Former defence minister Al Carns has warned the Government’s new Northern Ireland legislation will give the IRA “what they want”. The Labour MP, a former Royal Marine, said the planned Northern Ireland Troubles Bill would lead to “a string of inquests costing hundreds of millions of pounds of public money and probably no prosecutions”.
Concerns over the Bill
Ministers have vowed to press ahead with the Bill, saying it is needed to ensure that the truth is told about the deaths of almost 3,500 people during the period between 1966 and 1998, known as The Troubles. But Mr Carns warned: “Most IRA family members do not want closure – they want leverage. They want the British state in the dock, judged on terms written by those who blew up pubs and shot policemen in front of their families.
“The Bill, as drafted, hands them what they want: a legal framework that runs in one direction only.”
Resignation and criticism
Writing in The Spectator, he said the Government’s decision to press ahead with the legislation was one of the reasons he resigned as a defence minister in June, along with concern about defence funding. Mr Carns, who received the Military Cross for service in Afghanistan, said: “We are ceding the narrative to those who would reduce a complex conflict into a simple story: that the British state was the aggressor and those who served it were complicit.
“The Republican movement wants to punish the veterans, punish the British state and rewrite the history of the Troubles.”
Government defends the Bill
Parliament is set to resume debating the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill when MPs return from their summer break. It replaces laws passed by the previous Conservative government, which introduced a conditional immunity scheme that prohibited criminal investigations into Troubles-related offences, including alleged offences by British soldiers, and ended all Troubles-related civil claims and inquests.
The Government argues that the current laws prevent families from finding out how loved ones died and are not supported by every community in Northern Ireland. A Northern Ireland Office spokesperson said: “The previous government’s Legacy Act was unworkable and offered a path to immunity for terrorists responsible for the overwhelming majority of Troubles-related deaths. It left our veterans exposed and left families without answers.
“We are fixing that broken system. There was absolutely no equivalence between the lawful service of our military personnel and the sickening actions of the terrorists, and that will be clear in the Bill along with a raft of new protections for veterans.”
