Dean Godson: ​More needs to be done to challenge the easy ride that republican revisionism has been given

This memory war is aided by the dominance in the graduate class in the UK and Ireland of ‘luxury beliefs’ - a strong commitment to radically progressive beliefs that confer status on the holder but impose the costs on others.

In Northern Ireland this dominance of progressivism is reflected in the two universities in the state-centred focus of much of the work on transitional justice and in much of the work on conflict resolution; this supports an assumption of an unfinished peace process where the Union and unionists inevitably end up portrayed as being on the wrong side of history.

This has been aided by the Blair government’s definition of a victim in the Victims and Survivors (Northern Ireland) Order of 2006 - one of the concessions paid by the British state for the IRA’s decommissioning declaration of 2005.

It gives dry bureaucratic expression to the state’s willingness to accede to the IRA’s definition of reality.

A victim is ‘someone who is or has been physically or psychologically injured as a result of or in consequence of a conflict-related incident.’ Thus, terrorists killed or injured whilst carrying out attacks are ‘victims’ on a par with the hundreds of innocent men, women and children killed or maimed in terrorist attacks.

Memory activists on the nationalist side have been able to rely on British government sponsored reports and investigations for legitimisation, starting with Patten’s description of RUC Special Branch as a ‘force within a force’ and subsequently on the reports of successive Police Ombudsmen to put the historical focus on alleged RUC transgressions.

More sinisterly, some felt an intention to legitimise (or at least overlook) the criminal activities of terrorists, thereby paving the way for their integration into the political mainstream. This has been aided by one-sided investigations into allegations of criminality by the security forces that seemed to accord them parity of esteem with convicted terrorists.

The rewriting of the history of the Troubles to create a narrative of a ‘dirty war’ in which there was often no moral distinction between the actions of the security forces and paramilitaries has gained a remarkable hold on public perceptions of the conflict, even amongst unionists.

One of the striking features of Northern Ireland’s memory wars has been, until recently, the withdrawal of the British state from the battlefield of these memory wars. Following the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023, the British government is now commissioning an official history of the Troubles through the opening of state archives to historians who must carry out their work ‘independently of the influence of any other persons and in such ways as will secure the confidence of the people of Northern Ireland in them and their work.’

It is unlikely, given the continued political and ideological conflict over Northern Ireland’s very right to exist, that any official history - no matter how rigorous, comprehensive and independent - will secure the confidence of a substantial sector of Northern Ireland’s population who vote for a party which proclaims that there was no alternative to the Provisional IRA’s campaign.

What it could contribute would be to, in the words of Michael Ignatieff on the functions of truth commissions in other jurisdictions, ‘reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse.’

The Kenova Report into the agent ‘Stakeknife’, which has cost up to now nearly £40 million, has resulted in no prosecutions and led to the overwhelming media consensus that ‘British spy in IRA cost more lives than it saved’. It is reasonable to conclude that historians with access to all the material that Jon Boutcher had - as well as a brief to consider the full context going back years - will not come up with such a contentious and lame conclusion.

After all, the intelligence penetration of the IRA is widely believed to have contributed significantly to the “cessation” of August 1994. How many lives did that save?

The challenge to the republican-leaning rewriting of history has begun but largely in the work of individual academics. For example, Henry Patterson’s Ireland’s Violent Frontier established the importance to the Provisionals of being able to use the territory of the Republic to maintain their terrorist campaign into the 1990s.

He demonstrates how successive Irish governments, with the partial exception of the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition 1973-76, refused to take the issue of Provisional IRA exploitation of their territory seriously. A high price for this was paid by the Protestant communities in the border counties.

By the time of the Anglo-Irish Agreement more than 75 people, the vast majority Protestants, had been murdered in Fermanagh by terrorists while only one person had been convicted. There was no doubt in the minds of local Protestants that a campaign of ethnic cleansing was being waged against them.

The publications, conferences and lobbying of the Malone House Group have also challenged the one-sided media and academic output on legacy.

The challenge to republican hegemony on legacy has also come from grassroots victims’ organisations and in particular the South East Fermanagh Foundation which has produced a range of victims’ testimonies in books and CDs and have done much to spread awareness in regular media appearances by representatives like Kenny Donaldson of the ravages inflicted by the Provisionals.

Both the academic and grassroots challenges to the easy ride that republican revisionism has been given in local and national media have been taken up in this newspaper - now the only unionist newspaper.

This raises the issue of why the two main unionist parties have left it to a few academics, this newspaper and victims organisations to do the heavy lifting on legacy.

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Lord Godson’s article is based on his David Brewster Memorial Lecture ‘Unionism and Orangeism Before and After Brexit’ delivered on April 8, 2024. He is the author of ‘Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism’ (2004).