Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I thank, on behalf of the committee, the witnesses who have come before us from Relatives for Justice and Ashton Community Trust. We are joined by Mr. Mark Thompson, CEO of Relatives for Justice, and Mr. Christopher Stanley, domestic and international human rights advocate for Relatives for Justice. We are also joined from Ashton Community Trust by Ms Irene Sherry, senior leadership team, and Ms Shauneen Baker, clinical lead. They are all very welcome and we look forward to our engagement with them to discuss the ongoing needs of victims and survivors of the conflict, the importance of continued, sustained action through support services for victims and their contributions to the positive societal change. We also look forward to discussing the protection of human rights, social justice and reconciliation.

The format of the meeting will be that I will invite both organisations to make their opening statements, which will be followed by questions from members of the committee. Each will have seven minutes to include asking questions and the witnesses responding.

Before I begin, I remind members of the constitutional requirement that, in order to participate in public meetings, they must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex. Members of the committee attending remotely must do so from within the precincts of Leinster House. This is due to the constitutional requirement that, in order to participate in public meetings, members must be physically present within the confines of the place where Parliament has chosen to sit. In this regard, I ask members partaking via Microsoft Teams that, prior to making their contributions to the meeting, they confirm they are on the grounds of the Leinster House complex.

Members and witnesses are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in respect of an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

As the witnesses will probably be aware, the committee will publish their opening statements on its website following this meeting. MPs participating in this committee session from a jurisdiction outside the State are advised that they should also be mindful of their domestic law and how it may apply to their participation in such proceedings.

With all that housekeeping done, I invite Mr. Thompson of Relatives for Justice to make his opening statement, followed by Ms Irene Sherry from Ashtown Community Trust.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

We thank the committee for hosting this important evidence session. We again pay tribute to this committee for its dedicated focus on victims and survivors in the matter of dealing with the past.

Relatives for Justice, RFJ, provides an holistic support service to the bereaved and injured of the conflict. We offer these services to all those affected and impacted by the conflict. We offer this service every day to individuals, families and groups. These are people connected through violent loss, bereavement and injury, their shared experience being the death of a loved one or carrying a permanent psychological or physical injury. We provide a service to enable healing, recovery and remembrance.

For example, the Remembering Quilt is a project we have been involved in for over 20 years. It is a project in which families make a 9 in. square in memory of their loved one, which is then incorporated into an 8 ft by 8 ft quilted panel currently consisting of 539 squares. The project was launched in 2001 and, 25 years later, it is over 100 ft long when put together. We reference the Remembering Quilt because it is representative of the purpose of RFJ in our-post-conflict transitional society, a society in transition from violence to peace, a peace in progress secured by the internationally recognised Good Friday Agreement and its commitment in letter and spirit to human rights and the rule of law, specifically, those provided, secured and protected by the incorporation of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights, ECHR, into domestic legislation as part of that agreement, and those international standards of the United Nations, including Security Council Resolution 1325 and the recognition of a gendered lens reflecting the specific role of women in the conflict and post-conflict societies. Over 90% of those killed were male, leaving behind spouses, partners, daughters and mothers to pick up the pieces.

We mention the Remembering Quilt not only because it is a compelling symbol in addition to being a work of therapeutic recovery from loss in real time but also because we have recently referred to it in our written submissions to the UK Parliament Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in its call for evidence on reconciliation. We have reminded that committee that it had previously conducted an inquiry into reconciliation in 2004 and that much of our evidence of that time remains the same, echoing the same points about the role of truth and the importance of reconciliation.

For RFJ and those we seek to assist, it is symbolic that holistic support and therapeutic practices of healing, recovery and remembrance for individuals, families, groups and communities are connected to the processes of truth recovery and information retrieval about the truth of the past, with accountability. Healing, recovery and remembrance are in part achieved through securing truth, justice and acknowledgment for families. This might be the lens through which RFJ would articulate the reality of reconciliation for families.

The processes of acknowledgement, including state apologies and acts of memorialisation of grief, loss, bereavement and guilt, must place victims first. There must be no hierarchy of victims. There must be no burden on victims in the context of their being coerced into reconciliation into order to effect an acceptance of an apology or an attempt at closure. The line in the sand the state often calls for but can only be established by families, often across generations, belying the final opportunity rhetoric of the state in respect of matters of the past.

The Remembering Quilt is also a living act of storytelling and literally creating a narrative of the lives lost. Storytelling in terms of narratives is part of the process of establishing truth for victims in their own words, thereby empowering them. This is not an imposed truth certified by the state through historians and archivists appointed by politicians and supervised by civil servants, nor one that creates hierarchies of victims, for example, the false veterans versus victims hierarchy. The UK's Victims and Survivors (Northern Ireland) Order 2006 secures against this through its legislative process by virtue of the fact that it is inclusive. This is a truth recovery process which can be achieved by an independent authority empowered, through law, to conduct investigations in accordance with ECHR standards including the effective participation, which is really important, of families in the process of investigations in compliance with Article 2, with powers to compel evidence and the ability to create public record of that evidence, how it was tested and the results and conclusions that were arrived at.

This is a public record – a truth – now made possible, for example, to the families of those killed by members of the British army in the Springhill-Westrock massacre on 9 July 1972, which was delivered by an independent judge on 3 June 2026. This truth is reported as Neutral Citation No. [2026] NICoroner 2 in a 649-page narrative verdict. There are no findings of civil liability or criminal guilt, but – and this is hugely important – an inquest file has now been sent by the judge sitting as the coroner to the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland. Further questions remain for the Ministry of Defence, MOD, in regard to these killings. These questions have been asked by RFJ of the British Government in recent correspondence. An apology was made to the families by the then British Prime Minister during Prime Minister's question time in the House of Commons. It took less than 15 seconds of parliamentary time, or three seconds per victim. For the Springhill and Westrock families, supported throughout by RFJ, there has been an arrival at a point not of closure but of truth. The Springhill massacre inquest was the final legacy inquest before the legacy Act was imposed. Its conclusion for the families shows the value of inquests and coronial investigation in terms of truth recovery.

Not every legacy case requires the same process, but what has been denied to families is access to truth and, therefore, access to accountability. There is a right to truth in the jurisprudence of the ECHR, the Human Rights Act, HRA, and in international human rights law. The right to truth has been denied since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the McKerr group of judgments of the ECHR, the package of measures brought about to address the deficit in Articles 2 and 3, the Eames-Bradley and Haas-O’Sullivan processes, the failure to implement the Stormont House Agreement all they way up to New Decade, New Approach. It was denied by the UK at every turn as has been the case for the legacy Act. It is being denied by the UK's Northern Ireland Troubles Bill through the continuing failure to secure ECHR standards of compliance in, for example, the independence of appointments to the legacy commission, the disclosure regime and national security-public interest test controls by the British Executive and the failure to enable the effective participation of families in investigations. Denial is as costly as the process itself.

The work of RFJ requires investment. We fight to secure it in a hostile fiscal and political environment for the rights of families. Our work brings tangible benefits from an individual counselling session, to participation in the Remembering Quilt to a forensic family report detailing every sinew and fibre of evidence available and analysed, day after day. The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill has stalled. The remedial order has stalled. The Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery, ICRIR, mechanism is not fit for purpose and has not secured the support of families. These views of the failure of the ICRIR are supported by the UN special rapporteurs. The view of the committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to which we report under rule 9 regularly in Strasbourg are also clear on this issue. The views of the Irish Government appears clear by way of maintaining its application to the ECHR of the interstate case in terms of the overall legacy Act. This stalling does not facilitate reconciliation. It does not assist families seeking truth as part of healing, recovery and remembrance. It does not ease the burden of responsibility. It does not stop relatives dying at the doors of the court as happened to Eugene Thompson while he was waiting for the UK Supreme Court to deliver a verdict on the denial of truth about the collusion in the murder of his brother Paul. It does not stop retraumatisation, transgenerational trauma or the perpetuation of destructive and pernicious state counter-narratives denying families truth and justice.

