ICRIR Head Sir Declan Morgan acknowledges obstacles but says he is ploughing on
Sam McBride, Belfast Telegraph, February 1st, 2025
THE WORK OF THE NEW BODY ISN'T JUST ABOUT HELPING FAMILIES, IT'S ALSO ABOUT EDUCATING GENERATIONS TOO YOUNG TO KNOW THE UGLY TRUTH. SIR DECLAN SAYS HE WON'T FLINCH FROM PUBLISHING NAMES AND DETAILS OF ATROCITIES IN MOST EXTENSIVE INTERVIEW. HE ALSO SAYS IRISH GOVERNMENT MUST PLAY ITS PART
Sir Declan Morgan is one of Northern Ireland's most consequential people who remains unknown to much of the public.
Few people really understand what he's doing and fewer still grasp the significance of his role. Yet this retired judge's work has the potential to reshape our understanding of the Troubles.
In every age, there are people who profoundly alter the lives of successive generations.
Often they're not politicians, but less prominent people such as Sir James Dougherty, who, more than a century ago, drew the outline of what then was an internal administrative line within Ireland but would ultimately become the Irish border.
Morgan's work is in that category and is every bit as controversial.
Having risen to be Northern Ireland's Lord Chief Justice, he retired in 2021 but two years later agreed to head up the clumsily named Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) which will reinvestigate Troubles attacks.
Political Football
From the outset, he knew the role would make him a political football and would dismay many Troubles victims, because the commission was part of the last Conservative Government's Legacy Act, which was ferociously opposed by every political party.
The aspect of that law which was most morally repugnant to a majority of people — a de facto amnesty for Troubles killers — has now gone, something Morgan says he didn't support and knew wouldn't survive legal challenges.
What hasn't gone is the commission. What remains to be seen is whether one can function without the other.
In an interview with the Belfast Telegraph, Morgan presents his task almost as a vocation.
Pragmatism runs through Morgan's approach. He accepts that his team's work will be imperfect.
But in the absence of anything else so long after the end of the Troubles, he sees it as the only realistic option where, with each passing day, some of those who have waited decades for truth or justice are dying without either.
What Morgan refers to as “The Legacy Commission” is, he says, “designed to tell the unvarnished truth about what happened during the Troubles”.
It's an extraordinarily ambitious aim, but while Morgan is cerebral, he's not some wide-eyed outsider; he lived through the Troubles and grappled with these issues both as a barrister and as a judge.
He points to how, as Lord Chief Justice, he ensured multiple Troubles inquests were heard — a highly controversial move, with many unionists and some victims seeing it as creating a two-tier system.
Morgan saw it differently: “Those inquests primarily, in my view, were necessary to ensure that those who had been vilified as terrorists and killed were vindicated — as has happened, I think, in about 15 cases.
“What the commission is now able to do is to provide an opportunity for all victims to come and have the opportunity to have their case fully explored… and to have the truth told.”
After starting work eight months ago, it now has more than 120 cases, of which 24 have reached the investigation phase.
THREE PHASES
When families contact the commission, the process is explained to them. If they choose to go ahead, there are then three phases.
First is a cold case review of existing files and evidence to see if a prosecution is possible. Commission staff have the powers of a constable and have already undertaken at least one arrest.
If a prosecution is possible, the Public Prosecution Service then takes over.
Morgan doesn't pretend that most cases will lead to prosecutions, given their age and that many key people involved are dead. But he emphasises that this is not a tick-box exercise; already, he says they've identified evidential opportunities.
“I certainly don't think, looking at what we've got, that there won't be any prosecutions. I think there's material there which might well lead to prosecutions in a few cases,” he says.
Phase Two and THREE
If prosecution isn't possible, the second phase begins, which is about establishing what happened.
Former police officers are involved in that, as are investigators from other backgrounds.
At the end of that phase, Sir Declan, as chief commissioner, is presented with the evidence and issues a report setting out what he believes happened.
