Ms Denise Mullen Fox:

I thank the Chairman for giving me the opportunity to address this committee. I will give the committee some background information on myself and then outline my connection with the peace factory. My father, Denis Mullen, was murdered by the Glenanne gang in 1975. He was one of more than 120 victims of that gang, which was a unit operating in Armagh and Tyrone, with the support of elements of the RUC and the UDR. Only one of its victims had any connection with violent republicanism. My father was an SDLP activist. He was Austin Currie's election agent. My mother, who they also tried to kill, was active in civil rights agitation from the mid-1960s. They fired 27 rounds at my father and he was hit 17 times. At four years of age, I sat with my dead father in a pool of blood on our doorstep. The Sterling sub-machine gun that killed him had been taken from the UDR base in Glenanne, in County Armagh. It was used to kill at least ten other people. There was never any police investigation into how that weapon got out of the UDR armoury into the hands of a murder gang. It was just one of hundreds that went the same route.

There are many stories like mine and they are listed in the recently published book Lethal Allies, by the journalist Anne Cadwallader. Her book was rejected as a work of fiction by some who bear responsibility for finding a way for our society to deal with its violent past yet if we were to adopt the balance of probability standard acceptable to Mr. Justice Smithwick, we would find collusion proving my father's mother and all the 121 cases. In reality, almost all of them would stand up to much more rigorous definition.

Fifteen years after the Good Friday Agreement there has been no effective progress on the area of victims and facing up to decades of violence. We have had 15 years of frozen stand-off because the main political decision-makers prefer to defend what they see as their vital political interests to present their version of the past, their own tailored narrative, rather than simply seek and accept the truth. To put it even more bluntly, they have things they want to continue to hide. They have friends they want to protect in the RUC, the UDR, the British Army or the Provisional IRA or among the informers who worked for two or more of those organisations. Thus, every attempt to debate victims or even to define who they are drowns in a wave of whataboutery. This is what has happened to the most comprehensive attempt to face the past since the Eames Bradley proposals of 2009. We should watch what will happen to any specific or practical proposals put forward by Dr. Richard Haas.

The organisations that killed people share a common interest in letting this state of affairs continue. They and political parties will pursue their interests and neglect the victims. They pick over the bones of the dead, accepting some and rejecting others, championing some survivors and slandering others, fighting their dirty war all over again. There are those who would embrace me because my father was a victim of collusion while others reject me for the same reason. They reverse roles when it comes to the families of the disappeared. They are equally dishonest.

I sincerely hope that the Haass-O'Sullivan process will produce movement on dealing with the past but we face challenges from vested political interests and from victims groups which adopt a partisan approach.

We cannot afford further years of stand-off. The committee can play a significant role in ensuring that decent services are provided to victims, that the pursuit of truth and dealing with the past are high on the agenda of the two Governments, the co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement. That is my background.

The Peace Factory is a similar organisation to WAVE. Everything that has been said by the witnesses is what the Peace Factory is about. We have a database that covers about 400 people. It represents a small tight knit community in Dungannon, Moy and the surrounding areas but offers all of the same services as WAVE.