More Unfairness

On the telly they keep saying it's the festive season, by which the Australian Broadcasting Corporation seems to mean it's the season to run old episodes of QI on an almost continuous loop. To really get myself in the Christmas mood, I chose instead to watch a documentary about the people who were killed and secretly buried by the IRA.

The reporter, Darragh Macintyre, gave us detailed accounts of many sad stories, all of which Gerry Adams insisted he had no hand in, (and how thoughtful of that nice Mr Martin McGuinness, incidentally, to go all that way to pay homage to Nelson Mandela, from whom he clearly learnt so much about non-violence).

Perhaps the saddest and most utterly unfair and pointless of them all was the story of Jean McConville and her children, victims of bigotry from both sides of the divide in Northern Ireland and never given a skerrick of justice or compassion from anyone, so far as one can tell, least of all the church.

This bit of the documentary is especially poignant. It shows one of Jean McConville's many children, now an adult. All of them were left as orphans and sent off to separate institutions, simply because the IRA decided, for absolutely no reason at all, to abduct and murder their mother:

The stories of the disappeared are among the things that worry me about the compromises that resulted in a peace where the likes of McGuinness and Adams have ended up in positions of power. I know the fighting ended, but there is the question of justice. Without justice for innocent victims of violence, surely violence can be said to have won.