I will conclude by saying what I said when I was last before this committee in 2023. Families are never giving up. We play our part as will, we hope, this committee in continuing its work towards realising the full potential of the full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and the Human Rights Act which is what people want. I thank the committee for taking the time to listen.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Mr. Thompson. No doubt some questions will be taken on it. He is very welcome back since his previous appearance before the committee in 2023. I call Ms Sherry.

Ms Irene Sherry:

I thank the Chair and members for the opportunity to speak today. I am here on behalf of Ashton Community Trust and our specialist service, Bridge of Hope, to highlight the ongoing needs of victims and survivors of the conflict and to outline why sustained action is now more important than ever.

Nearly 28 years after the Good Friday Agreement, we have come a long way but for many individuals, the legacy of the conflict is not history; it is a daily reality. Between 1969 and 2006 over 3,700 people lost their lives, around 100,000 were physically injured and more than 200,000 experienced conflict-related mental health difficulties. Belfast, particularly north Belfast, bore a disproportionate burden of this violence. Today, those impacts have not diminished; they have evolved. At Bridge of Hope, we see at first hand how trauma persists across decades. Many of those we support are now ageing with worsening physical and mental health compounded by poverty, isolation and unresolved grief. Between April 2022 and March 2025 alone over 4,000 victims and survivors accessed our services. The majority were over 45 and demand for psychological support continues to grow. These are not isolated issues. They are complex, interconnected challenges including post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, chronic illness, substance misuse and socioeconomic disadvantage, all deeply rooted in the past but shaping the present.

Bridge of Hope was established in 2001 in direct response to violence in our community. Since then, we have supported over 45,000 individuals through trauma-informed, person-centred care. Our model is simple but effective, namely wraparound support delivered in the community built on trust and tailored to individual needs. We work alongside statutory and voluntary partners including through the Regional Trauma Network to ensure people receive the right care at the right time. This partnership approach is critical. It strengthens outcomes, improves co-ordination and ensures that support is accessible and effective.

However, despite this progress, we face significant and growing challenges. Legacy issues continue to cause real harm. Recent legislative developments have reduced access to truth and justice, increasing distress and undermining trust. This has led to a greater demand for advocacy and therapeutic support. Funding pressures are placing services at risk. There is a £3.3 million shortfall in the victim support programme, leaving organisations like ours struggling to meet rising demand. Crucially, the future is uncertain. The end of PEACEPLUS funding presents a major risk, potentially leading to the loss of essential services and weakening community resilience.

At the same time, new evidence highlights the scale of ongoing need. Our community navigator service, working in emergency departments, has engaged with thousands of individuals in crisis, including those experiencing suicidal ideation, violence and trauma linked to both deprivation and the legacy of the conflict. This reinforces a clear message that early, community-based intervention works but it must be properly resourced.

So, what is needed? We are asking this committee to take five key actions. These are to advocate for immediate funding to address the current shortfall in victim support services; promote a co-ordinated, cross-government approach between the UK and Irish Governments to ensure long-term investment; support the development of sustainable funding mechanisms beyond PEACEPLUS; prioritise trauma-informed policy across all areas, including legacy, health and community development; and strengthen cross-Border collaboration to address shared challenges and build lasting reconciliation.

While the Good Friday Agreement delivered peace, it did not end the need for support. The legacy of the conflict remains deeply embedded in individuals, families and communities. Without sustained and co-ordinated action, there is a real risk of embedding cycles of trauma and inequality for future generations, but with the right investment and leadership, we can build on the progress made, ensuring that victims and survivors receive the care, dignity and support they deserve. Go raibh maith agaibh.

Alison Comyn (Fianna Fail)
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I thank the witnesses for coming before us and for their very strong statements. Most of all, I thank them for the incredible work they do. I am sincerely sorry that there are people who are still suffering so many years later. It is clear from the many witnesses we have had before us that the hurt is still there and there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed. The remembering quilt sounds like a really lovely project, but what a tragedy to have so many victims that we are speaking about the quilt being 100 ft long. While I applaud the work, it is a shame that we are still looking at people being hurt and the legacy issues not being addressed.

The main reason we are here is the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. I will start by asking both groups their opinion of the Good Friday Agreement almost three decades on. How is it doing?

Mr. Mark Thompson:

It has transformed society in the North and across the island and the relationships between the islands. For me, as an activist, the incorporation of the Human Rights Act provided families with agency to use the European convention in local domestic courts to seek remedy. In the context of doing this, a war of attrition was waged against those families by the state agencies that had the information and controlled the information, and also had the forensic and ballistic evidence and withheld it, if we look at Ballymurphy and Springhill. We can see the outworkings of what happened in terms of the truth eventually coming out and what families had to face. The Good Friday Agreement gave agency.

It also led to the devolution of criminal justice and policing in the 2010 agreement at Hillsborough, which provided Northern Ireland with an Attorney General who could be petitioned under section 14 of the 1959 coroners Act to make applications for fresh inquests. This has enabled families to find an inquisitorial process in the judicial system. All of this has provided a toolkit for families to pick how they want to approach it. Ultimately, they want the truth. When a loved one is killed and there are many untruths, lies and cover-ups, people's lives become consumed with dealing with it. Some family members deal with it and others engage with therapeutic care and other projects such as storytelling and art to deal with it. The Good Friday Agreement and the devolution mechanisms have provided this agency and empowered families directly.

The consequence of this was the legacy Act. It was the direct response to the courts and the criminal justice process in the North working and functioning for the first time without interference and leading to the evidence. That is why we have the legacy Act. It came as a consequence of families using the Police Ombudsman's office, which derived from the Good Friday Agreement, with retrospective powers, using civil litigation and the inquisitorial process through the Attorney General and never giving up. What began to happen in the legal landscape was that a picture was built that was contrary to the propaganda of the state when it took lives.

Alison Comyn (Fianna Fail)
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I would like to get another question in, so I would love to hear from the other group.

Ms Irene Sherry:

The Good Friday Agreement is internationally recognised and has made a phenomenal improvement to lives and communities in the North. If we look at it from a trauma perspective, it is said that it can take 30 years post conflict for the trauma to come to the fore. The Good Friday Agreement has created opportunities. Having the accessibility and support of both Governments to support the needs of victims and survivors is critical. We are at a very difficult phase at the minute in terms of the needs of victims and survivors, which have increased significantly. There has probably been a 40% increase in terms of need across the groups in recent years with the different legacy processes. In particular, we will have the Troubles permanent disabled pension scheme working to a conclusion at the end of August. This has put phenomenal pressure on the groups and services that victims need to support them through the processes. There is still work to be done on the Good Friday Agreement and it is critical that the Governments renew focus and energy to support the outworkings to see more in the communities.

Ms Shauneen Baker:

Coming at it as a clinical lead, one of the barriers we see is a live anti-terrorism Act still operating, so there is silence with regard to people accessing the services and people cannot come forward because there are things they cannot talk about. When we talk about healing, we talk about parents, society, people themselves, communities and the country, but there is a barrier to that happening. We have to look at that in terms of the Good Friday Agreement, but it has created the space for us to grow, heal and repair.

Alison Comyn (Fianna Fail)
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I am sure that my colleagues will come to a longer question but I have a very quick one. I noticed some groups were still being marginalised. Which groups have been most marginalised over the past ten to 20 years? There was mention of LGBTQ groups being particularly marginalised. Are we talking about groups that are still being left out of restorative justice or addressing legacy issues?

Mr. Mark Thompson:

Recently, we received funding from the reconciliation fund from the Department of foreign affairs to conduct research into the LGBTQ+ community and how the conflict impacted it. This research is ongoing. There was the masculinity of the conflict in itself, although it is not that women were passive. They played productive roles as activists in the conflict from all perspectives. I think that the LGBTQ+ community felt the toxicity of the masculinity of the processes. The apparatus of the state had a particular viewpoint and people left. They have come back later in adult life with more confidence. We are a transformed society in that regard.

