Strabane Troubles trauma worker slams victims' commissioners

Director of the Strabane based Koram Centre Jeff Barr was providing evidence to the Stormont OFMDFM committee on behalf of the Western Trauma Advisory Panel last week when he made the hard-hitting comments.

He said the Commission for Victims and Survivors' (CVS) view that the TAPs be dissolved was wrong because the commissioners had not come up with a viable replacement proposal.

He explained how the Western area TAP recently put 24 ex-UDR men through a 10-week history course that involved visits to the Boyne, Kilmainham jail, Collins Barracks and Glasnevin Cemetery.

Mr Barr said the United Services Club in Londonderry, the Regimental Association of the UDR in Coleraine and Relatives for Justice representing the Omagh bomb victims all worked with the local TAP on that project.

"We also took them away to Poland, where some of the rebels of the 1798 rebellion had been sold off to the Polish Tsar," explained Mr Barr.

"The culmination of that project is that not only are they working with groups that they would not normally have worked with but they are travelling back and forth to places such as Dublin.

"They openly stated that, at one time, not only may they have been court-martialled for doing that but they would have felt under threat of being killed.

"That is the type of work that we have sometimes done that had to be done under the radar. Some of those people are now working with groups of victims and survivors that they would not have gone into the same room with."

But Mr Barr left the committee with no doubt about the strong views of members of the trauma panels.

He said: "It is our view, and that of TAP members, that the recommendation by the CVS to dissolve the TAPs is not only wrong but is a retrograde step, when one considers that the CVS, by its own admission, has not come up with a proposal for a model to replace the TAPs.

"Our view is that the TAPs should not be dissolved; if anything, they could be improved in order to complement the role of the new victims' service.

"We are grateful to OFMDFM for the current funding extension. We confirm that, with the CVS, the TAPs are willing participants in a transitional working group, as requested by Ministers, to look to the future and to beyond the implementation of the new victims' service."

The Western TAP began by training groups in the areas of counselling and psychotherapy to be able "to better manage trauma and to assist people to move between the groups and into organisations such as the Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation," explained Mr Barr.

"It also enabled access to greater services through the community mental health teams. Over the years, we have put quite a bit of store in building a rapport with GPs, and some of that is coming to fruition now, he told the committee.

Backed by members of the other regional TAPs he said that although OFMDFM money was coming down eventually, it was not coming down quickly enough.

"Some groups lost key staff as a result, and that was a major concern for them," he said. "They had big worries about what the future would hold."

He said "the be all and end all is victims and survivors" and that the TAPs and that there were strengths in the model and in the approach of working together.