BELFAST: Britain does not plan to appoint an independent panel to review the deaths of at least 10 people in Belfast in 1971 in an incident that helped spark an upsurge of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, a government minister said yesterday.
The Irish government has been calling for an investigation into what it says are the deaths of 11 people in the Ballymurphy area of Belfast in August 1971 in the days after Northern Ireland introduced the policy of internment without trial for suspected militants.
The violence that followed a wave of detentions gave new impetus to disorganised IRA guerrillas in their campaign against British rule. The unsuccessful and hugely unpopular policy of internment was abandoned in 1975. “In my view the balance of public interest does not favour establishing an independent review,” secretary of state Theresa Villiers said in a statement.
Ireland’s Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who wrote to his British counterpart David Cameron in January asking that a request for the review from families of the victims be granted, said he was disappointed by the decision.
“I am disappointed with today’s news, which I know will come as a blow to the families,” Kenny said. Decades of tit-fot-tat killings by Irish nationalist and pro-British militants largely ended in a peace deal in 1998, although Northern Ireland still experiences sporadic violence.
Reuters
