The victims’ pension needs to be paid now, and without any fudge that enables terrorists to get it

Yet it has still not been paid.

There was an apparent dispute over who would provide the funding, but the real reason is that republicans want it to be paid to everyone, including terrorists who injured themselves in their terror.

It is, therefore, totemic for them.

The seeds of the scandal go back a long way, to the morally neutral definition of a victim in 2006. But it should have been sorted long before even then, given that the worst of the troubles was 35 years earlier than that appalling definition (which includes terrorists), in the bleak early 1970s.

This newspaper fully supports UHRW in its comments today, and joins with it, and with other campaigners on behalf of victims of terrorism, to call for urgent government movement on delivering payments.

But this cannot mean that there is yet another sleight of hand, so that Brandon Lewis alters the guidelines to ensure that terrorists become eligible, and MLAs hide behind the urgency of the matter to acquiesce in such a change.

That would be further proof of a republican veto and of the impression that everything at Stormont is up for trading, including the morally repugnant notion of the UK paying those who were injured while trying to murder and people.

Mr Schmidt writes: “To [victims scarred by terror], as to us, paying compensation to those who were injured ‘by their own hand’ as they tried to commit murder would be a bridge too far. There can be no fudging on this central issue. The purpose of the scheme must be maintained. In the eyes of innocent victims of terrorism, to modify the position and allow payments to be made to former terrorists is intolerable and would heap injustice upon injustice.”

Well said UHRW.

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