Letter: Italy was relentless in its pursuit of justice - that persistence stands as a powerful example of what a state can achieve

For decades, the Italian authorities confronted the power of the mafia not simply as a criminal enterprise but as a direct challenge to the ‘rule of law’. When anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were murdered in 1992 in the Capaci bombing and the Via D'Amelio bombing, the intention was to intimidate the Italian state into retreat.

Instead, those assassinations triggered one of the most determined law enforcement responses in modern Europe.

Italian authorities strengthened investigative powers, expanded specialist anti-mafia prosecutors and relentlessly targeted the leadership structures that directed organised violence.

Investigators did not stop with those who planted the explosives or pulled triggers. They pursued the bosses who ordered the killings, the financiers who funded them and the networks that enabled them.

Mafia leaders were arrested years sometimes decades after their crimes. Trials continued long after the political shock of the attacks had faded. The message was: unmistakable organised murder would never be allowed to dissolve quietly into history.

The contrast with the unresolved legacy of the IRA insurgency during the Northern Ireland conflict is stark and deeply troubling. Some of the most notorious atrocities of that period remain unresolved or inadequately examined decades later.

The victims of attacks such as the Warrenpoint, Enniskillen, La Mon restaurant bombings and the Kingsmills massacre, to name just a few, continue to wait for the same relentless investigative determination that Italian authorities brought to bear against organised crime.

These were not obscure incidents buried in the confusion of a distant conflict. They were among the most shocking and defining atrocities of the Troubles, killing soldiers, police officers and civilians in calculated acts of violence designed to terrorise communities and destabilise the state.

However, decades later, the same sustained effort to map command structures, pursue organisers and hold leadership figures accountable is totally ignored.

Instead, the political landscape of legacy investigations has increasingly become dominated by renewed scrutiny of the actions of British soldiers. In some cases, elderly veterans now face reinvestigations over questionable incidents that occurred more than half a century ago.

No democratic society should exempt its own forces from legitimate scrutiny where credible allegations exist. But when the machinery of investigation appears relentless in one direction while progress on some of the conflict’s most notorious terrorist massacres remains limited, the perception of selective justice becomes impossible to ignore.

Responsibility for that imbalance does not lie with one government alone.

For decades, the IRA campaign depended on structures that crossed the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Insurgencies do not sustain themselves over long periods without logistical networks, supplies of weapons and deadly explosives without the political environments and safe operating spaces that allow them to function.

Thus the wider questions surrounding those enabling conditions including the responsibilities of institutions in Dublin during the years of the conflict remain and insufficiently examined.

That reluctance has left many victims families feeling that the full truth about the structures that sustained the insurgency has never been properly confronted. At the same time, successive governments in London have often appeared more focused on managing the political consequences of the past than on ensuring equal and consistent justice for all victims.

Legacy mechanisms have repeatedly shifted in response to Irish political pressure, leaving the impression that some cases receive relentless scrutiny while others quietly fade into bureaucratic stalemate.

The result is a deeply uncomfortable legacy landscape in which the pursuit of justice appears uneven, hesitant and politically constrained.

Italy’s experience shows that democratic states are capable of something different. It demonstrates that organised violence can be confronted without fear or favour, and that the passage of time need not weaken the determination to pursue those responsible.

Italian prosecutors did not simply accept that the complexity or political sensitivity of mafia violence made accountability impossible. They pursued it - more than 30 years after the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, investigations and prosecutions connected to mafia violence continue.

That persistence stands as a powerful example of what a state determined to defend the rule of law can achieve.

For many victims of the Northern Ireland conflict, however, the lesson is far more troubling.

While Italy relentlessly pursued those responsible for mafia terror, the governments in London and Dublin have too often appeared unwilling to apply the same determination to the architects of the IRA’s campaign.

Justice cannot survive on selective memory and until the pursuit of truth and accountability is applied equally to all perpetrators, all organisations and all structures that enabled violence the legacy of the conflict will remain not only unresolved, but fundamentally unjust.

William Mitchell, Lisburn