Editorial: ​Latest Alliance comments on the past provoke fresh criticism

​The Alliance Party needs to get its house in order over how it approaches the past, after its latest naive comments – this time from its chief whip – have prompted further criticism.

​Paula Bradshaw’s description of former terrorists as “ex-combatants” has been described as “straight out of the Sinn Fein handbook” by Jon Burrows, the former senior police officer who is now an MLA for the UUP, of which Ms Bradshaw was once a member.

It is the latest example of the self-styled cross-community party getting it wrong when talking about legacy issues. There can be no doubt that Alliance, since its inception, has stood firm for the rule of law.

But so enamoured are its representatives with the latest fads at Stormont that their language can slip, in this case using a term which softens and diminishes the brutal reality of what republican and loyalist terrorists did in this country.

The term ‘ex-combatants’ implies that dead terrorists were involved in a conflict of equals – they were not. Their modus operandi was targeting the defenceless.

They bombed town centres, restaurants, hotels. They sprayed pubs and churches with bullets. They placed bombs under the cars of people brave enough to put on a uniform and stand between the murderers and ordinary people from all backgrounds going about their daily lives.

Most Alliance politicians know that – and most are happy to call out terrorism for what it was. So when the justice minister says she isn’t “incapable of empathy” with people who got involved in violence during the Troubles – or the woman in charge of discipline in her party uses foolish language about ‘ex-combatants’, they deserve the subsequent criticism.

Such commentary undermines their proud history of opposing sectarian violence – and will do little to convince their pro-union voters that they aren’t a party drifting ever closer to a republican view of the past.