That report will be published publicly — not just to the family — and there will not be different versions in which material is censored, he says.
Awkward Questions
Awkward questions abound. Will he name killers? The default position, he says, is to name perpetrators. However, he is also required to protect both life and national security.
Reading between the lines, that's likely to mean that a living paramilitary informer won't be named.
But if there is a blanket ban on naming anyone still alive, it will again dismay some victims who hope for at least justice in the court of public opinion if not in a court of law.
The bar to triggering an investigation is exceptionally low, meaning that the commission is likely to be far more influential in shaping our knowledge of the Troubles than is widely realised.
One relative can start an investigation — so long as they fall into the definition of a “close family member” — as can a seriously injured survivor of an attack.
Isn't there the potential for that to inflict a final grave injustice on families who are left bitterly divided over whether to engage with the commission?
Morgan, who didn't write the rules under which he operates, doesn't quite answer the question, but it's one of multiple areas which are demonstrably imperfect.
Primary role of ICRIR is to help avoid recurrence of conflict
Morgan sees the value of his work not just as personal to the families, but also of societal benefit. The depravity of the Troubles will fade from memory if post-Agreement generations, many of them yet unborn, do not come to realise the horror which neighbour inflicted upon neighbour.
“For them, I think the important bit of this is to understand how awful and horrible it was and to make sure that they and others understand that we must never go there again,” he says.
Central to the commission's mission is reconciliation, although its own polling shows that two-thirds of people don't think it will achieve that goal.
There is an inherent tension between exposing the full truth of this grotesque period in our history and achieving reconciliation.
You can’t reconcile if you haven’t faced up to truth
Morgan rebuts the idea the commission might be tempted to withhold aspects not conducive to reconciliation: “We're not going to cover anything up… We can understand that may mean sometimes that those who request investigations may not be happy with the conclusions that we come to, but our task is to tell the truth…You can't reconcile if you haven't faced up to the truth.”
Some of the truth families are seeking is achingly prosaic, conveying the grubbiness of what was done to their loved one. Questions include “What did he say as he was dying?”, “What happened to an item of clothing?”, “Did he have his dinner before he was killed?”.
Morgan won't disclose individual cases under investigation, but we know they include the IRA's Guildford pub bombings and the Army's killing of 19-year-old IRA man Seamus Bradley.
Cases span full spectrum of victims
Morgan says current cases span the spectrum of deaths, from paramilitaries to victims and the security forces.
Some of the commission's investigators are former RUC officers, led by ex-RUC officer Peter Sheridan. It's not hard to see why families who suspect the police failed them in some way are ultra-suspicious that former officers from that force could be involved.
When asked if those with a link to organisations alleged to have acted improperly in a particular case would recuse themselves — as a judge would do in similar circumstances — Morgan doesn't say firmly that will always happen.
But he gives a strong sense that in most such cases it will happen, stressing that's “not because we've formed any view that in any way these people are not independent”, pointing to a court finding that the commission is independent (but it also found part of the legislation is still human rights deficient).
The confidence of families is crucial, he says, and “if it's the right thing to do, we have the option to have the cases dealt with by Peter's deputy, Keith Surtees, who was Jon Boutcher's number two on Operation Kenova”.
Role of MI5
Morgan doesn't dismiss scepticism that the ICRIR will be able to see everything in bodies such as MI5.
The commission has a power to go into MI5 and search itself — but he accepts that is only meaningful if it knows what to search for and where to find it.
He says he'll be arguing to MI5 and others that “it's their reputation that's on the line as much as the commission's reputation”.
If the commission fails, he says the effect on public confidence in government will be “devastating”.
No guarantees
“I'm not going to guarantee that we've got everything, because I can't guarantee that we've got everything,” he says bluntly.
In some ways, that the easy part. There might be difficulty persuading the state to give up material, but there's no question the material exists.