We hope the research will give an insight into that when it is published.

Ms Irene Sherry:

The regional trauma network under the research focus office is starting a piece of work around gender. Academics from all the universities are involved in that along with victims' groups. That is a great opportunity as well.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on gender acknowledges the impact of conflict on women. The British State does not recognise the North as having been through a conflict and therefore it does not apply 1325 in terms of the conflict in the North, considering the role that women played and the impact it had, particularly on them. Ms Baker would probably know more on the cognitive impact between males and females.

Ms Shauneen Baker:

In the past three years we are seeing an ageing population, mainly comprised of women over 45 years of age. The relevant percentage is 63%. That is the need in the past few years.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the witnesses for that. There is probably a body of work to be done on the gender piece alone. Once the report is done that may be something for the consideration of the committee.

Garret Kelleher (Fine Gael)
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I thank all the witnesses for taking the time to come in to us today. It is often said that the true measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable people. Certainly, that has to be at the centre of the better future that we are looking to create, whatever form that may take. Ms Sherry mentioned in her opening statement about the Good Friday Agreement delivering peace but that it does not end the need to provide supports and continuing assistance to those who suffered most during the conflict. In an ideal world we are looking to achieve a future where victims' voices will be taken into account and given the consideration they deserve in a non-partisan and non-judgmental way. Politically, on both sides of the Border, North-South and east-west when speaking about the legacy issues, where does Ms Sherry believe victims are being let down at the moment by those in positions of power politically who are trying to influence things to build a better future for everybody?

Ms Irene Sherry:

Our Government in Stormont has always been very supportive in terms of the needs of victims and survivors. It has continued to ring-fence funds, in spite of it being in receipt of underfunding, and victims have always been prioritised. The difficulty over the past two to three years has been with the legacy process, particularly the pension scheme. That has brought thousands of victims and survivors forward, both to look for support in writing their pension applications and it has also opened up a huge need for therapeutic support once going through that process. That has broadened in terms of family members as well. For some of the groups that involved in the regional trauma network, RTN, we reckon there has been a 40% increase in terms of needs. Whenever a business case is put up, despite the goodwill of our Government to support the needs of victims and survivors and the recognition that it wants to try to find other money, there is a shortfall of £3.3 million which has just come through the recently announced result of the victim support programme through the victims and survivors service. That demonstrates that there is huge need out there. The victims' pension scheme is expected to close at the end of August. It could take five years or more to the conclusion of that. The needs are going to increase significantly in the years to come. The requirement to bring it to a baseline links with the emergence of that deficit. As an organisation, after the first quarter of this financial year, 50% of our budget allocation for counselling provision is gone. As we look to the end of the next quarter even before the pension scheme closes we will have no resources to support the needs of victims and survivors. I do not believe that is within anybody's help. However, I would urge this committee to in some way advocate very strongly. All our groups are in the exact same position and it is really difficult for victims and survivors to go through very difficult processes while we do not have the resources to be able to support them.

Garret Kelleher (Fine Gael)
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Mr. Thompson made reference to concerns over the future of PEACEPLUS funding, which is a theme we have encountered time and again. Indeed, it was central to what was said when we met with representatives from smaller community groups on a recent visit to Belfast. I ask Mr. Thompson to elaborate a little on that, please.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

As one of my colleagues said earlier, recovery from traumatic incidents is a journey or a process. It is up and down; it is not linear or clean. People are going to courts. They are back in that place. It brings back every from maybe 20, 30 or 40 years ago. These people will have a need for therapeutic intervention and support. In the context of addressing the past, we have had failed initiatives going back to the Eames-Bradley report. In all of those initiatives, the British Government has been the bad faith actor. Everyone has taken the risk and stepped forward. Ultimately, it has failed to deliver. In terms of supporting journeys and supporting communities, the trauma is not going to disappear. We can address the legacy of the past and provide a measure of accountability and truth about who did what to whom and have that historical record clarified. There is then the aftermath of that. It is transgenerational. I will give an example. We work a lot in the legal sphere. I can provide the names of maybe 25 lawyers and barristers in the North who are practising in the courts and have been involved in this work. Each one of them has buried parents, siblings or grandparents. To give an example, in the community we have worked with the families impacted by the McGurk's bar bombing in 1971 in Belfast. Of course, the Stormont regime said it was an own goal; that the IRA had been making a bomb and it exploded killing 15 people and injuring many more. What we found out is that it was not an own goal but, rather, a loyalist bomb, possibly assisted through collusion with the explosives and the expertise and so forth. In some sense, the people who led that campaign are not just the next generation but the third and fourth generations. That gives a sense of the unresolved nature of this and how it occupies the space. It is collective. The traumatic circle of that is much wider. This is not just individuals and families, it is even communities, by extension, that have been criminalised in the context of all of this. The reparations for all of that take many forms. Looking at the reparations package of truth, justice and accountability reparations and the guarantees of non-recurrence, that is the sphere in which we are working in regard to transitional justice in its broader context. That is not going to happen unresourced and both governments have a role in resourcing that. The Irish Government has stepped up to the plate in regard to the Stormont House Agreement and the joint framework but the British Government is a persistent bad faith actor. I have said this to Hilary Benn and previous secretaries of state. It comes down to the security services in Britain and MI5.

MI5 advises a British Government Secretary of State about national security on what it should do to protect it, when it has been involved in all these things that have taken place. I will paraphrase Dr. Michael Maguire, who was the Police Ombudsman investigating collusion, who asked the PSNI for information to enable him to do the investigations and they denied it, resulting in an unprecedented situation occurring whereby the head of one Government institution, in criminal justice terms, took another to the court for judicial review. Paraphrasing Dr. Maguire, he said that he would not allow a situation to prevail whereby the very people who were the subject of his investigations in getting to the bottom of around 70 murders involving state collusion were going to determine what he got to enable him to do that investigation.

That is the same application we are currently dealing with around the legacy Act when it comes to MI5 talking about national security and a veto and closing this down and closing justice down. It is very important to remember that, as we are sitting here, the legacy Act is alive; nothing has changed. You still cannot take a civil case or have an inquest. You cannot do anything, but be directed to a body that is a sham and is not fit for purpose in ICRIR. I sat with the Minister, Deputy McEntee, Mr. Stanley and other groups, and she said it is completely unlawful. That is why we have taken the case.

We need to keep vigilant. Britain is in political flux at the minute. The remedial order to restore civil cases and to make the various changes is dead in the House of Lords. What the British are saying, and we do not buy it, and Mr. Stanley will talk more authoritatively on this, is that the changes they have made will make it Article 2 compliant. The Irish Government needs to retain the interstate case, to look at this and come at it with the clean eye it has had to it, not only in terms of resources required but also the political leverage and ensuring that the fundamental bedrock of the Good Friday Agreement, which is the Human Rights Act and the rights to justice, equality, truth and accountability that flow from that, are not being blocked by a British Government because it does not like what the outcome will be.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Mr. Thompson for that. Mr. Stanley wants to come in, very briefly.

Mr. Christopher Stanley:

On Mr. Thompson's point, to go back to the issue of funding, resources, victims groups and support that is needed in a transitional justice society, the committee will have heard before and will understand that this is not really understood within Westminster, and I am obviously speaking with a very English accent, because I live less than a mile from Westminster, so I am a Westminster watcher. What Mr. Thompson has just described in terms of a post-conflict society is not understood in Westminster. Before the carry-over motion of the Troubles Bill and remedial order, it took a UN special rapporteur to sit in a pokey room at the top of the Palace of Westminster to address three Labour MPs, one Sinn Féin MP and assorted civil society groups on the UN problems with the Troubles Bill specifically. This goes back to the point made earlier that the Good Friday Agreement is an internationally recognised and registered agreement. It is scrutinised by other organisations, including the UN, and is looked to as a model for other transitional, post-conflict societies.

