Editorial: The deluge of Troubles legacy cases against the UK security forces in Northern Ireland

​The Legacy Act, introduced by the last government was both a logical and a cowardly piece of legislation.

​Its most notable feature was what would have been, in effect, an amnesty for Troubles killings. This would have been both an outrage, and a reflection of reality. After all, what possible prospect was there of that former IRA godfather Martin McGuinness being prosecuted for murder and mayhem after he entered the Northern Ireland government as a minister in the late 1990s, let alone after he became deputy first minister?

So the Legacy Act, you could say, was a reflection of reality – the reality not just that IRA leaders enjoyed a de facto amnesty but lower level IRA seemed to enjoy some form of amnesty too, given the strange and very limited number of prosecutions of them, as prosecutions of ex security forces became an ever growing prospect. In particular, IRA had and have enjoyed an amnesty in the Republic of Ireland.

As this newspaper has pointed out, again and again, for an Irish government that runs a society that gave such vital, but arms length, help to IRA terrorists by not extraditing them in the Troubles, enabling them to continue their border sectarian campaign, and that also gave IRA an effective amnesty post 1994, to sue the UK was hypocrisy of the highest order.

In response to that, Keir Starmer and Hilary Benn have tried to give Dublin whatever it wants to make that case go away. What the Irish want is a process that turns against the UK security forces. Which, as the outrageous legal ruling on the welcome 1992 SAS operation at Clonoe shows, it is getting.

But the Legacy Act also sought down such inquests, and civil cases, which are almost all against the state. As we report today there are 1,000+ of them. The act was cowardly because it shut things down rather than take the legal fight to the terrorists, but it was preferable to this anti state​ deluge.