Introduction: Justice
Ruth Hutchinson

Comment: Be Not Deceived...
David McMillan

From the Director
David Porter

From Just Us to Justice
Duncan Morrow

Right Relationships or Justice
Brian Lennon

The Truth, the Whole Truth
Alwyn Thomson

Walking for Ministers
Graham Cheesman

Dealing with the Pain
David Bolton

The Case for Human Rights
Martin O’Brien

What’s Wrong with Rights?
Alwyn Thomson

< Past Issues Archive

THE TRUTH ... the Whole Truth ...
and Nothing but the Truth
For most of us there is an intimate connection between truth and justice, particularly justice as it is dispensed by the legal system. We assume that the task of judges and juries is to ascertain the truth of the matter in relation to the defendant and to determine whether the decision should be a declaration of guilt, followed by punishment, or a declaration of innocence, followed by release. Along the way, both are assisted in their task by witnesses – for and against – who are sworn to tell the truth. Sworn, moreover, to tell the truth without leaving bits out and without adding bits in. We treat this truth-telling with such seriousness that to fail to tell the truth as required can itself result in a witness becoming a defendant.

But already, as we think of witnesses, we begin to see that this business of truth-telling is not as simple as at first it seems. After all, in those instances where the accusations are being contested there will be two sets of witnesses. There will be witnesses for the prosecution, whose truth might well lead to a verdict of guilty, and there will be witnesses for the defence, whose truth should lead to acquittal. Whatever the verdict, it is unlikely that one set of witnesses will then be charged with perjury. And, of course, there will also be the legal professionals arguing on the one hand the defendant’s guilt and on the other, the defendant's innocence.

Truth, it seems, even in the apparently unmuddied waters of a court, is rarely simple. How, then, in pursuit of not only legal justice but that wider justice that God calls us to, should we think about truth and truth-telling?

Whose Truth is it Anyway?

It is no desire of mine to suggest that there is no such thing as ‘truth’, and that one person’s view is a valid as the next. However, even if we agree that there is some account of truth that frees it from being merely the expression of our prejudice, discovering or agreeing on that truth is far from straightforward. In order to explore this further I want to describe three kinds of ‘truth’.

The first kind is perhaps the most obvious, factual truth — that is, what actually happened. It is with this kind of truth that the legal system is largely concerned. The gathering of evidence, the calling of witnesses, the arguments of solicitors, all are geared towards demonstrating to the jury that the defendant was in this place at this time doing this thing — or not, as the case may be.

However, even here, where it appears that we can have some confidence that the truth is available to us, it is not always easy to find. Communities in conflict may well agree that shots were fired on a specific date on a specific occasion. However, it may be a great deal more difficult to establish who fired the first shot. Witnesses of equal sincerity will swear with equal certainty to two different accounts of that first shot. Beyond this factual truth, difficult as it is in itself, there is another kind of truth, more difficult yet — this is interpretive truth. Here the range of questions is beyond the ability of courts to address effectively. These are the questions that ask, “Why were shots fired? Why did they attack us? What did this incident mean? More than this, what did it mean for us, for our community? What does it tell us about them, the other community?”

Clearly, the possibility of establishing a shared interpretive truth between communities in conflict does not exist. For the very questions we ask and the interpretations we come up with rest on a series of assumptions about ourselves, and about those others with whom we are in conflict. More than this, they reinforce these assumptions and therefore reinforce the sense of who we are, who they are and the difference between us.

Moving further, we can identify a third kind of truth - this is functional truth. These are the communal or personal truths we inherit, hear told, tell ourselves, and pass on to others. These are the truths that vindicate us, condemn the other and subvert any attempt to challenge the status quo. This is a more conscious way of making use of truth — factual and interpretative — for our own ends. The use of events in the past to justify actions and practices in the present is an example of functional truth. Here, truth is used consciously and deliberately to maintain identity - both ours and theirs.

I want to illustrate these three kinds of truth through reference to the events of Bloody Sunday. I imagine most of us are aware of the questions that are still being asked as to what actually happened that day — the factual truth. Were there IRA snipers operating? Did they fire the first shots? Did the British Army believe itself to be under attack from the IRA? Were there British soldiers stationed on the walls of Derry? Did they open fire first? Was there an order from the military or political authorities to get tough? After twenty seven years, these questions and many others — questions that are primarily about factual truth, about what happened on that day — remain disputed and show every sign of continuing to be disputed despite the new inquiry announced by the British Government in 1998.

