Dr. Anna Bryson:

I bid everyone a good afternoon. I thank the joint committee for giving me the opportunity to speak to it.

As Professor McEvoy has said quite a bit about the Historical Investigations Unit, HIU, and the Independent Commission on Information Retrieval, ICIR, among other things, I take the opportunity to highlight some of the key issues related to one of the other mechanisms agreed to under the terms of the Stormont House Agreement, namely, the Oral History Archive, OHA. I will also touch a little on the Implementation and Reconciliation Group, IRG.

In some ways, there has probably been a sense that the Oral History Archive is the least contentious of the mechanisms and perhaps the easiest on which to get some consensus and agreement. Sometimes that perhaps is based on a misguided assumption that it is a soft or an easy option, but that takes away from the important work it could do, if fashioned correctly. What I want to say, first, is why I think it matters. It can do something different from the other mechanisms, in particular, the prosecutorial and truth recovery mechanisms. It can broaden the canvas for dealing with the past. We can get to gender related dimensions and rural experiences of conflict to take in the experiences of a very wide range of victims and survivors across Britain and Ireland, all of which is very important.

We know internationally about the work of oral history and storytelling mechanisms and how powerful they can be. Having worked on different projects related to the conflict and served on the advisory boards of oral history projects, I know just how important it can be to provide these opportunities and give voice to people who have been either been silenced, occluded or ignored. Such projects give space to the messy, complex reality of their experiences that defies monocausal explanations of conflict. That said and I hope having touched on some of the reasons it matters and is important, what we have been concerned to do is highlight the importance of getting it right and some of the problems we saw in the shape of the mechanism as leaked versions of the draft legislation unfolded and in our tick-tacking with the various key players.

First, it was agreed, rightly, in the Stormont House Agreement that the archive should be independent and free from political interference. I think we all agree that that is vitally important. That said, we were a little concerned that in the outworking when it began to meet it was tentatively agreed early on that the archive would be housed in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and, more particularly, that its direction would be guided by the deputy keeper of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. The deputy keeper is the Minister of the parent Department. That rang a few alarm bells for us in terms of the political independence of the archive. Although in the draft legislation that was leaked it was suggested the deputy keeper not take direction from the Minister, there were other clauses that said, nonetheless, that all of the rules guiding the functions of the archive, its remit, acquisitions policy and other issues would, in one way or another, be subject to the diktat of the Minister. That is what we felt amounted to something of a fig leaf of independence. Overall, it gave the feel of something that was top-down and state-centric. Looking at truth commissions around the world, we know how easily these mechanisms can be labelled as exclusionary and how people can self-exclude. If one is to reach out to a broad range of people, one has to get out of the building and engage in the painstaking work of building trust. To date, that is not something of which the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland would have had a lot of experience.

One of the things Professor McEvoy has mentioned is that we have been very pragmatic in our work. We accepted that we would work within the remit of that which had been agreed to politically. Accepting that the archive was probably going to be located in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, we said that at least there should be checks and balances. We looked at what else we could do to curb our fears. We argued very strongly in favour of a steering group that would hold the deputy keeper to account. It is very important that it not just be a talking shop and that the steering group have real powers to agree to the remit and vision of the archive and to agree to what can be destroyed, count as being of historical significance and, therefore, admitted into the archive and so forth.

On the point of having a bulwark against what could be a case by case fragmented approach, the steering group could play a very important part in mapping out the vision for the archive and how it would deliver on issues related to reconciliation. That brings me to the link with the Implementation and Reconciliation Group, IRG. As members are aware, the group is a mechanism that has been designed to establish themes. It is the big picture. At the end of five years there would a report on patterns and themes. That raises two key issues for us. It is an 11 strong body which is made up of political appointees. It has been a little vague. There is not much detail in the Stormont House Agreement about how the academics that will do the grunt work that will create the evidence base for the report on patterns and themes will be appointed or how they will do their work. I wish to raise two issues in that regard, the first of which relates to the importance of what is in contained the legislation. Currently, the sense we are getting is that all of the responsibility is on the individual academics to act independently and with the necessary rigour, but we want to ensure the criteria will be established in legislation to ensure the mechanism will be designed in such a way that we will not be in fear of the political appointees saying that although a certain academic is a bona fide academic, he or she should take out paragraph 11 and thus interfere with the work of the academics. There are plenty of good models for how one can do that. If I want to be admitted to the arts and humanities research council peer review college or the Royal Irish Academy, there are well established procedures. There are models which can be followed to establish the criteria to act as a really important brake.

The other point I want to raise in relation to the IRG partly concerns how the big picture stuff relates to the evidence base. This is something that concerned us. In the Stormont House Agreement it was anticipated that the evidence base to be used in compiling the key report at the end would be referred to the IRG under any of the legacy mechanisms. In some ways, that makes sense. If there is a slew of evidence before the ICIR of collusion, for example, one will expect it to be a pattern or theme that will be investigated. What concerns us is the suggestion that perhaps that it will be applied a little too rigidly and there might come a point where the evidence base could only come from the legacy mechanisms. If one thinks of collusion, it seems bizarre to us as academics that one might be told that one could not refer to the De Silva review or the Smithwick tribunal report. Instead we think the academics should have access to all of the relevant and available evidence and that we should trust them to go through the secondary sources, as they would. That brings me back to my point about the Oral History Archive.

We are getting a sense that an attempt could be made to limit the evidence coming through to inform the vitally important report on patterns and themes. If that is correct, the point I made about the Oral History Archive matters a great deal because the vision for it - the acquisitions policy and who decides what qualifies as a story of "historical significance" - will matter in terms of the evidence base to inform the vital report on patterns and themes.

The next point is linked. Members will be aware that the Stormont House Agreement includes a reference, albeit only a couple of sentences in length, to the effect that the British and Irish Governments will be expected to make statements of acknowledgement at the end of this process and that others will be expected to do likewise. However, if we do not get the Implementation and Reconciliation Group right and do not have confidence that the report on patterns and themes has been followed through on correctly, is sufficiently independent and vigorous and so forth, how can the Irish or British Government be asked to apologise, given that the question it will ask is for what is it apologising.

My final point is that all of these elements are organically linked and interdependent and one will have a knock-on effect on the other.