Editorial: London's letter to Dublin on legacy is welcome but not enough - it also needs to tackle distortions of the past

For years this column has chronicled the institutional weakness of UK governments towards the Irish Republic.

This is not to say that British governments are anti Northern Ireland, or anti unionist. Nationalists taunt unionists over the alleged hostility towards them in Westminster, yet prime ministers over 50+ years have been instinctively pro Union.

But while that is over-stated, in a bid to demoralise unionists, UK weakness towards the Republic of Ireland goes back to the aftermath of the Belfast Agreement. There were always influential, naive figures in Whitehall who wanted to push the UK towards a capitulation in Northern Ireland, and they got the upper hand in 1985, yet there was a backlash against the Anglo Irish Agreement when the London establishment realised that Dublin was not, as they had foolishly thought, going to help fight IRA terror.

The weakness is thus partly a reflection of the genuine good relations that pertained when John Bruton and Bertie Ahern were in charge and there has perhaps been an understandable reluctance to face up to the emergence of the Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney generation – anglophobic yet always claiming to be Britain’s friend.

Now London has written a robust letter to Dublin about its outrageous legal action against the UK over legacy, when it harboured terrorists during the Troubles and has been a safe haven ever since. It is asking essential questions about Ireland’s own de facto amnesty for the IRA.

But this is not enough. London has closed down legacy in a way that tries to keep Sinn Fein on board. Such an approach will not work.

With legacy, still, despite the new act, one-sided in every respect – see our editorial on the one-sided BBC reports on the death General Kitson – it is past time for the UK to set out how, outside of the new legacy body, it plans to counter Irish distortions of the past.