Mr. Mark Durkan:

I think parts of it are revived. The difference is that people were to go to a notional tribunal to claim this immunity. The 2005 legislation in itself did not overtly say there would be no more prosecutions. It did not provide a cut-off date or anything else but it would have made pursuit of prosecutions futile because people would have had these certificates issued by the tribunal.

It was giving a veneer of process and accountability. I would not say that this Bill is exactly the same as what was proposed then. It is different but the fact is that in effect, it means an amnesty. It means the same thing to victims. That is why victims were so unanimous in eventually opposing the Bill in 2005. In 2005, it took a lot of victims some time to wake up to what the Bill was because of the media. It was called the Northern Ireland (Offences) Bill, but the media kept dubbing it the "on the runs Bill", so people thought that it was just a Bill to deal with the anomalies that were there around "on the runs" and people who found their status questionable in terms of what might happen to them when they return to a given jurisdiction. However, the Northern Ireland (Offences) Bill was far more sweeping that. Unfortunately, we have come back to amnesty again. While we can and must criticise the British Government for that, this also comes back to the fact that the parties and the political process collectively have failed to agree a proper way forward and a legacy at different times. Different parties have different reasons for trying to avoid different proposals or to resile from different proposals on legacy. That has yielded a situation where a British Government has been able to do what it is doing and say that everything else that has been tried or that has been suggested has been turned down, and saying that this is all that we can do. We should criticise the British Government but we need to reflect on our own possible agency in this as well.