While I fail to see the point of the annual ‘Was Gerry Adams in the IRA’ debate, there’s only so many times the same question can be asked, it does highlight the issues we face when dealing with the past.
Can truth ever be possible while there is the threat of prosecution?
And even then, will people tell the actual truth or just their own version of it?
If there was an amnesty tomorrow would the former Sinn Féin leader throw his hands in the air or would we still be on the same merry-go-round?
Truth commissions have existed in other post conflict situations around the world with varying degrees of success.
We are not other places, we are a place apart, unique both in the formation of our state, the reasons for its existence and the way we continue to live – together but divided.
As a journalist you come to realise that the truth, when relying on one person’s memory, is subjective.
That doesn’t mean that a person is lying, just that their recall may have changed through time, stories become muddled, truth becomes harder to find.
Urban myths and folklore become a reality.
People play down their own role in horrendous events for their own mental and physical self-preservation, they falsely emphasise the role of those they no longer count as friends or comrades.
The dead become silent scapegoats.
There are also those who self-aggrandise, who claim to have been central to events they had no part in, who continue to glorify death in a way they feel will buy them respect through fear in the small world they do not possess the skills to break free from.
Would a truth commission give a platform to those people? Allow them to cause even more hurt by justifying the unjustifiable?
Making celebrities of serial killers, letting those who in death would be given a gable wall memorial spread their propaganda in the guise of ‘truth’?
Politicians say we must listen to victim and let them design the way forward.
But which victims?
I’ve rarely met two members of the same family who can agree on a way forward never mind achieve consensus from different communities and different victims’ sectors.
Placing the burden of finding a way forward on those who are grieving is unfair and an abdication of duty by the British and Irish governments who are responsible for protecting our peace.
During a BBC Talkback panel this week looking at the past the journalist Brian Rowan argued that an independent expert, a Chris Patten type figure, should be brought in to come up with a way forward free from the emotional baggage of our past.
Maybe that is the answer, unpopular as that person would be when their diagnosis was not what one section or another wanted to hear.
I have my own views but that’s all they are, one person’s view.
I do know one thing for sure though, this has to stop with my generation.
The passing on of generational trauma, the insistence that young people born free of conflict should be burdened with fighting for justice for a relative they never met – polluting the future with the past – this is how conflicts start not how they end.
Our children should be learning about the conflict in school history lessons not as part of a lived and learned experience in their everyday lives.
While legacy remains unresolved there will always be those whose very existence relies on it for survival.
Those still recruiting young people into their ranks rely on stories of injustices of the past that are still part of our present.
I do not want to be still writing about this in ten years time, there needs to be a conclusion and we need to be realistic about what can and cannot be achieved, but also the heavy price we will pay if legacy remains an open and festering sore.
