Deportees should engage with conflict commission: O'Loan

by Irish Echo staff 

Northern Ireland’s outgoing Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan has encouraged republican ex-prisoners caught in a legal limbo in the U.S. to engage with the Commission on Conflict recently established in Northern Ireland.

Addressing the Irish American Unity Conference annual convention in Boston, O’Loan said the hardships suffered by the families of the ex-prisoners, many of whom face the threat of deportation, was a legitimate matter for the commission to examine.

Headed by former Policing Board Deputy Chairman Denis Bradley and former archbishop Robin Eames, the commission is engaged in a wide public consultation to determine how best to deal with the past as the peace process moves forward.

“As a people, we are trying to find a way to deal with the past,” O’Loan  said. “The Eames-Bradley Commission is consulting widely though I don’t believe yet they have spoken to people in the U.S. However, it seems to me that the issue of deportees is one which might legitimately be brought to the com- mission.”

Former republican prisoner Malachy McAllister, who faces imminent deportation from the U.S., welcomed O’Loan’s suggestion. “I would like the Eames- Bradley commission to come and speak to me,” he told the Echo. “There are aspects of my case which make it relevant to them, not least the suffering of my children and my late wife who have endured all the trauma which resulted from a loyalist gun attack on my home 19 long years ago this month,” McAllister said.

In what will be her last major address before she leaves office next year, O’Loan said some people insist that “we have to close down the past.”

“I don’t believe that,” she added. “We have to face our past with courage in the knowledge that there is nothing black and white about our past.”

Among the former prisoners at the conference, all of whom have a question mark over their continued presence in America, were Bobby Lavery and Terry Kirby from San Francisco, Paul Harkin from Chicago and Matt Morrison of St. Louis.

Kirby, who escaped from the H-Blocks of Long Kesh in 1983, welcomed the opportunity at the convention to talk with representatives of unionism who were present for the first time.

Welcoming the recent engagement of Sinn Fe?in with policing structures in the north of Ireland, O’Loan said the biggest threat to policing was fear. Republicans who go to the police fear they will be harassed or ostracized by their community while the PSNI in turn fears it will be let down by republicans if it cooperates fully with them, she said.