Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief as I have to go to another meeting. The 150 paramilitary deaths since the Good Friday Agreement are obviously of concern. Have these deaths occurred because a lot of the infrastructure remains in place and is being allowed to remain in place for the sake of, one cannot say "peace", but perhaps stability? How much funding is required? One can set up all the infrastructure one wants, historical investigations and information retrieval units, oral history archives, and implementation processes, but if these are starved of funding, as has happened, it is all for nothing. It is merely press releases and agreements without implementation or the capacity to implement. Where is the initiative on communities in transition at and is it working? We are going to Glencree on Tuesday. The attempt to replicate what happened in South Africa has eventually run into the sand. Should that have stayed the course, should it be revived or is it too late?

It is 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement and we are the Good Friday implementation committee. One of the issues I keep bringing up is that we still do not know what is left to be implemented notwithstanding our designation as the implementation committee. What the forum is putting together is the ongoing building of the Good Friday Agreement. It cannot stay as it was 20 years ago and it has changed over time. Ultimately, how much money is needed – I know it is a lot - to support the next generation of victims? As Ms Thompson pointed out, there are people who are victims of the Troubles who were not born at the time. There is a ripple effect to the next generation. Children and grandchildren who were not alive during the Troubles are now their victims in essence. Is the problem a lack of funding or of will?

The historical investigations unit is interesting because pretty much no side has an interest in the truth. There are people in every organisation with things to hide and, ultimately, those organisations which are using victims for their own ends do not want the truth to come out. While they might want the truth to come out on one side, they do not want it to come out about what they were doing because everybody had informers inside. If that truth comes out, how can it be managed, if at all? The South African process is the interesting one. Did it work? Why did ours not work?