Please donate to the action against the Scots soldier killers

Three young Scottish soldiers, Dougald McCaughey, John McCaig and Joseph McCaig, were lured to their deaths on the lie that they would meet girls at a party.

Instead they were shot dead by the IRA in an act that provoked widespread revulsion and outrage.

It was one of the most important acts of violence in the course of the Troubles. It was intended to drive a wedge between the soldiers and Ulster Catholics, and it worked.

There is little hope of justice for such victims of terrorism.

The legacy structures are taking shape in a way that gives grounds for considerable unease. By far the loudest noise is about state killings, when in fact illegal state killings were a tiny fraction of the Troubles dead – perhaps as little as 1% or less of the 3,700 who were killed overall.

And yet the DUP is under pressure from Sinn Fein, the SDLP and Dublin to implement the Stormont House Agreement (SHA), which might make this imbalance worse. Even Theresa May has been advised that the SHA is the way forward.

Meanwhile, over a period of months, Charlie Flanagan has repeatedly been commenting in a way that either implies the UK has not been acting honourably on legacy matters, or else explicitly criticises decisions (such as the entirely appropriate decision not to hold a public inquiry into one Troubles murder, that of Pat Finucane).

It seems that one key route now to a proper focus on the 25 years of IRA murder and destruction is to back actions such as the McCue case against the killers of the Scottish trio. UK governments since 1997 have assisted in us reaching this point, by continually putting pressure on unionists to facilitate Sinn Fein. It seems they are not going to help get justice for the hundreds of IRA victim families who have never had it.

Thus we again urge readers to donate the soldier case (see page 9 for details on how to do this).

We hope it is the first of many such private actions.