Former Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has said prosecuting the IRA men who killed his RUC officer father in 1989 would make little difference given the short sentences they would receive under the Belfast Agreement.
Speaking in his first interview since retiring last September, Mr Harris said he did not believe the sentences his father’s killers would receive, if prosecuted, would “weigh the scales” in delivering justice for his murder.
He said efforts to deal with Troubles legacy cases would fail in most instances to heal the pain of victims’ families and that the Belfast Agreement failed to take the needs of victims properly into account.
“The failure to address that keeps on resurfacing there and actually continues to make legacy such a contentious space,” he told the My Identity podcast.
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His father, RUC Supt Alwyn Harris, was killed and his mother was injured when an IRA bomb exploded under their car while they were on their way to church in Lisburn, Co Antrim, on October 8th, 1989.
His father’s killing was “just a shocking blow” and it was “just like somebody had taken a white-hot poker to your soul”, Mr Harris said.
“It really just ripped me and the family in two with grief there,” said Mr Harris, who served as deputy chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) before becoming Garda Commissioner in 2018.
Pointing to the difficulties faced investigating often decades-old Troubles killings, Mr Harris said the Historical Enquiries Team run by the PSNI from 2005 found new leads in just 1 per cent of cases.
“For every hundred victims, you have one case where you have some chance of resolution, but you raise hopes, some expectations, with 99 others that aren’t going to be fulfilled,” he said.
My mother’s still alive. She’s been now nearly 37 years without my father. The magnitude of the loss – the magnitude of the ongoing loss – is such that two years in prison isn’t going to weigh the scales around that
— Drew Harris
“This year, it’ll be 37 years since my father was murdered. Really as a family, we’ve heard nothing about that for 36 years. In truth, I’m a little bit jaded about it all.”
Prosecutions now would do little to salve his family’s long-held grief, he said.
“Even if the people who murdered my father walked into a police station and confessed, it’s two years’ imprisonment – practically, what difference does that make?” he said, referring to the sentence for people convicted of Troubles-related offences under the Belfast Agreement.
“My mother’s still alive. She’s been now nearly 37 years without my father. The magnitude of the loss – the magnitude of the ongoing loss – is such that two years in prison isn’t going to weigh the scales around that.”
Following his father’s killing, he said he and his wife Jane had “worked hard ... to keep that bitterness away from the family home” and their own four children as they grew up.
Mr Harris stressed that others could “take a different view” on prosecutions in historical cases, and he respected that.
[ New Troubles legacy deal criticised by victims’ groupOpens in new window ]
Northern Ireland’s society “seems to have failed” to deal with the issues of reconciliation and remembrance, he said. Optimism that was evident in the late 1990s and early 2000s has “really just whittled away”, he said.
Young people have not learned the lessons of the Troubles and have “no experience of what it was like”, he said, noting occasions when large numbers have joined choruses of the Wolfe Tones’s Ooh, Aah, up the ’Ra.
He said he found it “nearly a bit distressing” to hear young people singing this, given “the impact” it has on him and other victims of the Troubles. Young people should know that “the great, great majority of people actually repudiated” the violence of the IRA, he said.
Praising the Garda Síochána, the former commissioner said the relationship members of the force have with their local communities is “just gold”, and far closer than that which is enjoyed by the PSNI.
Questioned about the possibility of a united Ireland, Mr Harris said high-quality policing that deals with crime in every community would do much to generate support for an all-island force, if people voted for unity.
The My Identity podcast is presented by Maynooth University English professor Colin Graham and is a part of the Arins (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South) research project between the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) and the Keough-Naughton Centre for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
