Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I am back. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to get back in and I apologise for having to run off earlier. I had to head down to the Chamber to speak. I thank Ms Teggart, Mr. O'Hare and Mr. Reavey for their incredible presentation and testimony. I am so sorry to hear all of the shocking things that have happened to them on those fateful days and on subsequent days, weeks, months and years. It is incredible that any normal and civilised society would see that happen to anybody, never mind the State itself being the perpetrator of those actions. From the work I have done with people like the O'Dowd family, who are not far away from Mr. Reavey and Mr. O'Hare, to the work I have done with Denise Mullen, we have seen that these actions are not isolated ones but actions that happened to hundreds of families across the North of Ireland over a period. It is interesting because I was not aware of all the details, especially the ones Mr. Reavey mentioned, of what happened to the families subsequently, including those actions of soldiers and the shocking, horrendous and ignorant sentences that were said to a grieving family. The amnesty Bill, in many ways, is a continuation of all of that. It fits right in with exactly what has happened to these families before and it is not an outlier in the behaviour of the British state. It is a clear continuation of what happened in those original days. What is probably worse about it is it is clearly at the feet and hands of the British Government itself and that policy and what happened to the witnesses goes right to the top.

The issue we have been looking at pushing for a long period is the one that was mentioned by Mr. Finucane at the start and has been discussed since, namely, the idea of our Government taking either those cases themselves, as it did in the cases of the hooded men, or challenging the legislation itself on behalf of everybody who has suffered. I propose that this committee sends a letter to the Minister for Foreign Affairs asking him to publicly take the position that the Government will pursue this case in the European Court of Human Rights if this legislation progresses fully through the British Houses of Parliament. If we take an action like that today and if that leads to the Minister going on the public record that this is what the Minister will do, that would be a positive step forward for the cases of all of these families.

Many of the questions have been discussed and answered already but I might put the following question to Ms Teggart. Where are the Jon Boutcher inquiries? I remember about a year ago there was a blockage. Mr. Boutcher's inquiries were looking for documents from the southern State and the Garda but there was some legislation in place at the time which stopped that. The Government had promised that it would change that legislation to free up a pathway for those documents to be handed over. Has that blockage been fixed? Does the Boutcher inquiry have all the information from the southern State that it needs to progress?