Mr. Daniel Holder:

In terms of how well the current mechanisms work, they came from the cases that were taken to the European Court of Human Rights that things were not meeting the investigative standards, so there were changes to the inquest system, the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, and a call in of independent police teams and things like that to try to progress human rights complaints investigations. As we know there has been huge amounts of obstruction of those bodies over the years. Most recently, it was the blocking of funding for things like legacy inquests and the office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland. Also, there was what is sometimes called the slow waltz of state disclosure, where documents in control of the Ministry of Defence and other agencies are not disclosed. We have got to a stage where the relentless work by families and their representatives has managed to overcome a lot of those barriers and we are seeing delivery of the existing mechanisms at the moment like never before, so we have many hundreds of pages this year. There are 600 pages in the two biggest reports alone but there is more than that from the office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland. They have delivered significant truth recovery with teeth because there are proper powers, in reports like Operation Greenwich and Operation Achille, and historical clarification regarding the patterns and practices of police collusion with loyalist paramilitaries in different areas. There is also the inquest system, which is also beginning to deliver. There was the Kathleen Thompson inquest last week and there was the Ballymurphy inquest before that. It has broken down what were decades of an official truth that simply was not true, and provided considerable historical clarification at the very least.

There is Operation Kenova and the other operations under the auspices of former Chief Constable Jon Boutcher, that have amassed, again using information recovery with teeth and full police powers, more than 50,000 pages of evidence now. Definitely the British Government's command paper but no-one else ever pretended that all of these mechanisms were about prosecutions. Everyone knew that prosecutions were going to be few and far between for reasons that do not need to be rehearsed here. Really they were about information recovery with teeth. It is at this very juncture, when they are now finally overcoming those obstacles and beginning to deliver, that the drawbridge is about to be pulled up, which is profoundly concerning.

On the question that asked who supports this, I struggle to pin down the names of groups. I mean that the groups who have supported this tend to be those that represent some military veterans and some police officers, and by former police officers, but by no means all.