Jim Allister: The proposed legacy structures are built on shameful foundations

The fundamental flaw at the heart of the Stormont House Bill is that it accepts as a “guiding principle” the perverse definition of “victim” which equates the innocent victim with the victim-maker.

Any edifice built on such a foundation is irredeemably flawed.

The fact that there proposals are the outcome of the DUP endorsed Stormont House Agreement is a reminder of the lamentable and serial failure of the DUP to use the leverage of its position to force a change in definition of ‘victim’, without which victims can never have equity or justice.

At St Andrews the DUP failed to make addressing this issue a prerequisite to devolution; at the Hillsborough Castle talks they failed to make it a condition of devolving policing and justice; at the Haass Talks they again failed to secure change on the issue and then at the Stormont House talks they accepted an agreement which preserved this perverse definition.

Now, the draft Bill does likewise, even in circumstances where the DUP keeps the government in office!

If the DUP’s commitment to changing the definition was more than lip service, then, we wouldn’t be facing a legacy Bill built on this shameful foundation. Innocent victims should rightly be asking why political clout and opportunity has been wasted.

Looking at the details of the proposals it is clear that they do nothing to address the concerns of innocent victims and are designed to assist republicans in their efforts to rewrite the past.

While they talk of “balance” throughout this is never defined.

Is it a readymade peg for the publicly funded anti-state agitators to demand that even though 90% of the deaths resulted from the actions of terrorists, investigations must not reflect this reality but be ‘balanced’ as between what they call the various ‘actors’?

If balance is intended to reflect that the overwhelming number of deaths came at the hands of terrorism, then it needs to say that. Why doesn’t it?

When it comes to the HIU the equality of focus on the criminal investigation, which might bring the terrorist to justice, and the police misconduct investigation is, of course, most unequal in two critical regards: a) the police misconduct investigation will be aided by official police records (terrorists keep no records nor live by codes of conduct) and b) the threshold for a misconduct charge against a police officer is proof on the balance of probabilities, but a criminal conviction against a terrorist requires proof beyond reasonable doubt.

There is even the perverse possibility that a terrorist injured in an attack which caused a victim’s death could request and obtain a copy of a “family report” prepared for the close family of the murdered victim.

The extent to which the Independent Commission on Information Retrieval ICIR is a useless, if not a dangerous, creation is illustrated by the fact that i) it must keep secret the name of anyone giving it information and the name of anyone named as a murderer; ii) any information provided cannot be used in any legal proceedings, including the prosecution of anyone named as liable for criminal acts; iii) there is no mechanism or means to test the veracity of the information provided and iv) that at the end of its work all information gathered by the ICIR must be destroyed.

So, sadly, what the ICIR offers the innocent victim of the IRA, for example, is a version of ‘Provo truth’ which is just as likely to seek to justify the murder, as part of their programme of rewriting history, as reveal the truth.

The statutory obligation for the ICIR to provide the Implementation and Reconciliation Group (IRG) with a report on “patterns and themes” identified from its work is wide open to being abused as a vehicle to peddle the agenda of the selective information providers in underpinning their narrative of “collusion”.

Untested allegations of collusion etc will be freely made by those seeking to justify killings and, then, the ICIR reports such “themes” to the IRG.

The Oral History Archive, like the ICIR, is wide open for abuse by the victim-makers.

With a labyrinth of organisations sympathetic to their cause it would be naive to think the opportunities to rewrite history will not be fully exploited by terrorist sympathisers compiling and submitting their spin and accounts to the archive.

The powers to restrict such are weak with no statutory bar on material supporting or justifying terrorism.

All in all these proposals are seriously flawed and in spite of all the flowery language offer nothing to innocent victims.

• Jim Allister is TUV leader and MLA for North Antrim