Letter: Only way of resolving the legacy issue is for both sides to sit down and iron out a comprehensive peace package

Ben Lowry is of course right about the implied amnesty in the Belfast Good Friday Agreement (For all the anger about an amnesty, the 1998 Belfast Agreement deal had an implied but obvious one, September 23).

https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/opinion/columnists/ben-lowry-for-all-the-anger-about-an-amnesty-the-1998-belfast-agreement-deal-had-an-implied-but-obvious-one-4346545

Like him, I voted for it on the assumption that an amnesty was implicit in the Agreement, which has been the norm under international customary law in other past conflicts, with exceptions being made in some instances for particularly egregious war crimes – otherwise conflicts would never end.

The only way of resolving the legacy issue is for both sides to go back to Stormont House and iron out a comprehensive peace package.

It needs to have the agreement of all the main parties, but above all, of the two governments if it is to have the same authority of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement.

This was implicit in Brice Dickson's very analytical Slugger O'Toole piece last week.

Our truth recovery process is predicated on such an approach.

In 2018/9 I approached six people - former combatants - who were willing to provide detailed information to victims and survivors on serious incidents which happened (mainly pre-1976), if a conditional amnesty of the sort we proposed was in place.

Three of them have subsequently died and one has developed dementia. There are two left and time is now running out very rapidly for the victims of those early years - half the total number of Troubles victims - to receive some modicum of truth, if not justice.

Of course a lot of people uncomfortable with honest discussion of the past want to bury the facts and perpetuate their own mythologies. They will probably succeed.

We are not opposed to people having their day in court, and perhaps a handful will succeed if the current impasse over the legacy act is resolved. But that won't help the vast majority.

Nor will it remove the shameful way in which victims of miscarriages of justice have been treated. Now the truth may never be known.

Padraig Yeates, Dublin