Why should we shake the hands of reconciliation?

The Commission for Victims and Survivors has called for a public debate on what constitutes the meaning of ‘forgiveness' and ‘reconciliation'.

What is forgiveness? Forgiveness essentially involves pardoning the wrongdoer. Pardon entails the renunciation on the part of the victim of both the demand for retribution or just punishment and claims to any form of repayment or restitution from the wrongdoer.

Forgiveness is also understood to be appropriately directed towards reconciliation between the offended party and the offender, where a significant relationship existed between victim and perpetrator prior to the wrongdoing — as, for example, in the case of forgiveness in the context of marriage infidelity.

The understanding that forgiveness should be directed to reconciliation also entails that the victim must give up resentment or moral outrage against the offender otherwise reconciliation could not occur. This is the standard view or understanding of forgiveness. But there is, however, a fundamental moral error at the core of much of the discussion of forgiveness in relation to the terrorism that occurred in Northern Ireland.

The error is the claim that forgiveness and reconciliation have application as moral imperatives to all situations of wrongdoing and specifically to terrorism. The implication of this understanding is that the victim of a terrorist act is under moral obligation to ‘forgive' and be ‘reconciled' to the terrorist.

Proponents of this view (clerics, politicians, journalists and the members of the various bodies established in Northern Ireland to ‘deal with the past' to name but a few) fail to realise that the attempt to extend forgiveness and reconciliation to situations of terrorist criminality is in fact morally and legally incoherent for the following reasons.

First, reconciliation presupposes some significant relationship between victim and perpetrator prior to the terrorist act. In the vast majority of terrorist contexts however, no such relationship exists — the terrorist and the victim are in most cases complete strangers and in consequence the notion of reconciliation in the context of a terrorist act is empty of content and therefore cannot be a moral imperative. Even in situations where reconciliation is relevant it is obvious that reconciliation cannot occur without genuine repentance on the part of the wrongdoer.

But the self-confessed IRA/Sinn Fein leaders of terrorism who sit in the Assembly and occupy positions of government in Northern Ireland have never displayed the slightest inclination to repent of the evil and pain that they inflicted on the innocent victims of terrorism — on the contrary they and their supporters glory in their wrongdoing.

Second, the requirement that the victim(s) of a terrorist act should in some sense ‘pardon' the terrorist and should renounce retribution or just punishment (which by definition is what forgiveness means) is incoherent for the simple reason that in a law governed state it is not within the legal or moral competence of the victim(s) of criminality (specifically terrorist criminality) to determine just punishment or to exercise pardon. This is exclusively a matter of due process within the legal system.

This consideration is reinforced by the moral fact that the renunciation of just punishment in the case of heinous criminality and evil (such as terrorism) is in effect a way of treating evil as something trivial or without moral and legal significance — that is precisely what happened when convicted terrorists were released under the terms of the Belfast Agreement which was an abrogation of just punishment on the part of the state.

These considerations mean that the insistence that forgiveness (involving pardon and the renunciation of just punishment) in the context of terrorist criminality as a moral imperative is not only incoherent, but a perversion of both legality and morality.

The treatment of evil as trivial is also involved in the demand that the victim(s) of horrendous evil (such as IRA or so-called ‘loyalist' terrorism) should relinquish moral resentment or outrage. Why would that be morally |commendable? The sense of moral resentment when confronted with evil is an entirely virtuous and good disposition — a person devoid of such outrage is not a saint, but a morally impoverished human being.

What is the practical import of this clarification of the notions of ‘forgiveness' and ‘reconciliation' for organisations such as the Commission for Victims and Survivors and the Eames/Bradley Commission?

The practical import is that these organisations should be immediately terminated. This would save millions of pounds from hard-working taxpayers. More importantly, it would put an end to organisations whose main purpose is to morally and legally ‘sanitise' the terrorism that occurred in Northern Ireland, which was mainly driven by so-called ‘Irish republicans'. This ‘sanitisation' of terrorism is effected by the misuse (indeed abuse) of core moral terms such as ‘forgiveness’ and ‘reconciliation’, directed at imposing some sort of moral requirement on the victims of terrorism to ‘forgive' and be ‘reconciled' to those who perpetrated the acts of terrorism.

The proper way to attempt to alleviate the psychological wounds of terrorism is for the state never to deviate from every attempt to bring terrorists to justice (this may not always be possible) and to impose on them proper retribution for their crimes.

Patrick J Roche was MLA for Lagan Valley (1998-2003) and has published extensively on Northern Ireland politics — the most recent being The Northern Ireland Question: The Peace Process and the Belfast Agreement published by Palgrave in 2009, jointly edited with the Irish historian Brian Barton

Belfast Telegraph