Ms Judith Thompson:

What has been proposed and not carried through in Northern Ireland is not exactly a truth and reconciliation commission, it is something different. We have held to a kind of legal framework. There is an historical investigations unit. It is not a truth process where someone comes in and says “Here is the truth”. It is an investigation and it will be evidence based. Broadly, that is what I hear people say. They ask how they can know the truth of something where they ask someone for information. They ask how would the person they asked even know, given the passage of time and people's memories. A principle of justice and looking at the evidence and having due process is maintained while at the same time the outcome of the process, as I have said so often and as I keep saying, will not be a lot of prosecutions. That is not going to be possible or likely. It is a rather different process.

The other thing I note is that these things take a lot of time. I was in Cambodia at Christmas. Cambodia had its peace deal around the time we had ours. It is a different society and it deals with things differently but it still has its international courts trying to deal with historic cases. Those issues have not all gone away as one finds when one has quiet conversations with people. I was in Bosnia last year. One looks at the length of time the hurt and division exist. It is dreadful to witness but in a way it tells us that we are not that unusual. These things cast a very long shadow. As to whether truth and reconciliation worked in South Africa, do we know yet? It takes a while and nothing is ever perfect. Why has it not worked in Northern Ireland? It is because we have not done it yet. We have done many things and many of those things have worked. The place has changed amazingly, but we have not dealt with the past and we have not done the victims any service by failing to acknowledge some of what happened to them. There is a toxic impact from sweeping things under the carpet and we are seeing that for individuals, for families, at a social level and for our justice system.

I was asked what it would cost. There are two answers to that. We do not know exactly what it would cost but if one asks the Department of Justice in the North, one finds it has done a lot of the sums. We know €150 million was promised from Westminster and we know it is not enough. A larger sum has been mentioned. The work is being done on that. The other question, however, is what it costs not to do it. A number of years ago, the criminal justice inspectorate in Northern Ireland prepared a report which is now out of date. I am sure the figures involved have greatly increased, but at that stage, we were spending approximately €30 million a year to do things that were not working. To that one must add the current cost of judicial reviews, backlogged cases, inquests and inquiries which are, let us face it, simply existing processes into which people are trying to shoehorn themselves in the absence of access to a proper process. If one adds up the cost of doing nothing, or doing things that do not work, over decades and sets that against the cost of the proposed institutions, the question is how one can justify not doing it, not only in financial terms but in terms of the impact on us.