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When getting to truth becomes a costly affair
Focus on the huge costs of inquiries like Bloody Sunday has led to plans to curb their powers. PAUL DONOVAN argues it is a dangerous step.
The cost of the Bloody Sunday inquiry seems to be being used as an excuse to restrict the scope and effectiveness of future public inquiries.
The final summing up of evidence to the inquiry, prior to Lord Saville and his fellow judges writing their final report, came the day before the Queen’s Speech announcement of a Bill that will restrict the scope and resourcing of any future inquiries.
The inquiry, chaired by Lord Saville, took evidence for more than three years, much of it very revealing of the way in which the British army has operated for the past 25 years of conflict in Northern Ireland.
To a large degree, the content of much of this evidence was ignored by many in the British media who chose instead to focus almost entirely on the cost of the inquiry.
Less well publicised was the fact that much of the £155 million cost of the inquiry was due to the legal teams employed by the Ministry of Defence to defend the soldiers. A sum of £15 million alone went on bringing the inquiry over to London in order that the soldiers did not have to go to Derry to give their evidence.
The breakdown of cost rarely appeared in any of the British media coverage.
It is a sad irony that this partial view of the cost issue should now be used as a means to deny justice to other victims of the British security forces in Northern Ireland. If the inquiries bill goes onto the statute book, it will be the families of Belfast solicitors Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, nationalist Robert Hamill and Loyalist Volunteer Force leader Billy Wright who will be denied the chance of independent public inquiries into the deaths of their loved ones.
The Bill that is about to be introduced into the House of Lords will require the chairmen of inquiries to “have a regard to the need to avoid any unnecessary cost” when making any decision as to the procedure or conduct of an inquiry. The result is likely to be less legal representation, fewer witnesses and more inquiries held without oral hearings.
The requirement to have regard to costs could also help chairmen resist high court challenges to their decisions about the conduct of an inquiry.
A major shift in the balance of power between Parliament and the judiciary comes with the stipulation that government ministers will be able to withdraw funding from a public inquiry if they believe it is exceeding its terms of reference.
It will only resume if ministers believe it has come back within those terms. Such a move will at a stroke remove the independence of any public inquiry.
The idea of restrictions being imposed on public inquiries first emerged in relation to the Pat Finucane inquiry. Under the agreement reached at Weston Park in 2001, Canadian judge Peter Cory conducted inquiries into eight murders resulting from collusion on both sides of the Irish border.
Judge Cory delivered his reports on time, but the British government sat on its four reports for some months. The judge had recommended public inquiries in the cases of Finucane, Nelson, Hamill and Wright.
Eventually, the British government conceded the inquiries in the Nelson, Hamill and Wright cases, but delayed on Finucane, with the attorney general Lord Goldsmith claiming that criminal prosecutions resulting from Sir John Stevens inquiry must go ahead first.
Once Loyalist paramilitary Ken Barrett had been convicted of the murder, Lord Goldsmith declared the inquiry into the Finucane case could go ahead but new legislation would be required.
The Finucane case was unique in that MI5, the army’s Force Research Unit, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and senior politicians have all been implicated at some level.
Michael Finucane, the son of the murdered solicitor, pointed out that the six month delay in announcing an inquiry into the death of his father was because the government was consulting with the agencies of the state that Judge Cory had investigated.
Michael Finucane is convinced that the British government has all along been determined to avoid a proper public inquiry into the death of his father.
“The all-consuming objective of the British government has been to delay the possibility that a public inquiry might have to be established within any kind of meaningful time frame,” said Finucane.
Much of the contents of the new Bill, under which an inquiry into the death of Pat Finucane would be formulated, tend to confirm this contention.
Other recent inquiries, such as that into the death of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence and Bloody Sunday have no doubt added to the impetus of government to restrict the remit of such bodies.
The goal of a public inquiry, after all, must be to establish the truth of the past with a view to creating a future where the same mistakes are not repeated.
The Hutton inquiry would no doubt have helped provide a good deal of the blueprint for the new more restrictive model now being envisaged under the Bill.
Hutton stuck rigidly to his terms of reference, conducted the inquiry in a short period of time — without exorbitant cost — and most importantly produced a final report that vindicated the government.
So in the final analysis it would seem a number of factors have come together to justify — in the governmental mind — the introduction of a bill that if made law will severely restrict the remit of future public inquiries.
If the bill goes through largely unamended — with politicians holding the purse strings — then all independence threatens to be lost.
In the short term, it will be the Finucane, Nelson, Hamill, Wright and other families who lose out. In the longer term, the ability to make the state and its agencies accountable will be severely reduced.
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