Editorial: Pinch yourself - Sinn Fein is unhappy for once on legacy

​For the last decade we have been alone in the media in challenging the pro republican terrorist direction of legacy.

Some mainland newspapers flare up from time to time about the way legacy is being handled to demonise the security forces, but none of them take a sustained interest in this scandal.

It is not merely a temporary imbalance. It is not the occasional outrage such as that veteran leader of a republican movement that caused such heartbreak in Northern Ireland, Gerry Adams (but who was not in the IRA), being made eligible for damages for his internment.

It is not the odd legacy case that, for example, manages to turn a terrorist atrocity into the fault of the police who did not stop it.

It is not even the patently atrocious ruling in the Clonoe inquest, in which Mr Justice Humphreys found that the SAS was unjustified in stopping an IRA mass murder gang, albeit only killing four of the ten who took part. Jeff Dudgeon examines the failures of his findings on pages 14 and 15.

It is a far wider scandal than that, in which legacy has turned against state forces who prevented civil war.

This Labour government is ridiculously late to the party in seeing this. Indeed it has greatly worsened the scandal by reinstating the sort of inquests that this newspaper warned about for ​years, long before the Humphreys ruling illustrated our point. But to their great credit, even Labour are now challenging the Clonoe findings.

There is a telling story on this saga on page four. Sinn Fein have described the government’s judicial review against the Clonoe as “disgraceful”. When in the last 10 years have you heard SF unhappy in a legacy development? Go on?

The party was so sure the Stormont House deal on legacy would work for the IRA it furiously demanded its implementation.

Now for once the political wing of the IRA is displease​d. Pinch yourself.