Professor Kieran McEvoy:

That is no problem. I will send it on.

It must be borne in mind when considering these cases that the state is responsible for 350 deaths overall: some 300 by the army and the rest by the police. In the context of those cases, 170 people were killed between 1970 and 1973. Of those, 63% were indisputably unarmed, only 12% were armed and 14% were possibly armed. No one was prosecuted at all. No state actors were prosecuted at all during that period. The investigations that were carried out have repeatedly found that a number of judgments in the North have been rudimentary and have not met a standard. That was accepted by the Chief Constable. The idea that the police were unbalanced in their investigations is because the investigations were not properly done in the first place. Therefore, the caseload for state-actor cases got bumped up because they were not properly investigated and there is a legal obligation to do so.

The third element of the witch-hunt narrative is that the early release mechanisms favoured the non-state actors. The early release provisions were in the Good Friday Agreement. This is sometimes written about in simplistic terms in the British tabloid media to say that all the terrorists got out of jail early but "our boys" did not get an equivalent. The reason is that they were not prosecuted and were not in jail, by and large. The legal point is actually more interesting. When the Good Friday Agreement was signed, there were two state actors in prison. Four were in prison for murder over the whole period of the conflict. All were released early using different mechanisms, but there were two in prison at the time the Good Friday Agreement was introduced. When that mechanism was established, it was independent through the sentence review commission. Once the early release provisions of the non-state actors are about to commence the UK Government politically, and perhaps understandably, wants to get its people out first. This is because of political optics.

It therefore approached the Sentence Review Commission and, essentially, said, "We want our two guys at the top of the list." I know this because I have talked directly to the chair of the commission. He then said, "Well, no, we have a system here. Obviously, they are eligible for release, but we have a way in which we will address them and they will join the queue, in effect." Then the Government used, I think, the Prison Act to get them out first. The point about all this is that this applied to state and non-state actors. There were very few state actors in for other reasons, but the early release provisions applied equally to the state and the non-state actors. The British Government, however, wanted for political reasons to get them out before the non-state actors were released so it used a different mechanism.

I am sorry. This is a complicated answer.