Mr. Paul O'Connor:

There was a question about possible threats to solicitors. In one firm there have been profound issues involving its solicitors, the PSNI and interviews, which have raised serious concerns. There have been threats to members of the media; two journalists at the Irish News have recently received threats. These are very worrying issues. There is no doubt that the current phenomenon whereby people are being kept on remand for long periods is deeply concerning and a serious grievance. I would not go so far as to say the legal system has not changed. I am not one of those people who think the North has not changed. It has changed profoundly. Everything has changed. The legal system has also changed. I have never known judges before. I know one, at least, now, and this is a profound change. There are very serious issues regarding the remand system.

The Stormont House Agreement is an uphill battle, and we must be vigilant. Mr. Gormally and others were involved in producing the excellent shadow legislation last week, and I recommend people read it. The conference that was unveiled was also uplifting and very positive. We have won a number of the arguments. The Chief Constable wants to get rid of legacy issues. He does not want the PSNI to deal with them and neither do we or any of the NGOs. The fact that we agree on it is positive. There will be an uphill battle regarding the security services and other issues, and we see it in Pat Finucane’s case.

On the question whether we need a HIU in the Republic, I would not give what we need a name. However, clearly there is a problem in that the original Stormont House Agreement spoke of all deaths that resulted from the conflict in the North being investigated, but this wording was recently changed to “all deaths that occurred in Northern Ireland.” Justice for the Forgotten, JFF, contacted the people in Warrington to alert them to the fact that there is a problem. Last week, I spoke to a woman at the conference whose brother was a British soldier and was killed in the M62 motorway bomb in 1974 in Britain. All those people outside the North are left out of the process, which should not be the case. While I do not want to specify the type of unit needed, we talked to the Department of Justice and Equality about it, and it is not good enough to hope that the HIU might, by leafing through papers on a particular case, come across intelligence about the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. There must be reciprocal arrangements so that people are specifically searching for information; otherwise, it will not be found. We need something clearly set up in the Garda Síochána.

The merger of PFC and JFF happened organically because we both found ourselves, at different times, searching the archives in London and finding the same research, particularly regarding the Glenanne gang, which was responsible for the murder of family members of people who are in this room and the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, as Judge Barron found. We were doing the same work and we co-operated on it, which led, eventually, to a merger. It was easier from the point of view of finance, funding and governance to have one board, which is the board of the PFC, and people from Justice for the Forgotten came on board. It was a very fruitful thing to do and, while it is not for us to say what other groups should do, it made sense for us.

Across the broad spectrum of families with whom we work, there are all kinds of needs. Some families need investigative processes, which they have never had. They have a right to those processes. This need would be satisfied by a robust, independent HIU. Others we engage with are already at the latter part of the process, with a storytelling exercise called the Recovery of Living Memory Archive, to capture the memory of who the victim was from a positive point of view. We merge it with the official report and will lodge it in the National Library here in Dublin and in the North. It is a unique project to merge the official account of a death agreed by a family with the family’s view of who the person was, such as details about how the person liked to go fishing or to sing. This addresses a different type of need for families.

One can never legislate for the different needs. With one family, we are addressing an issue of how to change paternity on a birth certificate. A lady went to register the birth of her daughter, whose father, to whom the mother had not been married, had been murdered shortly before the birth. The registrar would not allow her to put the father’s name on the certificate, and we are trying to find out how this can be changed. There are all kinds of different needs in families, and the different mechanisms proposed – the oral history archive, the Implementation and Reconciliation Group, IRG, and the Independent Commission on Information Retrieval, ICIR – cater to a wide panoply of needs. Some people want justice, correctly so, and a court process. We are dealing with the only family engaged in an ongoing legal process in which a former British soldier is in court, so I will not speak any further on it. It ranges from that to other families who do not believe they will ever see that, or do not need or want to end up there because they are in a very different place. One cannot legislate. Whatever a family requests, we try to see how their needs can be addressed.