Remember, Remember, the 5th of November... Paper Trail is 10 Years Old
Author Ciarán MacAirt reviews the historic work of the charity, Paper Trail, over the last 10 years.
The charity Paper Trail Legacy Archive Research is 10 years old!
On 5th November 2014, the charity Paper Trail was officially constituted in Belfast to support victims and survivors of the conflict that raged across Ireland and Britain from 1966.
There should not have been a need for the charity but, unfortunately, there was.
We were in a post-conflict society for half a generation and our political leaders were on the cusp of signing the Stormont House Agreement the following month.
As well as identity issues and welfare reform, the Stormont House Agreement had provisions for dealing with the legacy of the conflict.
We now know, of course, that the British government had little intention of justly addressing the legacy of its past and supporting the basic human rights of all victims and survivors of the conflict.
Instead, the British government denied and delayed victims at every turn, and then unilaterally decided to enact its pernicious Legacy Act which is its latest attempt to bury its war crimes in Ireland and to protect its killers.
Families fight for scraps of truth, justice, and acknowledgement from the British and Irish states to this day.
Paper Trail has been working with some of these hero families for 10 years now.
Follow the Paper Trail
With the great support of our Board and its Chair, Niall Ó Murchú, I built Paper Trail in my spare time for the first two years of its existence although we were working with family campaigns for many years before this.
Based on the success of this work, we first secured funding for Paper Trail in late 2016 from the Executive Office and then the Victims and Survivors Service and Peace IV from 2017.
Paper Trail offers free advocacy support to victims and survivors and the main reasons people seek its support remain: (1) legacy archive research and (2) training in truth recovery and recording lived experiences.
Rather than waiting on governments and statutory bodies letting us down again, Paper Trail helps families target and retrieve new evidence that the states buried in archives for decades. We share our skills with families and show them how they can find evidence, tell their own stories, and advocate for themselves.
Despite the very unstable financial, political, and societal landscape since then, Paper Trail continues to learn, share its learning, and support families across these two islands and beyond.
Paper Trail has recently secured funding under PEACEPLUS which will enable us to continue our work hopefully for another 4 years.
Let’s have a quick review of that work over the last 10 years.
Paper Trail Review: 10 Years
In 10 years, Paper Trail:
Supported over 350 victims and their families;
Supported over 350 learners and beneficiaries of our services;
Investigated over 120 individual cases accounting for over 220 lost lives and 440 injured victims;
Retrieved and collated over half a million targeted legacy archives from across Ireland and Britain.
Developed websites, social media networks and our new e-learning platform, Paper Trail Online.
Paper Trail’s legacy archive research has proved so successful that we provided new evidence for:
Over 60 legacy inquests;
Scores of civil cases and judicial reviews;
We have also published:
Books and expert reports
Hundreds of thousands of words
However rewarding and valuable, our work is laborious, time-consuming, and costly but we did all of this with the support of families and volunteers from across the community over the last decade.
You can follow us here and on Paper Trail’s website.
Victims and survivors can now also join Paper Trail Online and learn for free.