Editorial: An attempt to reprise the deeply flawed Eames Bradley Troubles payment plan

​Here we go again. There is a plan to pay out for those killed in the Troubles, including victims and terrorists.

The plan has been put forward by the Victims and Survivors Commission.

Ian Jeffers, the victims commissioner, says that disagreement over the proposal cannot be a reason to do nothing.

Such a scheme might cost public funds £130 million, around £10,000 each for 13,000 people eligible.

It essentially reprises an idea first put forward by the Right Reverend Lord Eames OM, former Archbishop of Armagh, and Mr Denis Bradley, who in a report suggested a similar lump sum.

That blind payment (blind in the sense that it did not take a view on whether someone was a perpetrator) caused outrage more than a decade ago.

There seems to be similar outrage for this latest version of the plan.

Will these ideas not just wither with time? It seems not.

The problems with such a payment are not just that it will go to some terrorists, although that is obviously the most repugnant part of the proposal. It also raises questions about whether such lump sums are needed or even appropriate at such a late stage.

Like the victims’ pension itself, which was finally implemented around 50 years after the worst of the Troubles, which was in 1972, many of the worst affected people are dead. Many people’s lives were destroyed by the death of a loved one but if this was the way to proceed it should have been agreed decades ago.

So will it really improve reconciliation?

Another massive problem is that this once again puts the onus on UK governments, and fuels the idea that they are the culprits if the plan is rejected – and not the terrorists, the biggest killers of whom were the IRA.