Mr. Paul O'Connor:

I will not deal with the issue of support services. On the question of how the Republic has dealt with the North, or not dealt with it, the South stopped dealing with it in May 1974 because it was sent a very clear message to stop worrying about it.

That is what the Dublin and Monaghan bombings were about. The warning was to leave the North alone: "Do not to talk about it, or else it will spill over to your jurisdiction." This was the warning shot and just the beginning of it. That is my personal view. I think that was the message intended and I think it worked.

In terms of some of the other issues, it is not an either-or situation with the HIU in terms of prosecution. The HIU is, first and foremost, a police unit whose job it is to attempt to gather evidence and, if possible, prosecute. That is its job and that is the mechanism within the Stormont House Agreement in which we are most interested, because most families want to see a proper investigation. Some investigations were carried out by the HET, which were excellent. We felt, and have said so publicly, that the senior investigating officers who were responsible for the Glenanne case were people of the highest professionalism, and they delivered and were very good. They assisted us in the recent court challenge in Belfast. The retired officer responsible for the Glenanne cases came over and provided an affidavit. I have also seen HET cases that were absurd, ridiculous and hurtful. There were particularly serious flaws in terms of British army cases. The HET was both good and bad; it produced a mixture of things. There were people in it who were able to do their job - there is no doubt about that - but what is needed is a body that can win back confidence in terms of providing independent investigative processes.

One point I wish to emphasise is that some people portray dealing with the issue of the North as almost impossible. It is absolutely not impossible. It is not rocket science. What we need are mechanisms that work. Even when we talk about what is needed in the Republic, if one considers the level of co-operation that would take place today as a matter of course between the PSNI and the Garda, that is simply what is needed when it comes to past investigative processes. They did go on in the past. I read declassified documents in our office yesterday, along with Alan, related to the fact that the Garda supplied the details of 2,000 cars within a short period to the Vengeful computer of the British army by mid-1976 to have them checked. Therefore, the Garda was using the British army's computer even then. These are declassified documents from the Minister for Defence. If they were capable of that of co-operation at that time, surely they are capable of it today. I do not think it is rocket science.

On the issue of an amnesty, I do not believe there is an amnesty in the Stormont House Agreement at the moment. There is a problem in that only four British soldiers have ever been convicted of murder. In the Dáil there was a unanimous motion on one of those cases, in which the soldiers were allowed back into the British army, and that has caused profound disquiet in the North. I saw the same happen recently.

In terms of definitions of victims and who is a proper victim and so on, we had a discussion in the office about this recently. Clearly, what happened with the disappeared worked. That process worked and was a valuable process for the families. It is interested to look at who is a proper victim. It appears that if a member of the IRA is killed, he or she is only a proper victim in some people's eyes if he or she was killed by the IRA. There is a widespread acceptance that most of the disappeared were proper victims, as I believe they were, but most of them were members of the IRA. Because they were killed by other members of the IRA, Unionists accept them as victims, but they do not otherwise. It is a very curious way of doing things.

There is also the terminology of innocence. We always say in the centre that we do not work with people who died but with their families. Their families are always innocent. Irrespective of what organisation their sons, daughters or relatives were in, the family is always innocent in the sense that they have a legal and moral right to information. I have two statistics about the issue of innocent victims that may be interesting. Lost Lives, the definitive study of victims from the Troubles, indicates that loyalist paramilitaries killed approximately 1,200 people, the vast majority of whom were civilians within the Catholic community, while the IRA and other Republicans killed some 1,800, of whom more than 1,000 were members of the security forces. So the IRA killed some 600 civilians in bomb attacks and other incidents, while loyalists killed twice as many from a smaller community base. Yet when we use these terms about civilian deaths, we do not actually recognise that over all the years of the conflict, there were only three years in which the greatest number of civilians killed did not come from the Catholic community. The majority of people killed each year were Catholic civilians. It is wrong to differentiate between those who were innocent, guilty, civilians, members of the security forces, members of the IRA and members of loyalist groups; their families are all the same, and they all have a right to information and to justice.