Professor Ian Acheson is Senior Adviser to the Counter Extremism Project.
Do you know where you were on 27 August 1979? I do. I was sitting in a car having just visited Northern Ireland’s only safari park as a holiday treat.
The news came out of the blue cloudless sky into our radio: Earl Mountbatten’s boat, the Shadow V, had been blown up in the water off the county Sligo village of Mullaghmore.
What I didn’t know in that day of horrific bloodshed, which concluded with the murder of 18 British soldiers in Warrenpoint, was that someone I knew and whose house I had played in as a small boy, Paul Maxwell, had been killed too.
The IRA claimed responsibility for what they called an ‘operation’ against ‘occupation.’ It’s worth dwelling on this description for a moment.
The bomb, planted overnight, was detonated by remote control. The terrorists must have known who was on that boat and then have concluded that the party that included Paul, 15, who was a member of the crew, and another teenager (Nicholas Knatchbull, 14) had lives that were worth discarding to get Mountbatten, along with that of his 83-year-old grandmother, Lady Brabourne.
When republicans eulogise the disgusting crimes the IRA carried out, it is always worth remembering that the unpaid bill for the sectarian utopia they lusted after with fanatic zeal itemises murdered children like Nicholas and Paul. The person on the headland above Mullaghmore, with a clear line of sight to the boat, watched the last breaths of the innocent people he was to doom with a simple electronic connection has never been found.
Thomas McMahon, an experienced IRA bomb maker, was found to be involved in the murders and sentenced to 20 years in prison in the Irish Republic. He was let out in 1998 under the terms of the Belfast Agreement, which saw Loyalist and Republican terrorists, complicit in some of the most horrific atrocities in western Europe since the Second World War, released from prison as the price to be paid for taking the gun out of politics.
McMahon has refused to engage with John Maxwell, Paul’s father, and has shown no verifiable signs of remorse for his part in rubbing out the lives of two children in the name of a new Ireland.
Why does any of this squalid and painful history matter? Because earlier this month, journalists from the Mail on Sunday reported that Michael Hayes, a former IRA commander now living in Dublin, claimed that he was the terrorist in charge of the attack.
“Yes, I blew him up. McMahon put it on his boat…I planned everything, I am commander in chief”, he claimed; Maxwell and Knatchbull were described with callous simplicity as “casualties of war.”
(True or not, this is the sort of depraved indifference to human suffering and the narcissistic grandiosity that is the hallmark of terrorists the world over; a ‘commander in chief’ who blows school children to pieces is truly a king of nothing under the sun.)
Two things emerge from this dramatic confession that draw the relevance of that awful day in August 44 years ago into the present.
First, the Irish Government remains implacably opposed to the recently-passed Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act, which has shunted terrorist crimes out of the criminal justice system and into an as-yet-untested truth recovery process with few teeth.
Dublin, however, have no such impediment and an array of draconian legislation under the Offences against the State Act to pursue prosecutions of Troubles era terrorists where there is evidence. Yet there is a continuing suspicion amongst many unionists that, throughout the Troubles and beyond, authorities in the south have been less than vigorous in their pursuit of terrorists motivated by republican ideology.
Here then is the ideal opportunity to show those feelings are misplaced, and demonstrate that justice this side of the border is immune to politics – or siren voices who would rather an inconvenient past remained buried.
Hayes boastful claims may simply be the sullen grandiose fantasies of a life lost to futile violent extremism. But they are an ideal opportunity to test the Republic’s resolve in delivering a reconciled island where the lives of innocent children amounted to more than collateral damage.
Paul Maxwell was not allowed to grow up and realise his potential. His father’s legacy was years of commitment to integrated education in my home town of Enniskillen, to put children who might otherwise have grown up and apart in sectarianism side by side in the classroom. Lady Brabourne, who perished with her grandson, helped establish an educational college in Bengal after hearing complaints from Muslim women that they were prevented from learning.
Violent extremism only destroys in the name of ideas, it cannot sustain goodness. The goodness that either emerges from – or is extinguished – by violent acts dwarves pathetic figures like McMahon and Hayes.
The principle of holding people to account for the harm they have done might be seriously compromised by the UK’s Legacy Act, as Dublin claims. If so, the Republic should take this chance to demonstrate that justice does not sleep.
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