Meaning for Victims

paceni's avatarThe Parental Alliance for Choice in Education blog

Was political failure to compensate deserving victims of the troubles inevitable given the incoherent thinking in the 2006 Victims and Survivors Order?

 There is a clear consensus abroad in Northern Ireland that the 2006 Victims and Survivors Order No. 2953 (N.I.17) permits the terrorist who takes the life of an innocent member of the public to be deemed as much a “victim” as the unwitting individual he or she kills.   The conflation of the innocent and those who terrorised them is achieved through the definition of the term “victim” in section three of the Order.  The Order’s approach to the meaning of “victim” is such that it can apply equally to the innocent citizen who finds herself in the vicinity of a bomb, and to the terrorist who planted it.

This brief essay argues that the meaning of the term “victim” cannot consist in a definition. Moreover, the Order’s…

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There is only one law: British Law (or is there?)

The Scots have it all sewn up!

Alistair Sloan's avatarAlistair Sloan, Advocate

Paul Nuttall MEP, Leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, kicked off lots of discussion on twitter today with his suggestion that upon this fair island there is only one law and that it is British law.  Many people have lined up to correct Mr Nuttall’s understanding of law within the United Kingdom, while some people (and they are by far in the minority) have tried to argue that he is correct.  So, is there only one law in the UK?

I will assume for these purposes that Mr Nuttall was referring to the UK and that he was not ignoring the existence of Northern Ireland (Britain referring only to England, Scotland and Wales – the UK’s full title being the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland).  The United Kingdom is divided into three separate legal jurisdictions:  those of England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.  So far as…

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Twenty seven years ago

On this day, twenty seven years ago , the PIRA bomb team, which I have publicly named, [ all of whom are still alive, some active in the SF/IRA election campaign in North Belfast] killed my father and so wounded my mother that she died the next day.

Let’s focus on  my mother, Ellen Sefton, aged 66, retired. Her only connection to “the conflict ” as SF/IRA now call it, was to be married to my father and to be a Protestant. No words of apology were ever uttered  by PIRA about her  death. She was the subject of a sectarian assassination involving collusion by the State, no different to those killings suggested by republicans. In all the forty years I knew her she never uttered a word against Roman Catholics. She was ahead of her time. She  befriended gays and Jews and loved the  heady atmosphere of New York. She loved its words and its freedom. She loved her family. She looked after  her mother till she died at 92.  She was full of life. She was my biggest fan. Perhaps that’s why it hurts so much.

Twenty seven years on , the State campaign of ‘forgive and forget’ is still being waged. Useful young idiots , solicitors, businessmen etc. are tapped up with promises of places on NGOs, slap up dinners, and photographs with the great and the good; if only they would embrace the “Peace Process”. The hurt and damage that these people cause  is beyond measure.

For all of these 27 years the State has lied to me, about the big stuff, its involvement  with PIRA, with Libya -and about the little stuff, who knew what about  UCBTs. The State knows who killed my parents, why would they not? They had so many informers that  by 1990 they had over run PIRA. So why don’t they come clean? What dead hand prevents disclosure? Who protects the like of Sean Maguire? To what end?

Who could believe the British Government about any security issue, old or current? A lesson that many of us have learned and many of the relatives of  the dead of Manchester and London will soon learn. Nothing is ever as it seems and the State will always lie to you.

I miss my parents every day.

I’ll continue to fight for them till my dying breath. It has cost me every material thing  I owned  but that doesn’t matter.

If I don’t do it , who will?

And I still own myself….