Opinion

Newton Emerson: Stormont House legacy proposals have something for everyone

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Relatives and victims of the Loughinisland Massacre pictured last year as a statement is read out by Niall Murphy, their legal representative to the waiting media about the evidence of collusion between police and Loyalist Paramilitaries. Picture Matt Bohill.
Relatives and victims of the Loughinisland Massacre pictured last year as a statement is read out by Niall Murphy, their legal representative to the waiting media about the evidence of collusion between police and Loyalist Paramilitaries. Picture Matt Boh Relatives and victims of the Loughinisland Massacre pictured last year as a statement is read out by Niall Murphy, their legal representative to the waiting media about the evidence of collusion between police and Loyalist Paramilitaries. Picture Matt Bohill.

The Time for Truth campaign, launched this Tuesday, brings together the Loughinisland, Ballymurphy, Springhill, New Lodge Six, McGurk’s and Kelly’s Bar campaign groups.

Clearly aware of lacking cross-community credentials, a spokesperson at the launch said Time for Truth represents victims from nationalist and unionist backgrounds.

This is unlikely to prove persuasive - a truly cross-community campaign would also need to represent the victims of nationalist and unionist perpetrators.

However, by calling for implementation of the Stormont House Agreement (SHA), Time for Truth is at least proposing a balanced solution.

The legacy proposals in that 2014 agreement were a hard-won deal between the executive parties and the British and Irish governments.

Legal experts have quietly criticised it as an unworkable dog’s breakfast but that is because it contains something for everyone, so in political terms it is at least sellable - the test that must be passed before any work can begin.

Any sense that SHA has been lost in the mists of time is mistaken. Sinn Féin scuppered the entire agreement three months after it was signed, following trade union objections to welfare reform.

But when that was resolved in the 2015 Fresh Start agreement, the SHA proposals on legacy were put back in unaltered.

Further confusion has since arisen over 53 scheduled Troubles legacy inquests, funding for which was blocked by the DUP on the grounds of being one-sided.

The DUP has a point - the 53 inquests mainly relate to security force killings and suspected cases of loyalist collusion.

But this issue is explicitly separate to SHA, which states that these inquests have nothing to do with its legacy proposals.

Describing the SHA proposals in detail would take a wall-chart, which is no doubt why they have failed to capture the public imagination.

As a rough summary, they comprise four new institutions: an Oral History Archive, reminiscent of the Boston College project, although hopefully without the Sinn Féin and PSNI sabotage; a Historical Investigations Unit, which would restart the Historical Enquiries Team in all but name; and an Independent Commission on Information Retrieval, modelled on the commission that located the disappeared.

It will offer secrecy in return for disclosure and can be approached by relatives who have essentially given up on the police and the courts.

Finally, after the above three institutions have run for five years, they will shut down and a panel of academics will be nominated by the main Stormont parties in proportion to their mandates, to produce a historical report on Troubles “themes”.

The legacy process will thus be time-limited and reach a conclusion.

This structure owes its origins to the 2009 Eames-Bradley report, so it has a rationale beyond the usual Stormont stitch-up.

Restarting the Historical Enquiries Team looks particularly worthwhile.

Since HET’s closure in 2013, the reports it completed have come to be seen - in the absence of anything else - as increasingly useful and authoritative.

The PSNI scrapped HET with rather too much enthusiasm after complaints it did not comply with Article 2 of the Human Rights Act, which requires a full, prompt and independent investigation of all deaths - a standard HET was never intended to meet.

Nevertheless, SHA addresses this by promising to beef up the inquest system (a point not be confused, again, with the legacy inquests already in that system).

As with HET, the Historical Investigations Unit can refer its findings for prosecution and can also undertake criminal investigations based on new evidence.

Unionists have as much reason as nationalists to want to see this happen, if not more so. HET was working through its Troubles case load in roughly chronological order, meaning some of the IRA’s worst atrocities escaped its scrutiny.

Since Stormont collapsed, talks on restoring it have introduced another complication - a statute of limitations for security force personnel, proposed by the British government and backed by the DUP.

This might be a fraught argument but it does not have to intrude on implementation of SHA. None of its structures would be part of the criminal justice system, which is where a statute of limitations would apply.

London is pursuing this de facto amnesty as an unmet commitment from its on-the-runs deal with Sinn Féin, which pre-dates SHA by over a decade.

Both sides to that deal can put it on the latest talks agenda but there is no need to link it to the legacy proposals in SHA.

Those proposals are something everyone can get behind, regardless of which campaign is demanding it.

newton@irishnews.com