‘For for some this will be seen as a smokescreen’

NORTH Belfast’s Alexandra Park boasts an unwanted claim to fame: it is the only public park in Europe with a three-metre high metal fence running through the middle of it. But this peace wall, built on the very first day of the IRA ceasefire in 1994, could soon find itself chalked off the record books.

A new gate in the interface, opened last week, means that, for the first time in a generation, children from nationalist Newington and loyalist Tigers Bay will share the park – if only for six hours a day.

Healing divisions engendered by 30 years of armed conflict has been a slow and painful process. Even if Alexandra Park’s peace wall is eventually scrapped, there are still some 50 others left in Belfast.

Sectarian skirmishes at interface flashpoints are not just a relic of the past, as the sustained rioting in East Belfast this summer attests, while dissident republicans retain both the capability and the grim determination to inflict casualties on security forces.

The Ministry of Defence’s decision to offer compensation to relatives of the victims of Bloody Sunday is unlikely to accelerate the sluggish pace of reconciliation – either political or societal – a great deal. Indeed, it could have the opposite effect.

The issue of cash for those affected by the Troubles has already proved divisive: in 2009, a report by Lord Eames, a former head of the Church of Ireland, and Denis Bradley, a former Catholic priest, suggested a £12,000 recognition payment to the families of every victim.

Despite being commissioned by the government, the Eames-Bradley proposals were rejected out of hand by unionist politicians and swiftly kicked into the long grass.

Compensating the families of the 14 unarmed civilians who died as a result of the paratroopers actions in Derry in January 1972 will cost of a fraction of the £40 million earmarked by Eames-Bradley but it raises awkward questions for the Westminster coalition.

Will families of others killed and injured by the police and the army be entitled to cash? What about those slain by paramilitaries: why should the relatives of the 11 Protestants killed by the Provisional IRA at Enniskillen on Remembrance Sunday 1989, or the 33 people who lost their lives when the UVF bombed Dublin and Monaghan in May 1974, not receive a similar windfall?

Of course, unlike loyalist and republican terrorists, the army and the police acted in the name of all the citizens of the UK. A full public inquiry into the state’s role in the Troubles might aid reconciliation but could cost billions: the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday alone cost £191m. Meanwhile, for some the compensation offer will be interpreted as a smokescreen, obfuscating calls for public prosecutions against the paratroopers who, unprovoked, opened fire on that fateful day in Derry.

l Peter Geoghegan is the author of A Difficult Difference: Race, Religion and the new Northern Ireland.