A realistic proposition for victims of 'Troubles'

ALLISON Morris wrote a thoughtful column (October 2) reflecting upon the arguments made by the BBC's Peter Taylor.

She observes that "While we have no clear winner what we do have is thousands of losers in the form of victims of the war, those who never lived to see the settlement and the families they left behind. "People mentally and physically injured, people traumatised by their experiences and... that includes those participants of the war who spent their youth in a prison cell."

Threatened budgetary cuts as well as overt and covert delays to investigations add to these problems. Add to this trauma the predilection of certain politicians to treat victims of 'the Troubles' like a political football when it suits them at election time and to then leave them languishing in the long grass - as at present - until it suits them. Given the long list of government agents in the highest echelons of paramilitary organisations (Gilmore, Haddock, Donaldson to name but a few) and their government handlers apparently facilitating 'the Troubles' it would seem that victims might group together to launch a civil prosecution of corporate manslaughter or culpability against the government for compensation approaching £1m per person killed, injured or imprisoned during 'the Troubles'.

This is particularly so given that, faced with a similar contemporary threat, the German government rapidly dealt with the Baader-Meinhoff group, the Italian government quickly brought the Red Brigades to book and even the Palestinian Liberation Organisation was rapidly subdued.