In Westminster terms, and I am sure the committee will understand this, you have a complex devolved system in Belfast at Stormont, a centralised Treasury system for huge amounts of public funding, and a Northern Ireland Office which, with no disrespect to the office, is not the most glamorous of portfolios for a Minister to hold. There are huge degrees of misunderstanding among Westminster MPs about what actually goes on in Northern Ireland in terms of victims, support and a post-conflict society. Unless they have representatives in the constituencies, they simply do not understand this or the needs, the mechanisms and fiscal constraints. This is made more complicated in a post-Brexit society, which does not help. It is a Westminster point, and I do not think Westminster, deliberately, understands very often. I was struck that a UN senior personnel had to come into Westminster to explain that what is going on in Northern Ireland is scrutinised elsewhere.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Mr. Stanley for that.

Conor Murphy (Sinn Fein)
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To follow through on the point Mr. Stanley just made regarding Westminster on the funding issue, the British Government has steadfastly refused to fund the victims part of the legacy process, despite the Executive only being formed in 1999 and 2000 and the bulk of people who were victims of the conflict experiencing this over the course of the direct rule period. When I was finance Minister in the North, I presented a paper to the then Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, arguing for British Government support for the funding of the legacy, particularly relating to that recompense issue for people who had suffered, and they steadfastly refused to do so. We now have a situation where Stormont, with its limited resources, is trying to fund that. We are also trying to get money from the EU and the Irish Government, all because they refuse to take responsibility for issues that happened in the timeframe of their direct jurisdiction in the conflict. This is a case we need to continue to push.

On the general points on legacy, the a frustration for all of us as we had agreed a legacy process in 2014. It may not have been perfect and we may have found flaws in it, but we are a long way down the road at this stage, 12 years on, in dealing with the effects of what was agreed. In that case, the British Government arbitrarily walked away and tried to frustrate the already existing process, and has now almost completely frustrated this and has not delivered anything in that regard. We have made the point repeatedly to members of the Government here that is was a real leap of faith to get into a joint process with the British Government, especially given the history.

I notice the briefing note we got from the Department of foreign affairs talked about the importance of building on the continued work in a timely and faithful fashion. The inclusion of that word "faithful" suggests a lack of confidence that faith will be kept in the agreement made between both governments. In that context, the retention of the possibility of an interstate case is critical. I notice the Minister, Deputy McEntee, has said Government intends to retain that. That is something we need to be kept informed on. It would be useful after the recess that we would get some of the officials in because this was originally due to come back to the House of Commons in the autumn, but it now seems to have drifted off. We are under a new Administration, which will obviously take off in the next couple of weeks, and I presume there will be an opportunity then for officials from the Department of foreign affairs to talk to officials in Britain over the course of the summer and into the autumn to see where this process is at. It would be very useful for this committee to invite officials in to give us a briefing on this. We have had briefing notes from them over time, but we have never had the opportunity to actually have people across the table to have a conversation on this. I suggest we try to find space for that in the early autumn.

As regards the interstate case, which seems to me the only card Dublin holds in trying to ensure this is followed in a faithful fashion, from the witnesses' own perspective, what is the importance of that? We have seen the proposition of numerous amendments from backbenchers. The Government claims it is bringing in amendments, which sort of deal with the problem but not in a way that upends anything, which again is something we are concerned about. There is also the prospect of, perhaps, in several years, a Reform Government in Britain which could see this all torn up. We could also see a departure from the ECHR. The importance of getting these arrangements in place now is critical. Could I get the witnesses' sense on that, on the critical nature of keeping that interstate case as an option, and a live one, which would be shrewd, and on the urgency in getting some sense of what the Government intends to do with this? As was said, that process of using the coroners courts and other things has now been stalled, and we are now sitting in a vacuum.

Mr. Christopher Stanley:

The interstate case is critical and is Dublin's leverage point against whichever government sits in Westminster in a few weeks' time, and it will be the continuation of the Labour Government. It is hugely significant and not just symbolic, although it is symbolic. It is hugely politically important for the Council of Ministers, committee ministers and the Council of Europe that this is being taken and held.

As members will know there has been the Troubles Bill, a remedial order and, now, two important judgments for the UK Supreme Court, all attempting, not to undermine but to destabilise the stability of the application. It is an application by the Irish Government against the UK. It has also got a number of interveners attached to it already, including victims' groups like the Birmingham pub bombing people. They want to intervene against the legacy Act. In a sense they want to resolve the legacy Act through the Troubles Bill but the Troubles Bill, as members will have noticed, is stalled. The remedial order is stalled, as we said in our opening statement.

There are 105 laid amendments on the Troubles Bill as I last looked at the start of the week or the end of last week. These are complex amendments about national security, the appointments process, the Intelligence Services Commission and so forth. That is not including the amendments which the British Government, and the Secretary of State has said, they are going to lay. Many of these amendments are contentious because they raise the victims versus veterans hierarchy of victims issue, which is, as members will know, been, in part, barnstormed through Conservative backbenchers through a Conservative stranglehold in the House of Lords. The argument was that they did not need a remedial order to amend the legislation because they have introduced new legislation. The remedial order still has to be done because of the decisions on conditional immunity and other provisions in the legacy Act.

The remedial order is a simple piece of legislation. It simply corrects the incompatibility argument that the British courts found against the ECHR, which have now been undermined, to some extent, by the judgment in the case of the Martina Dillon application. The remedial order had an amendment block against it by a senior Tory peer. That is going nowhere. There is no date even for the Committee Stage of the Troubles Bill. They cannot find the parliamentary time. They cannot find the parliamentary time for the Hillsborough Law Bill, which is related in one sense to the Troubles Bill about duties of candour on public servants. As members will know, there is a very powerful veterans' lobby, linked to what I might call a security community lobby and not identified. Therefore, the leverage point which Dublin has is to maintain it and not believe in the "we will fix this, we are going to reform ICRIR". We have had an internal non-statutory review, which was damning. We are now having a full-term statutory review, which has to report next year.

The interesting thing about the section 35 statutory review of the legacy Act is that they did not have to do this for at least two or three years. They are doing it early because of the concerns which were expressed by Peter May. Over the last two weeks we have seen members of ICRIR, as they would, coming out and defending their position, blaming in part the Irish Government about communication, disclosure, memorandums and so forth, and blaming the lack of resources, but in two or three years they have produced nothing. They might say that the ombudsman produced stuff in two years of being operative, whenever the ombudsman came about - 2001 or whenever - and contend that the ombudsman was simply looking at police disciplinary issues and misconduct whereas they are dealing with far more complex cases. Yes, they are dealing with far more complex cases but I think, as they described in the Act, the legacy commission is simply moving the deckchairs on the Titanic. It is ICRIR simply in a different form, the same personnel and so forth. It needs the root-and-branch reform which people like Nuala O'Loan have said that it requires. That is the play that the British Government will make and say, "Actually, we are going to make all this better", and as has been mentioned, "We can take away your interstate case now". That also plays into, as members will know, certain positions within British political society about its relationship with the ECHR because most people do not understand that the ECHR has nothing to do with Brexit. It is about the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers, but there is such a swell against the ECHR for completely non-legacy reasons, which the members know about, concerning migration and so forth. This is political rhetoric. The Irish Government should not be persuaded by the British Government saying, "We shall make this right. Please go away", because they obviously, as a Labour Government, are committed to the ECHR, but then other hostile forces are not. As we said right at the top of this session, and I think the opening statements reflected this, the letter and the spirit of the ECHR are embodied in the Good Friday Agreement.

