There needs to be a radical shift in legacy investigations

In some respects it is the biggest political scandal since the creation of Northern Ireland a century ago, because the sums of wasted public money are so large.

We have called for robust public inquiry and today at Stormont it should become clearer what form that inquiry will take.

But another massive political scandal is looming in the background and it too is one of the biggest political problems in Northern Ireland since 1921.

It is exemplified by the fact that no police officer is currently working on the Enniskillen bomb massacre, and probably no officer is working on any of the other IRA massacres. Yet the PSNI have never denied reports that a large team of officers have been working on the Bloody Sunday investigation.

The PSNI is also under huge pressure finding information for the legacy inquests into disputed state killings. It is further under pressure examining other cases against past alleged state wrongs.

Meanwhile, Dublin – among other agitators – wants more. It wants the legacy inquests to press ahead and it wants a public inquiry into one Troubles murder, that of Pat Finucane.

The only good news from recent days is that these are now not going to happen.

But that is not enough. A way must be found to massively scale back police resources on anti state investigations and massively increase it on terrorist probes.

James Brokenshire must speak out clearly in support of such a shift.

The process must be radically overhauled so that if elderly ex security force members are to face murder trials then scores more terrorists will do so too, given that terrorists killed far more people.