The Stormont House deal failed to find way to examine the role of the Irish state in facilitating terrorism

And it is a battle. Many discussions of the legacy of terrorism include victims of IRA violence who seem to accept the idea that everyone was to blame for the Troubles.

All victims are of course free to reach their own view on the past and to deal with their own agony in their own way. But that view is not widely held among victims of terrorism. Some 2,100 of the 3,600 Troubles dead were murdered by republicans.

Seff is right to call for an investigation into events surrounding the attempt to smuggle arms to the IRA in Northern Ireland 50 years ago, for reasons that Doug Beattie and Jim Allister explain opposite (in the print edition, to be put online during Friday).

But we cannot escape the key reason that groups like Seff can only appeal for such an inquiry, not demand it.

The 2014 Stormont House Agreement drew up a plan for tackling the past and granted the non negotiable nationalist demand for legacy inquests, which have become mini inquiries (or, in the case of Ballymurphy a massive inquiry lasting more than a year, involving multiple QCs, and set to cost tens of millions).

A Historical Investigations Unit was also agreed, in which only the RUC faced misconduct probes. It has since become clear that the rest of HIU – the non police element – would have ended up equally focused on allegations against paramilitary and state ‘actors’.

Already, several soldiers face murder trials and no IRA leaders do.

Meanwhile, multiple legal aid funded civil actions against the state wind their way through courts at vast expense.

The Republic of Ireland has tried to humiliate the UK at Strasbourg (hooded men case) and at the Council of Europe, complaining that many millions more are not spent on cases such as that of Pat Finucane (the latter being one murder among 3,600 which has already had millions spent on it).

That there is no guaranteed focus on the Republic’s harbouring of murderers, and the resulting lives lost, shows why the UK retreat from the Stormont House failure is not enough.

A radical response to this major scandal is long overdue.