SIX FORMER detainees yesterday launched a case against the British government on the 40th anniversary of the introduction of internment in the North on August 9th 1971.
Marking the anniversary yesterday a “letter of claim” was served on the office of the northern secretary Owen Paterson at Stormont on behalf of the ex-internees.
The group of former detainees view their action as a test case on behalf of almost 2,000 people, most of them Catholic, who were interned without trial between 1971 and 1975.
The six who are taking the case are Evelyn Gilroy, Brian Ward, Kevin Donnelly, Geraldine Rogan, Thomas Morgan and Joseph Curley.
On the first day of internment, which was called Operation Demetrius, 342 men were detained, all from a nationalist or Catholic background. In total 1,981 people were detained, with 107 of them loyalist. Internment was the unionist government’s response to the growing disorder in Northern Ireland but it is widely conceded that internment and its loaded implementation against nationalists merely served to intensify the level of violence.
The year after the introduction of internment was the worst of the Troubles with almost 500 people killed. Internment also led to the collapse of the Stormont administration, although the British government continued this form of detention which finally ended in December 1975. Many internees claimed they were tortured by the British army by methods such as beatings, sensory deprivation and the denial of sleep, food and drink.
In a case taken by the Irish government against Britain in the 1970s the European Commission on Human Rights ruled that the so-called “five techniques” applied against a number of internees were a form of torture.
The British government appealed this decision with the European Court of Human Rights amending the torture ruling to one of “inhuman and degrading” treatment. The six former internees launched their case against the British Ministry of Defence, the northern secretary, the police, and the estate of the late Brian Faulkner, the Northern Ireland unionist prime minister at the time.
The official response to the ex-internees letter of claim will determine whether formal legal proceedings will follow. Their solicitor Pádraig Ó Muirigh said the case was not about money.
“It’s really about acknowledgment, officially, that internment was illegal and discriminatory and the actions of the government at the time were unlawful,” he said yesterday. If there was liability accepted, or a settlement in these cases, it would be an acknowledgment of the wrong done to these people.”