Patricia Stephenson (Social Democrats)
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I thank the witnesses for their contributions so far. I want to pick up on that piece about the ECHR. Obviously Ireland was one of the 27 member states on the Council of Europe, as well as the UK Government, that signed letters seeking to alter both Articles 3 and 8. Article 3 has formed the basis of the hooded men case and formed the basis of the current legacy case, along with the other provisions. It is, therefore, important to note that while the British Government's handling of legacy has been awful, the Irish Government also sought to amend elements of the ECHR despite the fact we have two interstate cases against the UK Government. There is something about that of looking through the looking glass. It is also outrageous that that decision was made. Once you start engaging in any elements of undermining concepts of universal human rights, you unpick the entire framework. It is the basis of the Good Friday Agreement and two interstate cases, and it is an extremely dangerous precedent to set. I wanted to make that point. I thank Mr. Stanley for raising it and the whole ECHR deficit that we are seeing with the new legacy commission.

What I take from what has been said by the witnesses is that they would like the interstate case to go ahead rather than putting it on hold and waiting to see what happens because any given UK government will have a completely different approach. My understanding is that conversations continue about whether the British Government wants to be a signed-up member of the ECHR.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

We are, as an NGO, a third-party intervener in the case. We have made our submissions to Strasbourg. Even if the UK left the ECHR, it is still bound by the tenure in which the incidents happened while it was a member. You cannot de-obligate yourself from Articles 2 and 3 responsibilities.

Patricia Stephenson (Social Democrats)
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That is good to know

Mr. Mark Thompson:

That is very important to outline.

Patricia Stephenson (Social Democrats)
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Does that extend? Let us take, for example, the Article 3 provision on the threshold on torture and if that were to be increased. The fact the hooded men case did not find torture, which I do not agree with, just points to the fact that the threshold for torture is incredibly high. If the hooded men case was deemed not to be torture, that points to how high that threshold is. If there were subsequent successful attempts to increase that threshold further, which I would not agree with and is not something any government should be pursuing, would a third state be bound by the Article 3 provisions as they were when the event took place?

Mr. Mark Thompson:

It is like any law. On the timeframe of when the offence happened is how you must apply the law, whether in sentence or in this case when it is a member state to sanction.

Patricia Stephenson (Social Democrats)
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That is helpful to know. Thank you.

Mr. Christopher Stanley:

Just as a note to that, first, I praise the Irish judge, Judge O'Leary, in the Strasbourg case when the hooded men case was reheard in 2017 as she came out with a very powerful dissent on the thresholds for torture. I also think it was Lord Bingham, who was the President of the Supreme Court in 2010 to 2012, saying in a court case that were this to happen today, and he referenced the hooded men in Ireland v. UK, then it would have constituted torture. The arguments in the Attorney General's reference made to the Strasbourg court failed on this threshold, but it is still an absolute prohibition so we are talking about the thresholds, and the Senator must hold on to this. I take the point she made about the Irish diminution of rights. Once you start to have a diminution of rights and an attack on rights, that has to be held out against, which is why the Windsor framework aspects of the Dillon judgment are very important. I am a human rights NGO lawyer so this is what I do for a living. As I said, the dissent was important. You cannot start diminishing rights and they are retrospective. This is as it was at the time so it would have been torture, from an English judge back in 2012, held up by an Irish judge in 2017, but with a somewhat difficult judgment in Strasbourg.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

The application of Articles 2 and 3 in this jurisdiction as a member state has to be upheld, in the same way it has to be upheld in the North - across the island. I have held some meetings here with representatives, with Deputy Matt Carthy and with some families, in terms of the incidents that happened in this State as part of the conflict in which people were killed - the same, subject to Article 2-compliant investigations.

Patricia Stephenson (Social Democrats)
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That is what my next question is about. On the new legacy unit and its independence, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, and the Committee on the Administration of Justice, CAJ, have both raised serious concerns. It is good that it is happening, because it should have happened sooner, but there are serious concerns about its independence.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

We are working with both NGOs on this issue. There are so many cases. In fact, in the last financial year, we supported 7,000 individuals. Around 300 of them reside in the Twenty-six Counties jurisdiction. For the majority of people, the violations occurred in the North, but for a significant cohort, the violations happened in this State. This needs to be addressed. The problem at the minute, and rightly so, is that the co-operation Bill cannot be done until we see the colour of the money and what emerges, if it emerges, in the British Parliament in terms of the legacy commission and this new Troubles Bill. You cannot put in place arrangements to co-operate with something you do not know, so this has been holding things up. ICRIR is using this quite disingenuously to talk about a lack of co-operation from this jurisdiction, when clearly this would mean co-operating with something that you are taking to court that you deem to be unlawful.

It is also important to talk about the fact that the resources for the entire victims' sector in the North are minuscule. I will ask Ms Sherry and Ms Baker to talk about this issue as well. The £250 million was given to Declan Morgan and his outfit, ICRIR. It got £250 million, and it is now asking for several hundred million more. That organisation has 300 staff, while we have a staff of 52. We have a casework team of several people, and they have forensically produced 14 reports for families. In the time ICRIR has been up and running, it has produced none. I think that gives the committee a measure of what is really going on here.

Patricia Stephenson (Social Democrats)
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Absolutely, and I think the whole transitional justice piece that Mr. Thompson mentioned is really important. Some of my colleagues asked about the successes of the Good Friday Agreement. I suppose one of the failures was a failure to include legacy, and this is what we are dealing with now. We should be mindful of this for future agreements. We talk about the Good Friday Agreement being held up globally as an example, as it should be, because it brought peace, but the legacy aspect has to be built into negotiations, or otherwise families and communities suffer.

I did not realise that UN Security Council Resolution, UNSCR, 1325, on women, peace and security, was not recognised by the British Government in the North of Ireland. I find it astonishing. Does this mean we have a gender blindness when it comes to the legacy commission and everything that is coming out of it? What is the impact of this, especially on women, in the context of the participation and protection pillars of resolution 1325?

Mr. Mark Thompson:

A number of years ago, we produced a report entitled, Dealing with the Past in Ireland: Where are the Women? Our deputy director, Andrée Murphy, has been appointed to the Irish Government working group through the Department of foreign affairs. The Department does try to approach and incorporate us, even though it does not have the jurisdiction to try to catch the sweep of it, in its periodic reports to the UN under resolution 1325. I think it is something this committee should raise with the UK Government as well. I refer to why it does not recognise the North as being a conflict zone. We know why. It is building barricades to every road that leads to its own culpability and what it has been involved in.

Patricia Stephenson (Social Democrats)
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I think that is shocking. I recognise that the Department of foreign affairs does recognise the North and it is included in the national action plan for women. I think we are into the third national action plan now for women, peace and security, and Northern civil society groups are regularly engaged in that. I would be very supportive of the committee following up on this issue of the British Government's failure to recognise resolution 1325.

Ms Irene Sherry:

I will follow up on Mr. Thompson's point. Let us consider that we are talking about around €11.2 million in the sector a year. If we look at ICRIR in comparison, it has received £250 million, and there is talk of that group receiving even more money. Yet when we are looking at the North, we are talking, through the commission, about the fact that one in four adults has been impacted by the conflict. We are looking at this aspect from a transgenerational perspective and the work we are doing to support the parents of children at a time when we are now into the third generation. Regarding the interstate situation and the case in this regard, when we work from a therapeutical aspect, the important point is to do no harm. The legacy processes and what has been happening there are creating harm, including preventing people from having inquests and having their day where they can go through their feelings and any legacy process to support them. It is creating significant harm for future generations as well. Consider the significant amount of work the groups do, and yet we, that is, those groups working around the regional trauma network, RTN, are feeling at the minute that it is nearly like a crisis point for us in terms of service delivery and how we are going to meet the needs of victims and survivors. Yet we have processes that are given substantial money by the British Government. That is a real comment on the situation.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

It is important to put this point on the record in terms of the four key pillars in the context of the UN and the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, and so forth. On the reparations issue, and I think Senator Murphy was a Minister at the time, it was not possible to put legislation through in the Assembly in the North because of the divisive issue where unionists will not accept what the British State did or they will defend the indefensible. They want to promote a hierarchy of victimhood. Of course, we do not do any of that. Everyone who comes to our door is a human being, and they have had a harm done to them. No matter what that harm is, we will support them when they present to us. The Ashton Community Trust - Bridge of Hope is exactly the same.

