Troubles report 'a threat to peace'
THE Eames-Bradley report on the Troubles could threaten Northern Ireland's fragile peace, it has been claimed.
In a personally-written response to Secretary of State Shaun Woodward's consultation on the controversial report, DUP leader Peter Robinson savaged the group for the "pious tones" of its report, accusing them of abandoning basic moral principles in a fruitless search for consensus.
Mr Robinson's 4,000-word response to the NIO criticises former Church of Ireland primate Lord Eames and former Policing Board vice-chairman Denis Bradley for presiding over the process, branding them "these brave seekers after the truth".
Describing the group's proposal to pay the relatives of all those killed during the Troubles – whether perpetrator or victim – 12,000 compensation as a "grotesque proposition", the DUP leader denounced the report's authors' "pious tones implicitly assuming and asserting superior moral understanding and depth".
He argued that, if implemented, the Eames-Bradley report would re-write the history of the Troubles in such a way as to "create a moral void in which unlawful and undemocratic actions can come to be seen, or at least presented, as somehow justified and legitimate, if only because some of the 'combatants' believed them to be so".
"Unlike Lord Eames and Mr Bradley, I do not accept that it can be left to individuals subjectively to decide whether or not their illegal actions were justified. To do so is surely also to accept the personal defence of the Nazi death camp guard."
He said that the report amounted to a "subversive and injurious" political re-writing of the facts about the Troubles.
"Lord Eames and Mr Bradley would no doubt furiously deny any such intention, but that is the path down which their report would take us.
"What is worse, and the source of their greatest offence in my view, is that in offering an a la carte choice of interpretations and justifications about the 'cause of the conflict', the authors ask the rest of us to deny what we know and hold to be true, and instead collude in an exercise in moral equivalence, not to say moral ambivalence."
Mr Robinson said he believed that Secretary of State Shaun Woodward has privately accepted that the outcome of the NIO consultation will be an overwhelming rejection of the Eames-Bradley report.
But he warned: "I am also convinced, and more so as a result of the divisions re-opened by Eames-Bradley, that attempts to force this issue of the past could directly threaten our current peace and our future prosperity and well-being."
Mr Robinson's critique of the report also strongly rejected the Eames-Bradley recommendation for a Legacy Commission to look at the Troubles but said that he "took the Secretary of State at his word" when Mr Woodward said it would not happen.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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