Patrick Christys: Compare the way we treated army veteran Dennis Hutchings vs members of the IRA

Dennis Hutchings has sadly passed away. If you’re not aware of who he is, he is a military hero, a veteran who served in the Life Guard’s regiment for 26 years.

But he was also hounded to death by the British government. He’s unfortunately best known for being relentlessly put on trial for the attempted murder of a man in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Now, Mr Hutchings was found not guilty of this charge, twice. Despite this, he was rearrested at his home in 2015, when he was in his mid-70’s.

After six and a half years of this charge hanging over his head, he was finally hauled before a court in Belfast. This is despite the fact that by this time he was being kept alive by a dialysis machine, he’d been told by a doctor that he could have a heart attack at any moment and that he might not even survive the flight to his court appearance.

He then contracted coronavirus, and now he’s dead – he’ll never live to see whether or not he secured a hat-trick of acquittals. But there was yet more indignity piled on this poor old veteran before he died.

He was denied the right to a trial by jury and the right to wear his military uniform during the trial. We stripped him of his dignity, his identity, peace in his final years and then when he was in his final moments, grievously unwell, we didn’t fly him home, we left him to die alone in a Belfast hospital, with no family around him.

Contrast this, with the way we treat the IRA. It’s another one of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell’s greatest hits. They carried out secret side-deals with the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein as part of the Good Friday Agreement.

These included the assurance to unconvicted terrorists who were “on the run” that they would not be prosecuted for their historic crimes. Blair and Campbell kept the existence of these letters classified, knowing full well that the British public would find the whole thing treacherous and arguably treasonous, which of course it is.

Indeed, these “get out of jail free” letters remained such a secret that when John Downey was prosecuted in 2014 for his participation in the IRA’s 1982 Hyde Park Bombing, the trial collapsed when the defence produced the assurances secretly given to Downey by the British government.

So the IRA walk free, but our veterans, who we sent over to fight in a very dirty, Guerrilla war can get a knock on their door decades after their time in the fight, and presented with a question like ‘Do you remember what you were doing on June 15th, 1974? You’re coming with us now, sir, you’re up for a murder charge.’

The IRA have got a statute of limitations against prosecutions. Why don’t our forces. It has to be wrong. Our soldiers protect us, we don’t protect them. It’s a farce. I hope that Dennis Hutching’s legacy is that nobody has to go through this again.