The sense of it is that the British passed legislation for reparations for people who were psychologically fit and physically injured. It excluded the bereaved from that, and it excluded people it deemed unfit to be considered as beneficiaries, even though they had been impacted. The British Government passed the legislation at Westminster. It then gave it over to the Executive in the North and told it to foot the bill for that over the next decade and a half. I think this comes back to the point being made. The British Government gives a budget. There are then all sorts of cuts to it and everything slashed around it.

As Ms Sherry and Ms Baker pointed out, we are part of five groups in the sector that support the administration of the scheme referred to and support people to go through it. It is not that people come in and fill in an application. People present against whom there has been an economic war too because of their experience and their postcodes. These people present an application which is assessed by a Tory-appointed group in Britain to deal with benefits. As Mr. Stanley said at the outset, this group has no understanding of what the conflict was and how it was experienced in the North. It has a view of it where there were good guys and bad guys. When somebody goes before that group, they are retraumatised. They tell us they feel two things. At best, they feel like spongers. At worst, they feel like they are treated like scammers being asked to show the group their injuries. It is no different than the 1970s in the courts when someone was blown up, lost a limb or was injured. I am referring particularly to women. Judges then would have said that perhaps they could go into chambers and the victims could take their dresses up and show their scars. There is a belief that, somehow or other, we are telling lies. There is that approach.

If people put on a uniform, though, they are taken by the hand. That is the truth too. Over £1 billion has been paid out in schemes. We saw the latest scheme where there was a data breach with the PSNI. We are told by Stormont that there is no money, but £120 million was found to pay out to several thousand PSNI officers. The Chief Constable as much as said, although he has a legal responsibility, that, effectively, nobody was really under threat. That is my view. Each of them is being paid £6,000 and £7,000 and their lawyers are being paid. Yet there has been £3.3 million for a sector that is surviving on a budget from 2016 and 2017. There needs to be a broader examination of responsibility. What Britain does is to abdicate itself, throw it over, and say, "sort it out of that budget". It would not happen in any other region in Scotland, Wales or England. If Britain wants to have sovereignty, it comes at a cost. It has added to that, and it needs to repair it.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Mr. Thompson for that contribution.

Frances Black (Independent)
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Listening to the witnesses, it was a really powerful and informative session. I thank all of them very sincerely. I thank them, first, for coming down today, and for the amazing work they are doing on the ground. I want to hear a little bit more about the therapeutic side of things. The intergenerational trauma aspect is an area that I have a special interest in. I would like to hear more about it and its impact.

For example, we saw a report recently that violence against women was very high. I was at an event about suicide in north Belfast. It had the highest rates of suicide. I know that is the impact of intergenerational trauma. I want to touch on that but I also want to talk about what the witnesses would like to see us as a committee doing. Will they talk about the intergenerational trauma? Mr. Thompson said in his statement that truth can be established by an independent authority empowered through law to undertake a fact-finding investigation in accordance with ECHR standards, including the effective participation of families in the process. Will he elaborate on what he said with regard to that? He also referred to powers to compel evidence and place on the public record the evidence, how it was tested and the results and conclusions that were arrived at. Will he elaborate a little more on that and how he would like to see that presented?

Ms Irene Sherry:

When we opened Bridge of Hope in 2001, in those very early days, we were working following a gun attack on our centre during Holy Cross, in those terrible times, with a real physical and emotional assault on our communities. Now, 25 years later, we are working with 500 people a week. We work therapeutically in partnership with Relatives for Justice. We do not do advocacy, so we would support people through Relatives for Justice in that regard. Regarding counselling, coaching, complementary therapies, personal and professional development, and training people to be therapists, we are working with young children from five years upwards. That has grown, as has the recognition of transgenerational trauma.

As part of the regional trauma network, I co-chaired the children and young people area of work with one of the child psychologists. That was to co-design and develop a trauma-informed parenting programme, with the hope and aspiration of trying to support, with no blame and a very supportive framework and network, the breaking of that intergenerational trauma. Ms Baker will be able to speak on that. We have delivered three of them now, with another couple planned in the autumn. Interestingly, yesterday, we had 20 practitioners eager to hear more about that work, because it is what is coming in the doors in north Belfast, to the organisations. We have co-designed the approach to pain and trauma.

Ms Shauneen Baker:

There are a couple of things. There is a human cost. I am finding that the legacy Bill is adding unnecessary harm and injury to people. I had the privilege of working alongside Mr. Thompson on the quilt 20-odd years ago, working up close and personal with those families on every square. I bore witness to their journey. What the interstate case will do is give a little hope that somebody has their back and is going out for them. The current work I am doing is looking at what the current need and challenges are for victims and survivors of the conflict. We have identified through the pension that more and more people are coming through our doors. It is wrong. The demand is heavy. We need to be ready for that. There needs to be political will. There need to be resources, not cover-ups, and there needs to be accountability. If we invest in people and remove barriers and blocks, we have the potential to really heal our society, people, communities, and country. The current work we are involved in is a range of services. That is the one-to-one therapeutic work. I am a trauma therapist. We do group work through the regional trauma network with children and young people, managing pain and trauma. They are groups of people who maybe have not been reached before. Those people go from one sector to another, looking for help and support. We are trying to break that down and look at their overall physical and mental needs and support them to heal.

Ms Irene Sherry:

What is really important is how the committee could come up to Belfast through our organisations. I know Senator Black is familiar and I pay tribute to her because she officially launched Bridge of Hope for us on 26 November 2001. We are coming up to the 25th anniversary. Knowing of the Senator's work with problematic substance use and the difficulties and barriers for families was really important. As she rightly said, we are in an area that, sadly, experiences continued high levels of suicide. Those impacted include very high numbers of people presenting with mental health illnesses and problematic substance use. One of the striking elements of increased presentations is for individuals presenting in situations of emotional crisis.

I have had the privilege of leading in both emergency departments, in the Royal and in the Mater, in the last four and a half years, with people on the front-line, to de-escalate risk of violence and aggression, and where people could be experiencing suicidal ideation and be impacted by domestic violence, and a whole raft of other experiences. That is a significant, growing presentation in our constituencies. It is also one of the very highest risks for suicides. When you think about it, we would have had the child psychologist with us yesterday, and as he would articulate, children and young people do not recognise that they have been impacted by the conflict. It is only whenever they maybe get into doing other work or family work that something comes forth. It is about having visionary leaders who can actually help them to understand why they are thinking, feeling, acting out and behaving in such ways. It is no surprise that the areas most impacted by the conflict are the areas which experience socioeconomic deprivation and poverty.

We see that the health inequalities in the pure health outcomes, particularly in north and west Belfast, have widened. There is significant work to be done. I invite members to come up to hear a bit more and get to see some of the service users who may have come through. Mr. Thompson referred to the pension. I know that in recent times, we have had to engage with the victims commissioner about the significant negative impact that going through the assessment process has had on individuals. That creates situations of suicidal ideation and immense trigger points for individuals. I do not underestimate the challenges, particularly for the six groups involved in the regional trauma network and the five groups involved in the delivery of the pension.

We are in a critically bad state at the moment financially. Whatever way this committee can do to support and leverage support to allow us to engage in that conversation would be critical.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

The work has quantifiably increased beyond what people could have imagined because all these schemes have opened. That encouraged people to come out, but the schemes then fail them and that adds additional harms. As one relative said to me many years ago, it is a tortuous process because everything you do to assert your rights or take agency results in a war of attrition against you. The status quo is effectively against you, and you are swimming against the tide. There is a real sense of that. It is about trying to understand the world in which victims or people who have been harmed move. There is also an Article 3 violation in terms of the mental and psychological abuse that people go through with some of these schemes and the lack of resources relating to them.

