After doing much good work on legacy that was largely ignored, Innocent Victims United unveil a plan on how to tackle the past

Unless somehow it blows over in the coming weeks, and turns out to be less dangerous than feared (an optimistic and highly unlikely outcome), it will change much of politics, economics and human behaviour.

Therefore, the plans to deal with unresolved issues from the legacy of the Troubles will necessarily be relegated in public policy. But the fact that a court heard recently that the trial of a veteran can proceed by Skype shows that legacy matters are nonetheless an ongoing reality of life in 2020.

Also, the UK government’s response to the way in which republicans have taken control of the narrative has been so deplorable and weak over so many years, it remains possible that even the revised approach to legacy, signalled last week, will give apologists for terrorism their long-standing goals.

One key goal is that legacy investigations and processes start from a neutral assumption that UK and terrorist have as much to answer about the past.

This is the problem into which the UK got itself when it conceded that the approach to dealing with legacy had to be agreed by all. Republicans were never going to accept a starting point other than neutrality.

Yet it is possible both to recognise that the UK made grave errors in the Troubles and to reject a premise of equal culpability.

In any event, even if historic investigations are proportionate, state forces are far more vulnerable to criminal proceedings because they alone kept records.

Innocent Victims United (IVU), an umbrella group for victims of terrorism, has ceaselessly flagged up imbalances on legacy. Most of that good work has been ignored by London. Now it is flagging up concerns with the latest NIO ideas on legacy as paving the way to an amnesty. IVU has issued its own plan.

This is a vital contribution to the debate, and how we move past the idea that the PSNI can’t be trusted to investigate the past and that ex RUC alone will face endless low-level probes.