An open letter on language to Naomi Long from Robin Livingstone
Dear Justice Minister,
I see in response to a question from Gerry Carroll MLA you have chosen to use the relatively new PSNI/MoD phrase ‘attenuating energy projectiles’ instead of plastic bullets in a statement in which you declined to raise the issue with the Chief Constable.
“The use of attenuating energy projectiles is a matter for the Chief Constable, who is accountable to the Northern Ireland Policing Board. I am committed to respecting the operational independence of the Chief Constable and the role of the Northern Ireland Policing Board.”
I accept, of course, that you are limited in the scope of your interventions and that you are required to observe professional boundaries, and even if I personally believe that this long-running and endlessly painful saga is so pressing an issue of life and death as to warrant your stepping outside these strictures, I reluctantly accept that you have decided not to do so in this case. What I cannot accept is your decision to use a phrase which is not only a sickeningly cynical twisting of the language of physics, but which causes huge insult and hurt to the many victims of this deadly weapon.
All projectiles ‘attenuate’ – ie lose ‘energy’ – the further they travel. A kicked ball attenuates; a round from an assault rifle attenuates; an artillery shell attenuates; the rubber and plastic bullets which took the lives of 17 Irish children, women and men were attenuating and yet still they smashed skulls and splintered ribcages. Projectiles also ‘attenuate’ to a greater of lesser degree when they hit something – something like a child’s head, for instance. So it’s an entirely meaningless phrase, but it has achieved its twin aim of sounding less dangerous and being adopted by influential people.
My 14-year-old sister Julie was not a pig when she was shot dead by the British Army in 1981 – she had curly hair and big dimples and wanted to work with children when she grew up; nor were the countless other dead and maimed victims the same as pigs.
As for ‘projectiles’, they were bullets when they were first fired into the carcasses of pigs to test their traumatic effect on bone and tissue. I have learned, thanks to the MoD, that pig bone and flesh is as close as they could get to human. Lethality proven in data from these tests was subsequently covered up (‘MoD knew rubber bullets could be lethal, records show’ – The Guardian, 11. 06. ’13).
My 14-year-old sister Julie was not a pig when she was shot dead by the British Army in 1981 – she had curly hair and big dimples and wanted to work with children when she grew up; nor were the countless other dead and maimed victims the same as pigs. Thankfully, no British people have had rubber or plastic bullets fired at them, much less been maimed or killed, despite regular outbreaks of large-scale rioting in England. Not one. The MoD now, however, does have extensive data on the similarities between the damage rubber and plastic bullets do to the bone and flesh of pigs and the bone and flesh of Irish people. There’s a lesson there, if you care to learn it.
Finally, they weren’t ‘attenuated energy projectiles’ when I stood and looked at them – and the guns – in a glass exhibition case at Armed Forces Day in Lisburn with Julie’s picture in my head, while beside me smiling parents held their children up to have a look.
They were plastic bullets and plastic bullet guns. If the organisers of Armed Forces Day – which your party has voted to fund – don’t use the grotesque PR agency whitewash, I’m sure the PSNI and MoD wouldn’t be desperately disappointed if you didn’t either.
The PSNI/MoD don’t care if they insult us – they have shown that in spades over the years. But it is desperately disappointing that you have decided to adopt their language. It is their language of denial. It is their language of lies. It is their language of hurt, pain and retrauma.
Please do better.
