Mr. Austin Stack:

I will take Deputy Smith's question first as to whether our group has spoken to the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade or officials in the Department with respect to the Stormont House Agreement. Before the group was formed, I had a private meeting with the Minister about four weeks after the Stormont House Agreement was signed. When I read the document initially, I was quite worried about the issue of victims being able to meet the people providing the evidence or the perpetrators. Some victims would not feel capable of sitting down with the perpetrators, although in my case I would have no problem doing that. The way the Stormont House Agreement was drafted, it raised concerns that we would not be able to get that level of engagement. I got specific assurances from the Minister at that meeting that this would not be the case and we would be able to engage with the people who gathered the information and, if we so wished, with the perpetrators. I emphasised that this process needed to be done in public in some fashion, although I realise there would be great difficulty in how that could be managed. It is managed in South Africa in a way and there could be negotiations on how this could be done in public. In our view, to instil confidence and credibility, there would have to be some public element in how the information is given to victims. Victims must be able to test the evidence and information given to them.

In my specific case, when I met a representative of the IRA with Gerry Adams in 2013, there was one particular piece of the evidence given to me that I knew to be untrue and I was able to question the person about that and test what was being said. It was quite powerful from my perspective to be able to do that. In a forum like a proper truth recovery process in an official Government-backed process, we must be able to do it. That would give us and the public a sense of credibility about the issue.

When I was preparing for this, I spoke to many families and particularly relations of gardaí murdered during the Troubles. One family was quite upset and I was asked to bring to the committee that this garda's family had seen no recognition or medal for the murdered individual. The person was blown up with a bomb and his family is quite upset that no medal has been awarded to him. It is a simple issue for a family to get recognition, but 40 years later it still has not been done. As Deputy Smith mentioned, a national memorial could be quite easily done. It would not break the bank or offend anybody. For the 14 members of the State's forces and the many civilians - it would include the victims of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings and individuals like Tom Oliver, who were murdered during the Troubles - the families should have some sense of the State recognising and remembering their loss.

With regard to the Haass proposals and the Stormont House Agreement, in the meeting with the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, he agreed to take on board what I said. I specifically indicated that, in the Haass proposals, the victims and community groups in Northern Ireland would be allowed to have input into the structures and organisation, including how they would work. We are concerned that the Stormont House Agreement, especially with respect to the independent commission for information retrieval, has structures comprising only political people. They are representatives of political parties, the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister. Documents have been leaked in recent weeks on how families will be given a heavily redacted document, with no chance to engage, and that would not have happened if the Haass proposals had been implemented. The victims would have had input into the structure of the organisation at the very start. From that perspective, we are not happy at all with the way the commission has been set up.

Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan asked about consultation with other groups.

My group has had some contact - not a lot of contact - with other groups. Individually, before we formed the group, I had a bit of contact with some of the groups. I found it interesting that the Victims and Survivors Service in Northern Ireland will deal with me as an individual but it will not deal with my group as a group. I can get an award as an individual from the Victims and Survivors Service in Northern Ireland to the value of £500, but the group cannot get any support and there are no supports in this jurisdiction. This is the reason for the suggestion that one victims and survivors group should be allowed to help, support and fund the individual groups in the Republic, the North and the UK. That would be something we would suggest very strongly because at the moment it is very haphazard. There are very few groups. I am only aware of one other group representing victims in the South. We are only at the start of the process but we have had some engagement.

On not being consulted on the Good Friday Agreement, I will give the Deputy an example of how this affected us. On the day of the prisoner releases from Long Kesh, I had a day off work and I was looking at Sky News. I saw all the flag waving with people coming out and partying and whatnot. I immediately thought of my mother. I got in my car and I drove to Portlaoise to my mother. She was sitting in the front room of the house bawling her eyes out, seeing these terrorists out celebrating and yahooing and partying. That had an extremely bad effect on my mother that day. The Good Friday Agreement is perceived rightly or wrongly to be very perpetrator-centred and not victim-centred. The perpetrators seem to have been the ones who got all the gains and the victims were never consulted. The simple thing would have been for the victims to have been consulted and we would have told the governments that if they were going to do prisoner releases, which we realise would have to be done, they should do it in a low-key, staggered fashion. It would have been as simple as that and it would have meant that many people would not have been upset.

That is just something simple. It could have been done quite easily in the South because there are only 14 families of State forces concerned in the South. They would have been quite easily contactable by the Government at the time. There were also the civilian victims, but again there are not that many. We are not a body of people who are hard to get. People know where we are.