A sizeable proportion of people in Northern Ireland were not signed up to the Belfast Agreement and therefore politicians had to move “very carefully” in relation to the reintegration of republican and loyalist prisoners into society, a British minister said in 1998.
That was in December 1998, the year that several hundred paramilitary prisoners started being released under the terms of the agreement, which had been agreed on Good Friday just eight months earlier.
“There was already a huge reaction in society to the prison release programme,” noted Northern Ireland Office minister Adam Ingram when he met the group Projex 2000, which was lobbying on behalf of ex-prisoners. Those at the meeting included former IRA prisoner Tommy Gorman and UDA representative John White, a close associate of Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair.
The group also included Paul Mageean of the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), Brendan Mackin of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and businessman Ken Cleland.
State Papers: What we learned, from details of Boris Yeltsin’s Shannon no-show to Ireland’s lost moon rock
What do the 1994 State Papers reveal?
Bob Geldof warned Tony Blair that failing to support Africans at home would mean upheaval in West
Irish anti-Semitism claims ‘false, irresponsible and mischievous’, said Jewish community in 1944
Their general argument was that “prisoners’ groups do not see anything tangible coming from the Good Friday Agreement”.
Mr Ingram said that, on prisoners, the British government “had taken a lot of risks with no payback”.
“There were legitimate concerns that ex-prisoners could end up, for instance, teaching the children of their victims. In addition national security concerns would continue to be an issue even in a normalised society,” he said.
Mr Ingram also said that “every ex-prisoner does not become a good guy so we have to move cautiously”.
Mr Mageean of the CAJ intervened to say that Mr Ingram appeared to be working on the assumption that “every ex-prisoner was not a good guy”.
Mr Mageean said it was ironic that the British government “had signed up to the release of several hundred prisoners but yet would not allow them to get a job in somewhere like a passport office”. He believed that ministers could use discretion in employing former prisoners.
Mr Ingram responded that “a sizeable part of the Northern Ireland community are not signed up to the agreement” and that “we have to move very carefully, there is a much wider issue here”.
The Minister said he remained to be convinced that “specific provision” was necessary for former paramilitary prisoners. He added that it was not a “simple step to change procedures and mindsets overnight” and that there “were still dissident groups out there doing their own thing”.
Mr Cleland called for a partnership between Projex 2000, the private sector and the British government. As an afterthought he said that it was ironic that someone like the then Progressive Unionist Party leader and former UVF prisoner, the late David Ervine “may end up as a Minister in the new Assembly yet would be unable to employ civil service staff who were politically motivated ex-prisoners”.
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis
