Thirty-six blood-soaked hours in West Belfast’s Ballymurphy in August 1971 saw ten innocent people killed: Father Hugh Mullan, Frank Quinn, Joan Connolly, Noel Phillips, Danny Teggert, Joseph Murphy, Eddie Doherty, John Laverty, Joseph Corr, Paddy McCarthy, and John McKerr. The Ballymurphy inquest has been the longest inquiry into the conflict in Northern Ireland, slaloming the full gamut of humanity in the victims’ families’ fervent fifty-year campaign to hold the British state accountable.

Sixteen months of hearings, with over 100 days of evidence taking in 150 witnesses and 248 statements, led to the final two-hour stretch to Justice Siobhan Keegan’s conclusion on the inquest into the British State-led internment siege by the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment. Keegan exonerated the ‘entirely innocent’ victims and found the army used ‘disproportionate’ force in ‘unjustifiable’ killings. The soldiers and state upheld for five decades that they were targeting terrorists in a besmirching, painful propaganda campaign.

We can’t forget that this is the same army cell that went on to Bloody Sunday five months later, killing a further fourteen innocents and defining the conflict on the world’s papers and screens. In Keegan’s ruling, the British State was met with a rare illumination, condemned for nine of the victims, and for its ‘shocking’ failure to investigate the tenth.

Family members who had campaigned for many years listened to the momentous ruling. Some stood outside the Laganside Courts with portraits. A further seventy gathered in Ballymurphy’s Corpus Christi Church to attend a mass and watch the over 600-page report outlined. Scores of the victims’ relatives have died during their decades-long campaign, in the conflict or of illness and age.

‘We identified my daddy by his curly hair,’ Daniel Teggart’s daughter Alice Harper said. ‘Fourteen times they shot him. The next day they blackened his name and called him a gunman. Two years later, my brother Bernard, with a mental age of nine, was killed by the IRA. We want no amnesty for anyone.’

‘I am exhausted, but I am not done,’ Carmel Quinn, the sister of 20-year-old John Laverty, who was shot in the back, told BBC Ulster. Never did the bereaved lose their dignity or determination in the face of an omnipotent power that sought to vilify them.

On the Rebel Matters podcast, Joan Connolly’s daughter Briege Voyle spoke intimately about the fight to clear her mother’s name—her dead body was swabbed for gunpowder residue when soldiers claimed she toted a gun. ‘We had the bulk of what we know now 18 months after Ballymurphy,’ said Briege. ‘We gathered evidence by knocking on people’s doors. People stood on their doorsteps and told us, crying.’

Though finally vindicated, Carmel and Briege represent a community of the bereaved that stretches grimly beyond Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday, with a wide spectrum of killings in the North still unanswered for. If Boris Johnson and his government has anything to say about it, they’ll stay buried.

What does one do with a singular truth they, we, the state, knew all along? Fifty years to a semblance of justice is far too long, but the quest for reconciliation and the British establishment’s war crime reckoning continues. We can’t cleave this moment from the state’s winding warpath towards soldier amnesty.

As many as 200 soldiers could face prosecution for alleged crimes between 1969 and 1998, and the Stormont Agreement enshrines a promise to address legacy issues. But last week, the Queen’s Speech doubled down on previous promises of the Tory government to protect Troubles veterans.

‘Measures will be brought forward to strengthen the devolved government in Northern Ireland and address the legacy of the past,’ she read. Though vague, the statement speaks to Johnson’s leaked plans to legislate for a statute of limitations which would block prosecutions for criminal acts committed before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

This would mean those like the Ballymurphy families would lose any chance at accountability. The Queen’s Speech recalled last year’s statement, in which the government implied cases pursuing soldiers like in the North were ‘vexatious’ – as if pursuing justice for state-sanctioned murder is a buzzing fly in the face of the establishment.

We can run the bloody numbers and taut stretches of time that bind the Ballymurphy victims’ families, but perhaps more constrictive is the sinister lexicon used by the British establishment to conceal, to degrade victims, and to protect its arbiters. Boris Johnson’s paltry Downing Street statement reflected on ‘ending the cycle of reinvestigations’.

‘Terrible errors’ is how Secretary of State Brandon Lewis chose to describe the army’s actions on that day in a second-hand apology for Johnson in the Commons – as if the execution-style shooting of the already wounded Noel Phillips behind the ears was a blunder, or the shooting mother-of-eight Joan Connolly four times in the face and body was a lapse. Johnson’s letter to the families has provoked little but anger.

The re-narrativising of Britain’s war crimes in the North is a Tory checkmark, done most deftly by former defence minister Johnny Mercer – he’s said ‘there will be blood on the carpet’ should soldiers be prosecuted. Last week, he tweeted about former soldier Dennis Hutchings: ‘He is due to stand trial in September for something that happened 46 years ago in Northern Ireland. Everyone else present at the time is now dead.’

The ‘something that happened’ was the shooting of John Pat Cunningham, a 27-year-old man with learning difficulties, in the back as he ran away from an army checkpoint in Tyrone.

Before that, it was the former secretary of state Karen Bradley calling soldiers’ actions ‘dignified’. Before her, Theresa May attacked ‘activist left-wing human rights lawyers’ who ‘harangue and harass’ soldiers. Former defence secretary Gavin Williamson offered to fund legal costs for soldiers who he said ‘served with courage and distinction to bring peace’. These statements compound a cover-up endemic with vulgar nationalism.

Boris Johnson’s response and the pursuit of amnesties is an insult to these families and all of those whose right to justice he intends to legislate into implosion. It is all the more interesting that as Arlene Foster steps down from her position as first minister and leader of the DUP (a party that has stood against retroactive investigations into soldiers), she tweeted to ‘commend the families for their tenacity’.

A statute of limitations on prosecutions would affect anyone with loved ones killed across the conflict. Improving the handling of legacy issues is tantamount to shaping a hopeful, radical future for the North, especially given the current political tumult that could collapse Stormont again. The North’s politicians fail to heal the intergenerational trauma – though for some this failure is in their interests.

A DUP intent on stoking division while divorced from its grassroots and a frustrated Loyalist base compounds the motivations of last month’s rioting in Belfast, and the tightening grip of paramilitarism is clear.

Not reckoning with a violent past or with present failings emboldens the paramilitarism which led to journalist Lyra McKee’s murder in 2019 by dissident Republicans: her family recently launched a campaign for information. Intergenerational trauma is stitched into the fabric of the political and social systems. Communities are disempowered by the justice system, victimised by police forces, and let down by systematic lack of investment in community services.

This unresolved trauma is metabolised in people’s social and mental states and passed down to generations that did not live through conflict. In post-GFA Northern Ireland, young men, particularly from working-class areas are a group exposed to conflict-legacy issues like the recent interface violence and involvement in and threats from paramilitaries, while the children of victims and survivors are vulnerable in the aftermath.

These groups have increased rates of mental health and substance abuse issues. Children directly exposed to the Omagh bomb had significant levels of PTSD, while the Belfast Youth Development Study reported that 77 percent of contemporary adolescents had experienced community violence which affected depression and substance misuse. The North’s suicide rates are nothing short of an epidemic. A semblance of hope and care can be found in grassroots community groups and relatives groups.

And the degradation of those who pursue justice continues. Last week, the police ombudsman in Northern Ireland found police officers who killed four people at the beginning of the Troubles were not appropriately investigated. Their acts included the killing of nine-year-old Patrick Rooney, the first child to lose his life in the Troubles. The family of Joe McCann have vowed the fight is not over, after soldiers A and C were acquitted of his murder this month. Four cases involving the prosecution of Troubles-era soldiers are at pre-trial stage.

The state is the perpetrator, not the arbiter of justice people deserve. The Ballymurphy ruling is a triumph, and the families continue calls for a formal investigation, for fulfilment of the Stormont Agreement, and for an apt apology; meanwhile, the brutality of the past lives on in the British establishment’s active resistance to investigating the atrocities it commits and conceals, protects and propagandises.