PICK up any local newspaper or listen to any radio, television or political debate about the failure to pay the victims’ pension that has been promised and you will read and hear words expressed by people of all persuasions attempting to describe their differing opinions and thoughts.
Having personally met some of the most severely injured victims over the years, such as wheelchair-bound people like Peter Heathwood, Alex Bunting, Paul Gallagher to name just a few, I’ve even taken the opportunity myself to write and express my own thoughts about it in a number of articles in recent months.
Appreciating the complexities that appear to be associated with such a contentious subject and not wishing to exacerbate the issue, I have chosen my words carefully.
I have tried to delicately articulate that supposedly intelligent people in government should be able to sit around a table and sort out the problem and find it in their hearts to somehow pay the pension without any further delay.
But as I continually watch the lack of progress and decent human beings being wheeled out in vain for smiling photo opportunities with those same politicians and others responsible for sorting out this situation, my search for the right words fails me.
So in a further attempt at supporting all those deserving victims, I will not waste time searching for the right words to appeal to the supposedly caring nature of our politicians for their inability to pay this victims’ pension.
Instead I will use the appropriate words to articulate how I feel and which I believe sum up the truth.
The failure to find a solution to pay this long-overdue victims’ pension now is simply shameful, scandalous, dreadful, appalling, disgraceful, cruel, unfeeling and heartless.
I would ask yet again for those in authority and government to search their own hearts and swallow your petty political pride and do the right thing.
Do you want to see these people reduced to sitting outside Stormont in their wheelchairs with cardboard signs strung around their necks like beggars?
Stop forcing them to continually wait in pain for what they rightly deserve and were promised.
Stop watching victims die of old age waiting for this pension. Stop demeaning them. They deserve better.
And if the right thing means you being simply compassionate or indeed having to show some courage then have the bravery to do it.
Make a decision and make it now.
** George Larmour's brother John (42) was an RUC officer shot dead by the IRA in 1988 while working in the family's ice cream parlour on Belfast's Lisburn Road. He is the author of They Killed the Ice Cream Man: My Search for the Truth Behind my Brother John's Murder
