Ms Claire Hanna:

I am sorry, Chairman, as I am on a mobile and I do not know how to address this issue. I can see on the Chairman’s screen in miniature but it is coming through fine on mine.

I visited the WAVE Trauma Centre a number of weeks ago and when I left I thought about the whole day. We heard from three separate victims and families of victims what compounded their hurt each time. One was the phenomenon that justice is not arriving to people because the people who perpetrated the crime are not choosing to give up the information, which is as true of paramilitaries as it is of the UK Government. It is also the fact that people’s characters are besmirched. We heard from the Ballymurphy families that they have been painted and pegged as gunmen and women for decades. We heard from the McVeigh family of people being told that Columba was an informer. We heard from Paul Gallagher that the man who shot him wrote in his book that he only ever shot paramilitaries and then, by extension, besmirched his character.

It is that second way of demeaning and degrading victims by undermining who they were and retrospectively creating a false narrative for why killings were carried out. That is fundamentally worrying.

We do not have confidence that victim makers will have the good grace to leave victims in peace and not use the blank cheque of an amnesty to justify their own action. I do not have any questions, other than what other colleagues have asked about how we can support victims and what we can best do in terms of how they want us to bring forward the campaign. I thank the witnesses. There is unanimity in the committee on trying to amplify the campaign and generally, to the extent that we can, tackle the legacy issues. Do the witnesses have any questions for us?