[The Northern Ireland Troubles bill shows the British government
learnt nothing from the killing of Aidan McAnespie and the conflict in
Ireland]
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HOW MANY MORE KIDS WILL BRITAIN SEND TO WAR?  
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Pádraig Ó Meiscill
November 30, 2022
Red Pepper
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_ The Northern Ireland Troubles bill shows the British government
learnt nothing from the killing of Aidan McAnespie and the conflict in
Ireland _

For Irish unity march, London 1979, Photo credit: Gillfoto

 

David Holden didn’t intend to kill Aidan McAnespie, but he did
fantasise about doing it. While fondling a general-purpose machine
gun, aiming it at McAnespie and pulling the trigger, Holden fantasised
about killing McAnespie. Holden didn’t, however, know the machine
gun was cocked. When Holden squeezed the trigger, intent merely on
playacting, three bullets left the chamber in the space of 0.25
seconds, one hitting McAnespie in the back.

The words ‘manslaughter’, ‘murder’, ‘mistake’,
‘accident’, ‘tragedy’ have all been deployed over the years to
sum up David Holden’s actions, but the bare fact is that Aidan
McAnespie was killed not far from his mother’s door by a soldier who
wouldn’t have been able to tell Lizzie McAnespie the difference
between Aughnacloy and Amritsar.

The reason that Aidan had a machine gun pointed at him that Sunday
afternoon in February 1988 was that, according to Holden’s superiors
in the British army, the Tyrone man was ‘a person of interest’.
Potentially a terrorist, definitely a fellow traveller. From a border
village under military occupation and engulfed by intense IRA
activity, McAnespie was subject to daily harassment. Employed on a
poultry farm on the southern side of the border, hours of his working
day were often taken up under interrogation at the British army’s
border crossing. Lizzie would often accompany him through the
checkpoint because the abuse he was subject to would usually be less
obscene in her presence. On the day he was shot, Aidan was going to a
Gaelic football game.

Structures of injustice

Did the 18-year-old Holden ever imagine that, three decades after his
deployment to Ireland, he’d be dragged back to a Belfast court house
to answer for the killing of this Fenian chicken plucker, to make
amends for the state-sanctioned vendetta that led him to squeeze down
on his trigger?

The basics of Holden’s trial have been gone over repeatedly by every
media outlet with a court reporter or the subscription for one. The
former grenadier guardsman is the first British military veteran to be
convicted of a conflict-related offence since the signing of the Good
Friday Agreement. Probably, thanks to the Tory
government’s Northern Ireland Troubles bill
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The approach to date for dealing with the legacy of the conflict has
been far from adequate. Non-jury Diplock courts were just as much a
tool of the conflict as car bombs and machine guns, the fact that they
still exist a quarter of a century into a peace process, including to
convict Holden last Friday, is an indictment of our ability to grapple
with the structures of injustice in the North of Ireland. However, in
the absence of any appetite among both state and non-state actors for
a meaningful truth and reconciliation process, families have been
forced to pursue the criminal justice route for some measure of
redress.

The Tory’s Troubles bill will not only end all conflict-related
prosecutions, the only viable way to prevent more British soldiers
being put in the dock, but close off myriad mechanisms for exposing
wrongdoing. The families of the Falls Curfew dead
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for example, will never get the chance to remove the word
‘misadventure’, the quaint Victorian legal term for your demise
being your own fault, from against their loved ones’ names as no new
inquest will be allowed. Inquests already underway will be halted. The
bill, which not one political party in Ireland supports, has been
labelled a ‘bonfire of human rights
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group Relatives for Justice.

Whether the Tories succeed in getting their bill through the House of
Lords
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not, nothing can diminish the heroism of the families of the dead.
They should be applauded by anyone who professes a concern for truth
telling given the public service they have performed via their
tenacious battles with the official keepers of silence. That even a
modicum of honesty has been wrung from the state is a testament to
their perseverance.

Accountability evaded

After the verdict against Holden, the British government’s
‘veterans minister’ Johnny Mercer, holed up somewhere far from the
courtroom, tweeted
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remain committed to our manifesto promises made in 2019 [to oppose
‘vexatious’ claims against British soldiers]. David is being
supported in all respects by MOD (Ministry of Defence) colleagues at
this time.’

We might ask why Britain needs a minister for military veterans in the
first place and why there are such an avalanche of ‘vexatious’
claims and whether these two things are linked and whether avoiding
future wars of aggression might put an end to both the need for a
costly government ministry and suspect claims from dodgy natives. But
we shouldn’t vex ourselves unnecessarily.

Johnny Mercer doesn’t care about David Holden, and certainly not
about the family of Aidan McAnespie, he cares about the children of
the future and making sure they will have the capacity to use a
machine gun wherever and whenever deemed necessary by people of his
high station.

Occasionally, we ask ourselves what we have learnt from a wrong move,
a mistake, a sin even, and that is proper. David Holden has perhaps
asked that of himself in the recent past. But what do those in power
ever learn about sin? Who forces reflection upon them? Why, for
example, did the British state send the Queen’s Lancashire regiment
to Basra to beat Baha Mousa to death
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the SAS to Afghanistan to roam the country as a vicious death squad
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These things matter because this is the nature of power we’re
expected to put our faith in every morning when we open our eyes and
prick our ears for the sound of life persisting. We want to believe in
so many things – among them that the people with fingers on
triggers, not of mere machine guns, but of nuclear bombs, are
civilised, humane, cultured even, and not just well-mannered thugs who
send kids off to kill in foreign backwaters.

David Holden’s conviction may have brought some vindication to the
family of Aidan McAnespie, but it won’t wean the British government
off its addiction to using violence to achieve political ends. Behind
the veil, behind the David Holdens, waits the monstrous manicured
fist.

_PÁDRAIG Ó MEISCILL [[link removed]] IS A WRITER
FROM BELFAST._

_Red Pepper is a quarterly magazine and website of left politics and
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* Northern Ireland
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* Great Britain
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* War Casualties
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