In an ideal world Haggarty would die behind bars

Failing that he would get a life sentence that meant life, as opposed to meaning 15 or 20 years, for any one of the murders that he carried out, let alone all five of them.

Haggarty has rightly been dubbed a serial killer. His lenient fate has clearly caused great pain to families of his victims.

There are, however, three caveats that should accompany any discussion of the sentence applied to Haggarty.
The first is that the state was right to try to revive the notion of supergrass evidence in 2011. The supergrass method of subverting terrorism almost destroyed paramilitary groups in the early 1980s but was stopped amid legal fears about the reliability of the witnesses. But if the supergrass principle was ever to be revived and operated under better safeguards, this could only possibly work if an ‘assisting offender’ had the incentive of major sentencing reductions.

The second point is, as said above, the inadequate jail terms that apply to murder (be it terrorist or other murder). Murder automatically gets a life sentence but for decades the amount of time actually served was 13 or so years. This has crept up in recent years, but only a bit and is still often less than 20 years.

If someone was actually due to serve, say, 50 years behind bars then they would still be spending 12 years behind bars even if they got a 75% reduction.

The third point to make is that the Belfast Agreement allowed for imprisoned members of paramilitary groups on ceasefire to serve only two years in jail, even if sentenced to ‘life’. This last point rendered absurd the criticism of Haggarty’s sentence yesterday that was issued by IRA men.

Our criminal justice and political response to terror is already flexible to the point of softness. Haggarty is just the latest man to get away with murder because he has adhered to procedures that were agreed on pragmatic grounds.