To pick up on the Senator’s point, we are all about people and community. When I was speaking about the Remembering Quilt, earlier I was thinking about Shauneen. Shauneen started with Relatives for Justice as a family support worker when that project was happening. She looked after that on her own therapeutic journey in terms of becoming qualified and completing all her training. We are all committed to people and community. That is the vocation we are engaged in. We want to get things right, and we need help. We have a British Government that will not listen to us and that is pushing in the opposite direction for very obvious reasons relating to reputational damage. It is ten times more difficult for people to come out and step forward into that environment, but still they do. We meet amazing people who have huge resilience. That is not to underestimate the impact this has had on them, traumatically and otherwise, but I would be inspired by ordinary people every day in the context of their journey and how they step forward and decide that they are going to address this. We are privileged and humbled to be part of the journey in supporting them. That is what we are engaged in.

In the context of the processes and what they are, if we were to design a process, it would be around what Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention outline as the right process, step by step. Law is a wonderful thing. It gives you the tools to address things that happened to you that were wrong, and to go through a process. We have the opposite in the North when it comes to legacy. Every possible barricade is erected. When I talk about those processes, I am referring to things that are victim-centred. It empowers people. It treats them with respect and ensures that they get the integrity they deserve. They are able to come forward and present the evidence. Matters are capable of being investigated robustly and independently, adjudications made and accountability delivered. I often ask why Bloody Sunday was so important that we had an inquiry. Set aside what the British Ministry of Defence did in terms of cost and all the challenges to it, because that gets used as an excuse and people say, “You could have built schools and hospitals”. Truth costs nothing. It is the cover-up that costs everything. Bloody Sunday was important because what happened with Widgery, Coleraine and the garrison town the following year was a whitewash. The people killed and injured on Bloody Sunday were labelled gunmen and bombers. That was a terrible injustice in terms of the bereavement and injury caused to a community. When you get to the point where the British Government concedes to an inquiry, and it happens, you have an official record that sets it right. If you had not have had the public inquiry, in 100 or 200 years' time, the Widgery report would be the historical and factual record, not what the community and the people said. With Saville, that has been completely overturned. Fair play to David Cameron. He accepted it without equivocation, and that was that. That was important. That has to happen for families within the type of process I have outlined. That is what we need.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Mr. Thompson.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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Gabhaim mile buíochas leis na finnéithe as ucht teacht anseo inniu. I thank the witnesses for all their work over the years. That work has been really pivotal for so many people. I have no doubt that there are many people alive today as a result of the work that has been done by their organisations.

Everyone is entitled to truth and justice in the North of Ireland no matter what background they are from, but I do think there is a lack of symmetry in terms of truth and justice. It is often stated that republicans have spent 100,000 years in prison as a result of actions that were undertaken during the Troubles and that, on the other side of the divide, many people from the British state spent no time in jail and often received promotions in their military careers as a result of the actions they took. That is quite shocking. One of the difficulties with the lack of symmetry comes from Britain being a combatant in the Troubles. It also owns the legislation which underpins the justice system and, as a result, it is in its material interest to prevent truth and justice emerging. One of the biggest problems I have in terms of the new Troubles legacy Act, as such, is the power it gives the British Secretary of State to decide whether information can be included in investigations as a result of his or her decision of whether something is in the interests of national security. This is particularly the case in light of the fact that Hilary Benn used the justice system to block inquiries into, for example, the murder of Sean Brown. This particular Secretary of State already has previous regarding the lengths and efforts the British system will go to prevent those inquiries. If there was a Conservative or Reform Secretary of State, the whole system would be even more likely to unravel in that regard.

It seems that the political establishment and the parties here have overlooked that to some degree or that they are at least not as concerned as maybe I am or other people are in relation to that matter. Can the witnesses focus on how necessary it is to amend that element of it? What is their view on that?

Mr. Mark Thompson:

The simple answer is that the power of the British Secretary of State to exercise a veto over the information that can and cannot be made public is a breach of Article 2. Fundamentally, that is the position.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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Therefore, a judge could make a decision that would protect British national interests or security interests, and it would depoliticise that to a certain extent.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

Every state has a legitimate national security interest. It is when a criminal act has been committed by a state actor or commissioned thorough collusion by a non-state actor in their employment that you seek to protect, which is the case with Sean Brown, which was the case in Paul Thompson and which is the case a hundred times over. When you seek to extend and abuse the national security remit, you have to enable covering up wrongdoing on the part of or on behalf of the state, which equates to a policy, and that then becomes a fundamental problem and a breach of the law.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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The other aspect is that the legacy law is still in place, which, again, quite shocking. Most of those in the political system in the South would not be au fait with that. In many people’s minds, we have passed over or parked that – it is done - but it is the current reality. What steps can the Irish Government take to put pressure on the British Government to get rid of the legacy Act as it stands?

Mr. Christopher Stanley:

The Irish Government agreed in September 2025, in the form of the joint framework agreement, that anything which we implement on a cross-Border basis would be true to the principles of the Stormont House Agreement, which came into place in 2014. Going back to the question from Senator Black, that agreement contains a model of investigation, namely the historical investigations unit. That is the model. It is an ECHR-compliant model. They are the models which the Irish Government should be supervising and monitoring in order to ensure that are replicated in the Troubles legacy Act.

In the context of disclosure, I have always found it fascinating that national security is not defined. By its very nature, it is not defined. The British or Irish Governments will not define what the national security is. We are dealing with issues of national security that are 40 or 50 years old. We are not asking for the details of operations about who actually pulled triggers and killed people. We want to know was there somebody who actually pulled the trigger and killed somebody and whether were they a state agent. That is the point in the Sean Brown case. We are not asking for the operational details. That always comes down to neither confirm nor deny, because it may impinge future national security operations, whatever national security is.

One then links it to the public interest again, which is defined by the executive decision. As a result, one is questioning executive authority. That is why the mechanisms that have to be in place and that have to be monitored by Dublin if they are going to be implemented by London in Northern Ireland have to be ECHR-compliant. These are not complex mechanisms. They have to be independent and they have to involve the effective participation of families to interrogate the evidence. The disclosure issue has to be independently made beyond the executive for the very points that Mr. Thompson has made, because it is an executive decision to protect national security interests of a vested interest. This is why David Cameron said to the Finucanes that there were people around who would not allow him to give them a public inquiry. Eight or nine years later, this comes to pass in the same way that the Omagh inquiry, which was denied by Theresa Villiers in 2013, came to pass. Somehow, national security is a movable feast and depends on which vested interest has been listened to.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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Has any work been done over the years by Andy Burnham in the context of looking for amendments to the current legislation? Do people know where Andy Burnham stands on this? There is, obviously, the major issue of British self-interest in making sure that these do not happen, but there is also the major political instability in Westminster at the moment.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

Apart from singing "Viva la Quinta Brigada", the Christy Moore song, I do not know. Mr. Burnham was instrumental in Hillsborough, which gives hope, but he will get nobbled. If he becomes Prime Minister, MI5 will be advising him on national security telling him "You can't go there". It is a case of whether or not he stands up to it. Mr. Justice Colton ruled that the immunity provisions and barring civil cases in the Legacy Act were unlawful. He did not rule on the Article 2 point insofar as it had not been operational and it was like trying to hit a moving target. It is only when it is operational that one can prove that, but everyone, from the UN to the Committee of Ministers to the Council of Europe to anyone of legal standing or credibility in the international community, is saying currently that it is not so. Those are core issues. The simple answer is that we do not know.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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I propose that the committee writes to the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade calling on the Government to make sure that the interstate case goes ahead and that we seek to have pressure brought to bear on the British Government in order that the power of the British Secretary of State to make decisions on the basis of national security and whether evidence is allowed or not be removed and be found to be a judicial power. I know that the full membership of the committee is not present, maybe if we could discuss that proposal at the start of the next meeting when we have a full-----

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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That is due to be a private meeting.

Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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I also propose that the committee writes to the British Secretary of State to say that this power in the Troubles legacy Act should be removed.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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We will put those proposals to the members of the committee at our next meeting, which will be in private.

Mr. Dáire Hughes:

I thank the representatives from Relatives for Justice and Bridge of Hope for attending. I apologise for being unable to join the meeting in person.