The interpretative truth of Bloody Sunday is probably familiar to us all. On the one hand the British regime confronted the demands of Irish people the same way it has always done – with force – and did so egged on by a sectarian Unionist establishment. On the other hand nationalism demonstrated its disloyalty and untrustworthiness and allowed itself to be used as a cover for terrorist attacks on ‘our’ Army. For both communities Bloody Sunday simply reinforces negative and hostile interpretations of the other. These interpretations existed long before the events of that day, and continue to exist among many in both communities who were not caught up in Bloody Sunday or, increasingly, were not even born in 1972.

The functional truth of Bloody Sunday is simply the interpretative truth put to use for our own ends. On the one hand it can be used to justify the tactics of armed republicanism. For them, Bloody Sunday demonstrates that the British State is not amenable to peaceful protest and that the unionist state can never accept nationalists as citizens with equal rights. Thus, the only option is violence. For many unionists on the other hand, the events of Bloody Sunday are used to justify a deep-seated suspicion of and hostility towards nationalism. Bloody Sunday demonstrates to them that nationalist demands can never be satisfied, for nationalists will settle for nothing short of a united Ireland. More than this, it demonstrates the extent to which nationalists are prepared to resort to violence to achieve their ends. Thus the events of Bloody Sunday function as a means of calling unionism to watchfulness and resistance.

Discerning the Truth

How does a society deal with these different kinds of truth? Should we simply give up in despair, allow the courts to settle routine legal matters and build walls out of our functional truth on the foundation of our interpretative truth? This at least would guarantee our survival as a community and keep us continually aware of the ‘enemy’. Yet, as we know to our cost, this is a recipe for despair.

What then should we do? First, we should not undervalue the significance of the pursuit of the factual truth. While factual truth is never complete in itself, that is no reason to simply give up. Factual truth, once established, can have one particular benefit. For factual truth functions ‘to narrow the range of permissible lies’. (Michael Ignatieff) Where few facts are available, all of us have space for endless creativity in self-justification. However, the more that is known of what we knew, the less scope we have for the creation of self-deceiving narratives. To go back to our earlier example, if we can determine the factual truth of who fired the first shot, from where and when, it might become more difficult to sustain interpretative truth based on other claims about factual truth. I emphasis ‘might’ because we also have to acknowledge that interpretative truth is not dependent on the details of factual truth. Clarify one detail and another will take its place. The primary purpose of the details - for example, who fired first - is usually to illustrate, reinforce and exemplify an existing, more broadly grounded interpretative truth. So an incident like Bloody Sunday does not create interpretative truth — it demonstrates it.

We must also recognise that the pursuit of factual truth, and even the reaching of agreement on factual truth, will not inevitably result in a shared interpretative truth. For, if my interpretative truth is crucial to my self-understanding and my understanding of you, then I cannot abandon it without at the same time radically redefining my own identity. To abandon the interpretative truth that sustains key aspects of my identity is to abandon that identity to a degree that few of us are able or willing to do.

We might be tempted to think that between abandoning and holding onto our interpretative truth there is some third way. However, this itself creates difficulties. For unless the whole of a community is prepared to redefine its identity on the basis of some shared interpretative truth — perhaps lying somewhere between existing ones — then the end result is not a community at peace with itself but a community where there is now a third interpretative truth being told.

Reconstructing the Truth

This raises a new question. Might it in fact be possible to establish a shared interpretative truth which can claim the allegiance of different communities, and allow for the creation of a new community with a new self-understanding whose identity is able to encompass those who were once the other, the enemy?

In one sense the Belfast Agreement is an attempt to do precisely that. While recognising the legitimacy of both nationalist and unionist identities in Northern Ireland, it attempts to construct a shared story of the future, even if it fails to deal with much of the past by handing the questions back to a series of commissions. Thus far, this new interpretative truth has managed to gain the assent — if not necessarily the wholehearted allegiance — of many from both communities. However, within both communities there are those who continue to maintain an allegiance to their alternative interpretative truths. There are, too, many more whose heads assents to the new interpretative truth but whose hearts still tell them a different set of truths.

The extent to which the Agreement does or does not deal with crucial concerns from the past raises another key question. How much truth can any society bear? We assume that exposure to the truth can only be a good thing with positive results. But why should we? We also assume that other societies that appear to be more at peace with themselves are so because they hold to a shared truth. But is this really so? Isn’t it the case that in such societies it is the ‘shared’ that is more important than the ‘truth’? A lie will do, so long as the lie is widely accepted. In reality, for all societies it is neither lie nor truth that determines their self-understanding and forms the basis of social stability. It is some combination of lie and truth — something we might charitably call myth. We might wish to extend our charity further, and define the Belfast Agreement too as myth.

Truth-Telling and Reconciliation

That truth and justice belong together is probably widely recognised. I suspect that before the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa the pairing of these two ideas might have been less common. The TRC seems to suggest by its very name that truth-telling and reconciliation are intimately connected. Certainly, Archbishop Desmond Tutu is strongly committed to the belief that the two are inseparable. However, it is worth asking if knowing the truth can or will result in reconciliation.

