Mr. Padraig Yeates:

I will come back on the question. Like many people, I have been in court from time to time. I have been a witness, a defendant, a plaintiff and, most of all, a reporter over the past 50-odd years. I have never been in a courtroom, whether the case was civil or criminal, or where there was an inquest or whatever, where I felt I was in a reconciliation process because I was in the presence of a contest between lawyers. The facts and alleged principles come in very far down the line.

I have also been a trade union activist. As such, I have been involved in a fair bit of mediation through what used to be the Labour Relations Commission and is now the Workplace Relations Commissions; I am showing my age. It was where some sort of progress could be made provided people engaged honestly and fairly with each other. What we are proposing is an option. We are not saying, as the British Government does, that this would replace the courts. We absolutely accept everyone's right to go to court and to use the criminal justice system and, indeed, the civil courts to achieve justice. We are saying that we all know, as does everyone in this room, that the vast majority of people will never get justice in the courts. It is just not possible because the number of cases is so great and also due to time. I am of an age where I can remember the start of the Troubles and the civil rights movement. Most of the people I knew in 1970 and 1971 are dead, including people who had information.

There has to be some alternative. We cannot just park it. I am fairly tired of hearing politicians and lawyers, in particular, saying they will get truth and justice, will find a way of doing it, will bring in legislation and will have talks and negotiations, but nothing happens except that another case trundles through. Every case that trundles through those courts adds to the legacy problem. I have friends who got a case into court relatively recently. It happened to involve the British army but it could have been anybody. Their hopes were quite high that they would get a result. They did not get a result but it re-traumatised them. They had to go through the ordeal, when the people concerned were acquitted, of having to walk out of that court building at Laganside. Naturally enough, in what was a perfectly human reaction, the soldiers and their supporters were celebrating. My friends had to walk through that. It could have been the other way around. It is not a one-sided street. That is the problem.

We need to find some other way of doing it. We are saying that if people come forward in good faith and give information, and if it can be verified from other sources, which in many cases it can be, then there is a basis by which people can reach the truth and agree the facts. They may not agree anything else but unless we can do that, we will end up with the usual story of one side wins while the other side loses and they each bring out their version of history or of what happened. Someone recently said to us at the conference, "What about subtext? What about the circumstances?" We have loads of subtext. We are falling down and could bury this country with the number of books and propaganda being produced on history. What we do not have are people who are willing to get up and tell the truth. That is what we need.

I will add one other point. It is a matter of record that I am a former combatant. I have never yet been in a room with a group of former combatants where I was contradicted when I said that we all know people who went to prison for things they did not do, because we do. The reason for that is the only way people could prove their innocence, as they were usually stitched up by somebody, was to say, "It was not me. It was him." or by turning informer and, unless they were a supergrass, they would not do that. People will not leave their communities and they will not become outcasts and have their families suffer the results of their decision. We need a new way of doing it. We need a different way before it is too late.