GEORGE Hamilton was not the first to compare the impact of the past to a tsunami.
At a meeting with MI5, six maybe seven years ago, as someone described the past as being explosive and likely to erupt like a volcano, one of the big chiefs interrupted to say that it would be more like a tsunami because it would come from below and would sweep all and sundry aside.
The tsunami has struck. The police, not before time, have admitted that it has the power to destroy them. It is either the past or the present but both together are beyond their resources and ability.
The police ombudsman is telling us that he hasn’t the money and it could be decades before he could begin to open some of the files.
The coroner’s courts are more or less broken and Lord Justice Weir, unlike many of his predecessors, has become part of the tsunami, knocking aside anything that looks like a legal, financial or political excuse. And all of that is only for starters.
The political dilemma about legacy always boiled down to a judgment call between the wisdom of confronting the complexity and the rawness of the past set against the possibility that time, death and human indifference would be the best way to allow the new politics to move into a ‘past free’ space.
The new space has not been realised and even though the political structures are more secure and politicians have found a way to keep Stormont (and their jobs) the legal and policing structures are suffocating.
Hence the backlash from the criminal justice system; railing against the politicians for their failure to agree and implement a comprehensive approach and for dumping the mess in their lap.
It was a sight to behold Arlene Foster bound clear of a position that the DUP had huffed and puffed about for years.
They were prepared to stand in the way of pensions and any compensation for victims and survivors if it was implemented on the back of the 2006 definition of a victim.
It was the constant refrain of Jeffrey Donaldson and every other DUP man and woman who took to the airwaves.
Arlene reversed that last week when she signed up to Eileen Evason’s proposals on welfare.
Evason gives extra points to victims using the 2006 definition, which doesn’t distinguish between categories or hierarchies.
The DUP insisted they would get the definition changed.
There never was any likelihood of such a change but there is certainly no chance of changing what you have already accepted.
Arlene changed it last week so that minister Morrow could get on with implementing it. There wasn’t a squeak.
The other big row is about disclosure. It is hard to know if Theresa Villiers is playing this badly or is using that meaningless phrase ‘national security’ as a blocker.
In the foundation documents that informed the Stormont House Agreement there was no suggestion of full disclosure.
There was a recognition of the deep hurt and fracturing, most specifically in working class communities, where most of the ‘war’ was fought.
On the sensitive issue of informants one of the documents highlighted the damage done to such communities by the oppressive presence of paramilitaries and the British army.
It specifically challenged the republican community with the scenario of telling an ageing mother that her martyred son was actually an informer. That is what full disclosure means.
The allegations made in this paper last week about the Shankill bomb has not enhanced Villiers’ argument.
Up to that, half the community didn’t buy her argument. Now it is closer to the whole community.
All of which highlights that the fulcrum has shifted. It looked for a time that nothing politically was going to happen and that the police and the judicial processes would be left to either sink or swim.
Now it looks as if the £150 million promised is going to be spent. And that is when it gets really scary.
We haven’t seen the legislation that is going to underpin that money and we haven’t been given the names of the people who are going to take on the amount of work that any comprehensive approach entails.
But we are all long enough in the tooth to know that for even the best of people, bad legislation is hard to implement and that even good legislation, in the hands of the wrong people, is likely to come a cropper.
