Veteran mobilisation, prosecutions, and the contested legacy of the past in Northern Ireland: Deconstructing the 'Witch-Hunt' Narrative

This chapter critically examines how criminal prosecution for historic state violence in the absence of overarching transitional justice mechanisms has become one of the most contested issues in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Rather than seeing the ongoing prosecution of a small number of former state actors as ‘normal’ if somewhat belated criminal trials for conflict related offences, critics have dismissed such trials and related investigations as a ‘witch-hunt’ driven either by former ‘terrorists’ or their supporters or politically partial human rights activists. Analysing a range of factors including the protests of supporters of the former soldiers, this chapter unpicks the ‘witch-hunt’ narrative as propagated by military veterans, the right-wing media and UK politicians. The chapter presents empirical evidence to demonstrate that the ‘witch-hunt’ narrative is legally and factually untrue. It then explores how the narrative, although deprived of any empirical foundation, nonetheless took root in the ideological, political, and socio-cultural sensitivities that the British ‘imagined community’, the UK Government, and military veterans themselves have around the legacy of the British Army’s role and conduct in Northern Ireland. These sensitivities have created an abiding sense of injustice that has mobilised both internal and external audiences in performative and highly visible protests demanding an end to legacy case prosecutions and a formal amnesty for aging former British soldiers – a variant of which has now been enacted into UK law.