Professor Kieran McEvoy:

I will address the amnesty questions. Deputy Breathnach's question on this arrangement to which families would sign up to it is a good one. In effect, the mechanism which we did not talk much about, the Independent Commission for Information Retrieval, ICIR, which is in the Stormont House Agreement, is more or less that. No one knows whether or not that will work. It is modelled on the commission that was established to recover bodies of those who were disappeared which has basically worked. There have been 13 bodies returned out of 16. Deputy Breathnach's constituents would be well aware of this. That is the model. The idea, basically, is that the process is triggered by a family member approaching that commission. In doing so, the family member will be aware that any information that comes back from an armed group or from a state body about what happened to his or her loved one cannot be used for prosecutorial purposes. All the information in that is sealed and it is designed to help people come to terms with the past. Whether or not it works we will not know, I guess, until we are roadtesting it. That is the way that mechanism was designed. Those families know that any information coming out of that process cannot be used for prosecution. If evidence emerged from another process, for example, the investigative work of the historical investigations unit, people could still be prosecuted as a result of that, but any information that comes out of the process of the disappeared commission is airtight. That process will not work unless it is airtight. One of the reasons, from my perspective, the work of the disappeared commission has been excellent is that the process has been airtight, there has been no leakage and there have been no prosecutions. That has done a huge amount. Relationships of trust, in effect, have been built up between armed groups, in particular, the IRA and the INLA, in the recovery of those bodies and those relationships of trust could only happen if the guarantees of non-prosecution were airtight. That is the way that mechanism is designed.

Deputy Breathnach's second question was on cross-Border co-operation. It is an excellent question also. We would do a lot of work with victims from across the community. A big concern for victims in the North, particularly victims from the unionist community, is whether information would be forthcoming about IRA activities that happened south of the Border with people going across the Border and coming back. It is also a concern for victims here in the Republic. For example, as the Deputy will be aware, the families of the victims of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings have been very frustrated about the lack of information coming from authorities in the North. Both Governments recognise that for it to work both of them have to apply themselves with goodwill in a cross-Border situation. In fairness, there has been a significant amount of work done, for example, in terms of the provision of information from the Department of Justice and Equality towards the inquest system in the North and in the development of protocols for the sharing of information, etc. There is quite a lot of nerd stuff. There is a lot of logistical work to be done on all of that but these mechanisms will not work precisely and will not have credibility in either jurisdiction unless, as the Deputy hinted at, there is effective and real cross-Border co-operation between the authorities on both sides of the Border.

On the statute of limitations question of Mr. Hazzard, it was quite interested that when I gave evidence to that committee I outlined the three components of what an amnesty looks like and the chair of that committee stated that the committee did not like to call it an amnesty and preferred to call it the statute of limitations. I said that as a lawyer, my view was that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. If it negates criminal and civil liability for serious offences, it is an amnesty. What they are talking about is an amnesty and they know that. In fairness to that committee, it took the legal and technical arguments about the consequences if one introduces that. One simply cannot, for example, as I stated earlier, introduce a statute of limitations which negates people's right to truth under Article 2 of the investigative elements of that. Second, if one is doing this, one must know that one is saying that it would be very difficult to mount any successful prosecution against the non-state actors, loyalists and republicans, because of the legal arguments for the introduction. That style of an amnesty is called a self-amnesty. It is the kind of amnesty that was introduced by the military dictatorships in Argentina, in Chile and in Brazil. Indeed, Robert Mugabe introduced a similar style of self-amnesty for ZANU-PF activists. That is the kind of company one is keeping with this version of a self-amnesty. Courts will obviously look at that, look at the context of what one is doing there and judge it accordingly. Then if anyone tries to mount a prosecution, for example, of a non-state actor in the context of such an amnesty, of course, the lawyers who are representing the non-state actor in that context will talk about equality of arms and collusion. They will raise all the issues which will make it, in effect, impossible to successfully prosecute non-state actors. That honest conversation with victims, which, in fairness, Dr. Julian Lewis was having, is the realm that we are in. In some ways what one saw in this debate was, while some of the DUP MPs were pushing hard on this issue, there was a degree of blow back from some elements. For example, I saw some correspondence from a victims' organisation which is called the innocent victims network in Northern Ireland which became understandably concerned that the consequences of the DUPs MPs pressing for this for those victims would be that, as far as they are concerned, IRA terrorists would never be successfully prosecuted as a result of this amnesty. There is probably a bit of political pressure coming from grassroots unionist victims' groups on the DUP and the Ulster Unionist Party around this issue. I do not know where that will play out. We are talking here about is a self-amnesty which will have the consequence of a de facto amnesty for non-state actors as well. If we are to have conversation with victims, honesty is the key to all of this in terms of public credibility.