That RTE has given a platform to the claims of a lying, murdering thug, who besmirches the security forces, is another grim legacy milestone

Indeed it is one of the most serious developments of the legacy of the Troubles.

And there has barely been a whisper of criticism of what RTE has done, outside of a handful of brave voices including Eoghan Harris, in the Sunday Independent, and Ruth Dudley Edwards, who joins us as a columnist, opposite (in the print edition, to be put online at a later point).

See below for one of this newspaper’s various news stories that have tried to bring balance to these claims.

For many years, legacy has been heading in a disastrous direction. Patent rubbish has been talked about the brutality of the UK state, supposedly working in tandem with loyalists.

There were clearly instances of collusion and there were clearly members of the security forces who committed loyalist terror crimes including murder. Neither point is in doubt.

What is very much in doubt is scale. Some 2,100 people were murdered by republican terrorists in the Troubles. Loyalists terrorists murdered 1,100 people. State forces killed 360 people, the latter overwhelmingly legally and almost entirely without pre meditation.

Yet, as if Britain was the brutal protagonist, this film had at is heart the testimony of a sectarian murderer, John Weir. Now this lying thug is helping lead much of the population of the Republic to think UK state elements wanted to massacre Catholic schoolkids.

Why did the documentary not interview internationally respected RUC detectives who led the search for and the bringing to trial of Glennane gang terrorists (as they hunted and helped jail so many loyalists)?

This saga is a reminder that not a day goes by in which the silence of the UK government (and of much of unionism) on this almost unending legacy scandal is apparent.

Since no-one else is countering the distortions, and given that Dublin is pushing legacy deaths that embarrass the UK in the Council of Europe (with no context of the deaths and with no even suggested legacy process for examining Ireland’s shameful decades of extradition refusals of fanatical murderers), why does London not use the levers that it has to announce unilateral (ie outside of cross-party support that will never come) inquiries into the murder and mayhem of the biggest terror group, the IRA?

Who led it? Who carried out its worst atrocities? Who helped it? Why was the Republic a safe space for them?

How many people died as a result of the UK’s scrupulous adherence to the rule of law, so that murderers were allowed to go about their murder because they were too skilled at evading justice?

• Ex-RUC officers’ dismay at RTE platform for killer’s belated collusion claims )

• William Matchett: Weir was a murdering, bigoted cop who fuels fake news of collusion

• RTE silent over source of funding for Glenanne killers documentary

• How the RUC ended the Glenanne Gang’s murderous reign of terror

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