Paramilitaries never recorded crucial information; much of what they did write down will have been destroyed.
Isn't there an inherent and insurmountable imbalance in this process, I ask?
Morgan says: “I wouldn't suggest that there's any form of balance at all between the way in which terrorist organisations organise themselves and the way in which the state was organising itself. I entirely accept that these organisations were designed to hide a great deal of what they were doing and therefore the availability of information directly from them is inevitably limited as a result.”
He still believes there are former paramilitaries who have been convicted and who could “freely talk” without any fear of being jailed.
Unlike a police interview, if a suspect refuses to talk in an ICRIR interview they can be fined £5,000.
Some former paramilitaries ‘actually helpful’ in Stakeknife investigation
Morgan says he understands that some former paramilitaries “were actually helpful” to those investigating the IRA informer Stakeknife and he hopes for information from sources who might not be expected to cooperate, even without immunity to offer them.
There remain ongoing legal wrangles about the commission's powers, which Morgan wants to see resolved quickly: “From my point of view, I would just like clarity; I would like to know exactly what we are supposed to do and what we're not supposed to do.”
His more immediate focus is on the other side of the border: “The most important change I would like to see is an extension of our information-gathering powers to Ireland to ensure that, just as the British Government is required to provide information in relation to these events, we explore how Ireland might assist in doing so as well.”
Dublin needs to play its part
He accepts that would require mechanisms to protect the Republic's national security, but says there are many cases, especially in murders near the border, where families believe the Irish authorities have information and “if they [the Irish Government] are going to honour the implicit requirement of the Good Friday Agreement that those who have been through the Troubles deserve to have what has happened to them explored and explained, then they should play their part in that”.
That's especially more significant because there is no territorial constraint on the commission's powers; if a Dublin family comes to it about a murder south of the border, it must investigate — yet without access to most of the relevant material.
The Irish Government has given little indication that it intends to cooperate with the commission. However, Morgan says he spoke briefly to Micheál Martin last autumn and that within hours of Martin's confirmation as Taoiseach, he wrote to him requesting a meeting about the issue.
I ask Morgan one final direct question: if the Government were to interfere in his independence, would he resign?
Without hesitation, he replies with a single word: “Yes.”
If he succeeds, Morgan is the man who will uncover and publish much of the material which journalists and, later, historians will put together to tell the hitherto unknown story of the Troubles.
If he's obstructed and walks away, it's questionable as to whether anyone else will be able to make this work.
Either way, like Sir Patrick Coghlin, another retired High Court judge who chaired the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) Inquiry, Sir Declan Morgan is likely to be remembered not for his distinguished legal career, but for a very different job he did for just a few years late in life.
Listen to an extended version of this interview on The BelTel Podcast from Wednesday February 9th, 2025.
It can be accessed at
or, if you have a Spotify account at
https://open.spotify.com/show/0APbk8WmDsaEocbdaqrOzf
Comment
Good day Sam, I was hoping to meet up with you regarding Sir Declan and ICRIR. It is acknowledged that Sir Declan is a decent person and was well respected as the LCJ. He was actually involved in some of my cases. However his opinion and the opinions of the people who matter the most, the victims' families are completely different.
I invited him last year to a victims event in the Ulster University, which I chaired and he took the opportunity to put his case defending ICRIR to the audience, which included solicitors, barristers, students, members of the public, politicians and victims families.
Respect was shown and I put my case forward rejecting ICRIR. No one from the audience came out and agreed with Sir Declan.
I found out afterwards 4 or 5 ex-prisoners attended the event, none of whom supported ICRIR.
No one spoke out in support of Sir Declan's speech of advocating ICRIR. Yet from the audience it was obvious that by applause, questions and comments my stance against ICRIR had the support of the audience.
If possible I would like to meet up with you and give you the victim's perspective on ICRIR and Legacy issues as I did at the UU.
As we say there are two sides to a story .
