The next parliament needs to radically improve its scrutiny of legacy plan

Yet outside of the pages of this newspaper, there has little scrutiny of the matter.

The legacy inquests relate to more than 90 deaths, almost all involving allegations against the state. There was a long impasse over these hearings, until a civil servant approved them at a cost of tens of millions of pounds, after a court ruling that the UK government failed to appeal.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein, a party that was once seen as the political wing of a terror group that, amid many other unsolved atrocities, targeted judges, particularly Catholic ones, repeatedly cited the lord chief justice’s request for funding for these inquests. The LCJ made clear in this newspaper that such calls were not made at his behest, and that he had only stated a legal view, not a political one. He also said that there had been ways other than inquests to meet UK legacy obligations under Article 2 of Strasbourg human rights convention.

Even so, it is not unreasonable to speculate on the uproar there would have been in a parallel situation in which the DUP had repeatedly cited NI’s top judge in pursuit of one of its political goals, which had then been granted by a civil servant because there are no ministers in place, because the DUP had pulled down Stormont to get a non negotiable demand.

Now there are political calls to implement the Stormont House legacy structures, to balance the inquests. Yet MPs recently badly failed in the NI Affairs Select Committee properly to grill academics on those proposals. Some critics in this newspaper have said a mooted Historical Investigations Unit (HIU) will disproportionately focus on ex security forces.

It is good that MPs yesterday heard from key Police Federation NI and ex RUC representatives. Police killed far fewer people than the army yet are most vulnerable to HIU, which might make state forces seem the terrorists. The incoming parliament must radically improve its scrutiny of the plan.