma or injury would be classed as a victim. That means that proven murderers killed in an attempt to carry out another murder count as victims. I know of nowhere else in the world where the law treats killers as victims. This issue is still relevant. In September last year, the Democratic Unionist party used a motion in the Northern Ireland Assembly to try to restore some moral clarity by adding the word “innocent” before “victims”. Most of us would think of that as a tautology, but the motion was defeated by Sinn Féin, supported by Alliance. That is incredibly central to this matter, because the word “innocent” exposes the truth and draws a line between terrorists and their victims. In response to the point made earlier by the hon. Member for Sunderland Central, “veterans” and “victims” are not mutually exclusive terms, but “terrorists” and “victims” are. That is the significance of the amendments I am talking about. In the IRA active service unit killed at Loughgall, there were any number of people to whom that applied. The clearest example was Jim Lynagh, who was guilty of at least 20 murders and probably more than 30. His nickname was “the executioner”. He was not an innocent victim by any rational judgment of the word. Why Loughgall? It was the greatest single defeat of the IRA—the one that they are most sore about and still feel the scars of. Why is that? Because it involved the defeat of what they considered their most successful unit, the East Tyrone brigade. What was the measure of that success? That so-called brigade killed 250 innocent people. The defeat at Loughgall was seen as a humiliation for the IRA, and that means that they are now desperate to rewrite history and cast their murderers as heroes and British soldiers as amoral killers. That is why they want a coroner’s inquest, rather than a legacy commission. I am afraid that in Northern Ireland a coroner’s inquest is in many ways public theatre; it is just different. The shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), made this point, but I will reiterate it. In the rest of the United Kingdom, an inquest is not allowed to pursue a case if it becomes at all apparent that it may lead to a criminal prosecution, such as the finding of an unlawful killing, but in Northern Ireland the reverse is true. Even Northern Irish judges recognise the ludicrous nature of that situation. We saw that in the Coagh case with Soldier B, where there was judicial review attempt after judicial review attempt, which led to the judge talking about the “ludicrous nature of this challenge, funded as it is by legal aid.” The judge in that sequence talked about having to make views or judgments in slow motion or freeze frame on decisions. Those were life-and-death decisions, for the individuals concerned, and they were made in fractions of a second. That is the central reason for my objection. Why are operations such as Loughgall, Clonoe, Coagh or any of the others challenged by supporters of the IRA and others? The peculiar circumstances of Northern Ireland made this sort of operation necessary. How is that? The IRA knew how to frustrate justice. They would murder or intimidate not just anybody who thought that they might be a witness, but their families. If I were in that circumstance in Northern Ireland, I would baulk at giving evidence if I felt that my family might be murdered as a result of doing so, and I would baulk at serving on a jury for the same reason. That is why we ended up with Diplock trials, which had judges without juries, because that was simply not viable. When Diplock recommended those trials, he gave the example of a man who was executed in front of his young son the day before he was due to give evidence in a terrorist trial. That is the background and the circumstances. However, the IRA did not stop there. They understood that, as well as witnesses, the other thing that matters in court cases is forensics. That is why they wore a strange uniform of boiler suits, rubber gloves, shoe coverings or wellingtons and balaclavas, because they knew that they had to deny the evidence, but that was not all. When they had carried out their crime, the cars used were frequently abandoned and burned to destroy the evidence. There are plenty of examples—I think Clonoe was one of them—where a crowd prevented the authorities from getting close to a car until it had burned out, for the very simple reason that it destroyed the evidence. Even in the case of the murder of a previous Speaker at Stormont, Norman Stronge, and his son, the IRA set fire to the house, with the same aim.