Editorial: At last, a humiliating defeat for the Northern Ireland courts on legacy

​For once, and belatedly, the Belfast courts have been slapped down on legacy.

Numerous rulings against the past conduct of the UK state have perpetuated the gross imbalance in how the Troubles is being investigated retrospectively – and indeed covered by the media. Any young person following rulings and coverage on legacy matters would conclude that the UK was a murderous state that persecuted Irish republicans – a total inversion of the truth.

Yesterday, however, the highest court in the UK – the Supreme Court – issued a devastating and unanimous dismissal of a coroner’s decision to publish so-called ‘gists’ of intelligence information that would have had implications for the identifying of informers. This arose in the inquest into the 1994 murder of Liam Thompson. The Supreme Court said: “A first instance court (and particularly a coroner conducting an inquest) has to take great care that it is fully and accurately informed about the competing aspects of the public interest before reaching an overall conclusion as to whether the information should be disclosed or not.”

Not only did the coroner Lisa Fee fail to reach the reach the right balance on those competing aspects, the court found six errors in her decision to discloses the gists. Worse, her findings were upheld by a High Court judge, then two out of three judges in the NI Court of Appeal, led by the Lady Chief Justice Siobhan Keegan.

Meanwhile, the PSNI chief constable Jon Boutcher has become a campaigner for overturning the ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ policy that prevents informers being identified even after death.

That Mr Boutcher has been defeated and the NI courts humiliatingly overturned is welcome. But it is alarming that things got so far. PIRA and their dissident successors would be thrilled if it became harder for the UK to recruit informers. And Islamist terrorists too.