Truth, after all – factual truth – can divide. It can create anger. It can discover new facts to legitimise interpretative truths based on difference and conflict. Truth can wound. Truth can be bitter. It is fair to ask just how much truth any of us – individuals, communities, nations – can handle. “All nations,” writes Ignatieff, “depend on forgetting: on forging myths of unity and identity that allow a society to forget its founding crimes, its hidden injuries and divisions, its unhealed wounds.”

Could a TRC work in Northern Ireland? We need to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the South African TRC before addressing that question. First, at the level of truth the TRC has been relatively effective in exposing the factual truth of what happened — who was killed, who was tortured, who was responsible. However at the level of reconciliation the TRC’s achievements have been more ambiguous. Significant groups within South African society remain unreconciled — many within the military establishment, within the Afrikaaner community, even within the ANC itself.

Yet if a TRC was going to work anywhere it should have worked in South Africa. For it was clear that the political and religious leadership of white South Africa, as well as many others within that wider community, recognised the unsustainability of their interpretative truth long before the TRC began its proceedings. It was that recognition of illegitimacy, and of the need to create a new interpretative truth that would encompass both black and white South Africans that made the TRC possible in the first place.

However, no such situation exists in Northern Ireland. Neither community here accepts that its interpretative truth is illegitimate or unsustainable. Where both parties still believe in their interpretative truth, truth is powerless to bring reconciliation. It will remain a basis of disagreement, and the pursuit of one truth at the expense of the other may well generate renewed conflict. It is also critical to note that the Belfast Agreement, indeed the whole process that has taken place over the past years, is premised precisely on asserting the legitimacy of the interpretative truths of both communities.

Forgetting the Truth?

If, in a sense, the Agreement represents a setting aside of the issue of competing claims to interpretative truth in the interests of reconciliation, it is by no means unique. In the immediate aftermath of independence, the Irish State fought a bitter and bloody civil war. However in the interests of the survival of the state there was little attempt, either then or since, to address this conflict. This may have been less a matter of choice and more a response to the geographical presence of another interpretative truth – that of Irish Unionism – and the availability of a shared interpretative truth around the War of Independence against Britain.

Looking further into the past, in the aftermath of the American Civil War Abraham Lincoln resisted calls for retribution against the defeated Confederate states. Instead, he followed a policy driven by the principles of his 1863 address at Gettysburg. Yet the pursuit of unity and reconstruction meant that many of the events leading up to the war, and many of the actions carried out during the war were left unexplored and unaddressed. More recently, post-Franco Spain chose the way of political amnesia in its attempts to deal with the years between the Spanish Civil War and the end of the dictatorship. So it is clear that despite the current emphasis on Truth Commission, these are not the only ways in which states and peoples deal with conflicting interpretative truths after the end of a period of conflict or political trauma.

Gospel Truth?

Churches, too, have an interpretative truth. It’s a big truth. It takes in the whole of creation and the whole of time. But it does so without ignoring the particular, the here and now of the lives of those of us in this community at this time. Part of the church’s difficulty, though, is that relating its interpretative truth to those of the communities, to which church people belong, is far from easy. Often, we get things wrong. Often we prefer not even to think about it. Often it is the interpretative truth of our community that determines our reading of the interpretative truth of the church.

Given this, perhaps the best place for the church to start is from a position of humility. We have often got it wrong. We have often taken the easy option. We have often marginalised our role as members of the church in order to more fully assert our place as members of our community. We have often sewn a seamless garment from the interpretative truths of our community and our church.

A voice spoken with humility must then give way to a voice of warning — a warning to ourselves and to others. A voice that warns and reminds that we dare not assume that our truth is ‘The Truth’, while your truth is a lie. While such an attitude may be the norm, not just in our community but in the life of any community that does not put God at its centre, this is not a reason for us to concede the legitimacy of such of view, either by assenting to it or by ceasing to challenge it wherever it is found.

The voice of warning must then give way to the voice of proclamation. There is truth – interpretative truth – to be found. It is the truth we find in Jesus Christ. This is not just a truth of facts, or of doctrine, but a truth of life, a truth to be lived. It is the truth that speaks neither in triumph nor in bitterness, but in love. It is the truth that challenges and subverts the interpretative truths that are dearest to us in our community life. It is the truth that shapes lives and communities so that they embody and manifest the virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Further Reading

I would like to acknowledge my debt to the work of Michael Ignatieff and Timothy Garton Ash on these and related matters. I would strongly recommend anyone wishing to follow through on these concerns to begin with their works.

Alwyn Thomson - Research Officer with ECONI