‘Terrorists should not be treated as victims’

A CLERGYMAN from Sixmilecross whose father and uncle were both killed by the Provisional IRA has said he is ‘sickened’ by a proposed plan to compensate all families who lost loved ones as a result of the ‘Troubles’ in the North.

According to the advice paper from the Commission for Victims and Survivors, ‘bereavement payments’ would be made to relatives of people killed during the ‘Troubles’, including those belonging to paramilitaries.

It is understood that around 13,000 people would benefit from the scheme.

However, while the paper has been welcomed in some quarters, it has been reviled in others.

One of the most outspoken critics of the proposed plan has been Canon Reverend Alan Irwin, whose father and uncle, both part-time members of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), were killed by Republican gunmen during the conflict.

“My father Thomas was killed in Omagh in 1986 and my uncle Frederick was killed in Dungannon in 1979, but I never considered picking up a gun and murdering somebody in retaliation. I am not a terrorist. The people who killed my father and uncle were.

“That is the all-important distinction that this proposal by the Commission for Victims and Survivors fails to recognise. Again, they are equating victims with perpetrators, and saying there is no difference between innocent people who were murdered and people who accidentally killed themselves whilst trying to murder others.”

The minister claimed that the families of people who belonged to terrorist organisations should not be considered victims.

He said, “Their relatives made a choice to use guns and bombs to kill and maim people, and to destroy property. That is terrorism. This pitiful proposal is the outworking of the faulty definition of ‘victim’ established during the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which we now know was hastily constructed and was only ever meant to be temporary.”

Though no indication has been made regarding the amount which each family member would receive, a speculative prediction of £10,000 per person would see the scheme costing a total of around £130m.

Payments of £50,000 would see the scheme running at a cost of almost £650m.

Mr Irwin said, “For the families of many true victims, this proposal will reawaken deep psychological trauma; trauma that not only stems from their loved ones murder, but also from the persistent efforts to put victims and perpetrators on the same level.

“Personally, I am sickened and find these efforts to rewrite our history to give credibility to terrorists utterly gut-wrenching, but it does not surprise me. The revisionist narrative that had been fed to young people has created a generation of people that are oblivious to what really happened in this country.”

Concluding, the clergyman, who is rector of Colaghty Parish Church, Lack, said, “The people who were given those pitiful payments of a few thousand pounds back in the 1970s and 1980s need to be given the decent sum they deserve, as do the families of all the other true victims. However, those who decided to be terrorists should not be treated as victims. That is not justice.”