Jeffrey Donaldson: We will seek justice for those who kept us safe from terror

Our position is clear and unalterable: we will seek justice for those who kept us safe and we will not allow a re-writing of history.

The men and women who fought terrorism weren’t criminals, they’re the people who defeated them. Their service was precisely that – a service to the entire community here and to the wider country beyond.

Their actions, when they kept the peace, weren’t criminal, they were the very shield which protected the rule of law.

My party therefore will not allow any malign, politically motivated agenda to claim after the fact that somehow the forces were breaking the very law they were upholding.

The reason they were not prosecuted for so-called ‘crimes’ at the time is precisely because they were upholding the rule of law.

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We have been working with others in parliament and there is considerable and growing support for our stance.

The great victory for common sense and decency that saw the closure of the IHAT (Iraq Historic Allegations Team) because of the multiple squalid abuses which occurred in its wake shows what can be done if there is political will and, of course, if there is constant and unrelenting political pressure.

This parliament is what it is.

Every week as DUP Chief Whip I am conscious of the position my party is in. But let me be very clear about this, we do not seek justice for the forces because it’s popular, or because it frustrates those who cheered on terrorism.

We intend to ensure our veterans are freed from these threats of prosecution because it’s both the right and the vital thing to do.

That it’s right is self-evident.

The facts speak for themselves.

In the Troubles, the terrorists did the crimes.

The tragedy is that the deeply flawed Belfast Agreement allowed so many of them, duly convicted, to no longer do the time.

Yet now, thanks to that hugely flawed process, and justice having been denied to the victims of that terrorism, we are in the absurd position where long-time advocates of terror are cawing that the people who stopped them should be prosecuted for crimes they patently did not commit.

The DUP will not stand for this.

Whatever mistakes were made in the past, whatever passes were sold by the UUP and others, we will not allow our soldiers and police to be persecuted for having done their duty.

Ben Lowry and others in these pages have rightly written about the mind-numbing hypocrisy of someone like Gerry Adams trying to use the law to hurt the heroes who stopped him in his tracks.

A man who can’t even admit he was in the IRA and who most recently refused to tell the truth about the foul IRA murder of prison officer Brian Stack in the Irish Republic, is not someone we need lecturing us on what the rule of law amounts to.

But I said justice for the police and the armed forces is vital too.

Their job is not over. It’s never over.

And we will no more forget our debt to serving personnel than we do to retired members of the forces.

Justice is what they ensured through their sacrifice, and we shall see to it that justice is what they will get.

• Jeffrey Donaldson is DUP MP for Lagan Valley

Morning View: There still seems to be too much faith in the SHA legacy proposals

Tom Elliott: For balance over the past, we need new legacy processes that include the inquests