Professor Kieran McEvoy:

Can I come in on that point as well? There is one thing that sometimes gets missed out on here, and this goes back to Deputy Brendan Smith's comment about the international experience. One of the reasons to set up effective independent truth recovery mechanisms with real powers, be it a truth commission or whatever, and to appoint people with real public credibility who are independent is to get the ugly truth about all the protagonists to the conflict. That includes the non-state actors. That includes loyalists, republicans and the British state.

With the Stormont House Agreement, we were finding a way to address the ugliness of all the responsibility of all the different actors in the conflict. The problem with the establishment of a process like the one we are discussing is that it is obviously designed to achieve impunity for state actors and to rewrite the narrative about the blamelessness of the state. It is not going to work and it will allow parallel histories to exist. People are still going to have their own views on what happened, but there will be no central overarching mechanism or process with credibility that covers the culpability of all the actors. It sometimes allows, in some ways, some of the horrors of the non-state actor groups to be obscured by the UK's efforts to hide its own ugliness. If we had an independent process completely independent from the Secretary of State, with proper legal powers, proper investigations and victim's rights upheld, we could at last address our past properly in all its complexities and with the culpability of all the actors to the conflict.