Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. McCord and his colleagues, Mr. O’Hare and Mr. Farrell. As the Cathaoirleach said, it takes a person of great character and substance to be able to come before a parliamentary committee and outline what his family has been going through since 9 November 1997 when Raymond Jnr was murdered. None of us have the words to comprehend adequately the grief that Mr. McCord and his family, as well as Raymond’s friends and extended family, go through. All we can say is that we fully support his efforts to get to the truth. He graciously includes all other victims regardless of what background they come from. That is extremely important for all of us. We can all have our political views but we want to see justice for everybody.

In fairness, in this Parliament, in both the Dáil and the Seanad and at all committees, regardless of party, everybody was vehemently opposed to the legacy Bill. I do not know how many times we discussed the matter here with different groups. We discussed it with senior British politicians. Successive Governments were totally of the same opinion as the Oireachtas. We are totally ad idemregarding how deplorable the legacy Bill is. It is a charter for the perpetrators of crime and murderers. In layman's terms, people who committed heinous crimes, including murder, inflicted grievous bodily harm on other individuals and created mayhem could literally give themselves an amnesty. In what democracy that we would regard as one does that happen? In particular, in democracies of the western European style, we always hoped there would be basic civil rights, basic human rights and basic justice. All of us in public life, particularly those of us who are from the province of Ulster or a Border county, are very familiar with families who have campaigned for justice and who have been denied it. People know full well that it is very hard to get convictions after the long periods since some of these crimes. Some of the families I have supported lost loved ones 50 years ago, and that still does not take away from the grief. I am sure that as time goes on it becomes intergenerational. It probably gets more intense as time goes on with no truth established. Then a mechanism is put in place by a government to stop whatever pathways there might be to establishing the truth. That is absolutely deplorable. Mr. McCord makes a plea on behalf of all families and all victims.

The police ombudsman report, going back to 2007, I think, found that there were a number of failures in the original murder investigation into Raymond Jnr. Then a coroner's inquest into the death of Raymond was ordered but it has not yet commenced. What type of lame-duck excuses has Mr. McCord been given for non-commencement? Was there any real effort to commence such an inquest at any stage?