Historic events should always be set in their proper context but it must be accepted that the passage of time alone makes it tempting for a certain amount of revisionism to creep into any assessment of the past.
It is important that this tendency is guarded against, especially in a society such as ours which is deeply scarred by the evils of sectarianism, state collusion, unspeakable violence and paramilitary murder campaigns.
While there can be competing narratives and constructive debate around why specific events took place, the plain facts should not be denied. To do so is not only dishonest but also dishonours the victims.
On one level it is perhaps understandable that the perpetrators of some of the most heinous acts committed during the Troubles seek to revise history; trying to ascribe even a vaguely noble motive to the most depraved crimes may be a form of assuaging guilt for blood shed and lives lost.
A vivid example of this is the ambitious assertion by loyalist Jamie Bryson that the UVF were 'counter terrorists'. This is a claim designed to distort that organisation's role in our Troubles and to convey the idea that they were somehow 'fighting the good fight'. Nothing could be further from the sordid truth, as the unvarnished historical record shows.
It was the UVF who carried out the first murder of the Troubles, shooting 28-year-old Catholic John Scullion at the front door of his west Belfast home in May 1966.
The UVF was behind the Glenanne Gang, which included RUC and UDR members and is thought to have killed around 120 people.
It was the UVF who carried out the bomb attacks in Dublin and Monaghan which claimed the lives of 33 people in May 1974.
The UVF were responsible for the Miami Showband Massacre of 1975. The Shankill Butchers were UVF men. The Loughinisland Massacre was a UVF attack. And so it goes on.
It doesn't serve either the historical record or the prospects of reconciliation for apologists to pretend that these crimes were somehow justifiable on the basis that the UVF were counter terrorists "responding to the IRA". A similar litany of appalling and unjustifiable atrocities can be attributed to the IRA.
As Kenny Donaldson of victims' group Seff emphasised, both loyalist and republican paramilitaries were motivated by "ethnic and/or sectarian hatred". Those who claim otherwise are deluded, he said, and "engaged in stinking historical revisionism".
The past might be a foreign country for some but for many others the Troubles remains a daily lived reality, found in the empty chair and the tended graveside.