It is abundantly clear, from the opening statements and the witnesses' contributions thus far, that there is a broad spectrum of work still ongoing in relation to legacy issues. The long and the short of it is that we have legal, physical and mental manifestations of having unsatisfactory mechanisms to deal with our past. In recent weeks, we have seen the absolute importance of varied avenues still being available to victims and their families to pursue and address legacy cases and to pursue truth and justice. Mr. Thompson referenced the Springhill inquest. We had the initiation of the Pat Finucane inquiry and the conclusion of the Reavey civil case. It is essential that these avenues remain open for victims and families to pursue that truth and justice.

How concerned are Relatives for Justice at the potential significant regression from the British Government? We have the joint framework and the legacy Act, challenging though they are. We are going through that legislative process. That has already been alluded to, but the mood music in Westminster is not good. Just last week, a former minister bluntly stated, "We must protect them". Them, of course, being British state forces. We have any number of Tory and Labour backbenchers trying to make a name for themselves with the veterans' lobby, and, of course, we have a distracted political centre. All of this points to the possibility or likelihood of enhanced provisions for one protagonist in the conflict, namely British state forces. The Irish Government is on the hook for this with the joint framework, and that is why the interstate case has to very firmly remain on the table along with continued diligence and public pressure on the British Government where possible.

The British Government committed to consult widely in relation to its own package of amendments. The British Secretary of State confirmed that to me. Has Relatives for Justice been consulted? Is it aware of any proactive attempts to engage with victims and their representatives on this legislative process?

My next question is for the Ashton Community Trust. I agree entirely with its commentary on the continuation of PEACEPLUS funding. That is essential. There is a commitment from Dublin and London, which is welcome, but that has to be matched by a commitment from Brussels, including, crucially, a financial contribution. Over the past ten months or so, the work of this committee has been dominated by exploring North-South healthcare and circumstances in which we can co-operate and build shared services. It struck me again while the witnesses were speaking that trauma is a public, physical and mental health issue and we should explore reference to trauma services for that all-Ireland health report. I would be keen to hear how the witnesses think those services could be integrated in the short, medium and long term.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

In terms of what is happening in Westminster, we fear that the objective of the intelligence services and the wider community and the influence it has in Westminster are bearing fruit. If a Belfast court finds that the immunity provisions, among other things, are unlawful, what it did not win through the front door, it will try to bring through the back door. The joint framework was an honest attempt by the Irish authorities to keep the British honest in terms of Stormont House and Article 2 and to cajole them to a process that we get to a better place. That was a genuine attempt. The disingenuous nature was that the British Government almost simultaneously produced a six-point plan to protect veterans. I linked that to Mr. Justice Colton declaring the immunity provisions unlawful, and we were involved in those cases along with 21 families, several different law firms and other NGOs. If he declares that they are unlawful, what it did not win there, it will try to put into the slipstream of the legislation.

The remedial Bill is effectively dead in the House of Lords. We have no timetable for the amendment. Are we consulted? We do meetings with other NGOs such as Amnesty International, the Committee on the Administration of Justice and the Pat Finucane Centre. We have had several meetings with the British Secretary of State. We do not see the colour of their money other than promises. We tell them that is not good enough. It probably annoys Hilary Benn and senior Northern Ireland Office civil servants when I tell him that he is not making these decisions, MI5 is. Why did he challenge the Brown case? It was because the Ministry of Defence and MI5 advised him to challenge it. Why did the Dillon case end up in the UK Supreme Court? It was because rather than deliver the truth, MI5 told him to challenge it.

I am going put the following on record. It is a matter of public fact. Lord Sales was the senior judge at the UK Supreme Court. He drove the Paul Thompson case. Remember that we had a chief constable who was on side with the British Government when the Tories were in power, with Chris Heaton-Harris challenging the decision of a coroner in the Paul Thompson murder case to disclose information that she attested would not breach national security and would reveal that state agents were involved in his murder and that it could possibly have been prevented. That was challenged by Chris Heaton-Harris. The family sat in court, and Mr. Justice Humphreys ruled that the coroner was right. Hilary Benn then came into office and challenged that ruling before the UK Supreme Court. The chief constable accepted Mr. Justice Humphreys's ruling and stepped out of the case. Not only did he do so, he made another assessment to the effect that, to his satisfaction, certain information could be provided to the family and the public in order to reveal, to some extent, what happened. However, that is still challenged.

He goes to the Supreme Court with the family. The only living relative of Paul, who was killed, was Eugene, and he was dying of cancer in the hospice on the Somerton Road. I sat with him on a laptop while we watched the proceedings as he died. The Chief Constable came and said he would help him to try and he would go to the court, which he did, in fairness to him, yet Lord Sales drove that case and did not recuse himself on the issue of neither confirm nor deny, NCND, which was at the heart of this case. Then we found out Lord Sales as the Treasury devil, which is the nickname they get working for Whitehall, was dispatched to Belfast to meet Lord Carswell, the then Lord Chief Justice in the North, to advise him the judicial review taken by Freddie Scappaticci could not win because Freddie Scappaticci was Stakeknife and that NCND must apply and be rigid, yet he sits on the Supreme Court nearly 20 years later fighting and reprimanding the coroner and the Chief Constable. James Eadie, the senior lawyer for the British Government, reprimands the Chief Constable and undermines his integrity. That is what you are up against in Westminster, so what you win in Belfast they take away in London and we have to be vigilant. That goes for the Irish Government, the NGOs, the families and the international community because that is a lesson.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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We need to be conscious of mentioning so many names of individuals who are not here-----

Mr. Mark Thompson:

It is a matter of public fact and it is on record.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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-----and you clarified that. Thank you for that. Are there any other questions? Go ahead, Ms Sherry.

Ms Irene Sherry:

Go raibh maith agat. To answer Mr. Hughes, there are great opportunities to work across the island. We can look at recent work that has been done over the last four or five years with the regional trauma network, the six large victims' groups and all five health trusts in the North and how that could be expanded even in terms of learning good practice. I did something a few months back for the second time. It is like everything in that some areas have more expertise and good learning we can take back. Ms Baker and I brought people down to the Keltoi, which has reopened post Covid as a dual diagnosis day service in the Phoenix Park. We had psychiatry, psychology and some of the regional trauma network colleagues from the health trust down to see about any good practice we could bring back up. Historically, there was more experience of working with substances and so on in the South and therefore it is good experiential learning, especially to do with problematic substance use. Keltoi opened in, I think, 1991 as a residential centre. It comes from a trauma-informed background as well. We have taken a lot from it in a couple of site visits we have done. A lot more of that could be done as groups in the North have the opportunity to undertake to develop a trauma charter mark. Maybe some of that could be explored as well. I am just not sure if the same one would work here, but it certainly is one to explore.

We can look at the number of people who have been impacted by the conflict who live in the South. Obviously there are many victims and survivors and that intergenerational trauma will be here as well. There will be great opportunities to learn and develop together. For children and young people, we are doing really good work with the psychologists. There is one child psychologist in each of the trusts under the regional trauma network. As part of the work we talked about earlier we have a child psychologist co-facilitating with Ms Baker as our clinical lead on all those programmes, so there is a lot of cascading of different ways of learning and practice and bringing that into the communities. Importantly, as Mr. Thompson reiterated, we are all here to support individuals, families and communities. It would definitely be worthy of a conversation and one we would love to take further with Mr. Hughes.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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Thank you very much, Ms Sherry and thank you, Mr. Hughes. Deputy Crowe will come in in a second, but I thank both organisations for their work and their remarks today and for the answers to the various questions that have been put to them. Thanks to Ms Sherry for inviting the committee to come up and see the work of Bridge of Hope.

I have some questions. To Mr. Thompson, how can the various schemes or processes he has outlined be improved, especially for the benefit of victims? He mentioned the retraumatisation of groups or individuals that have come to him through Relatives for Justice. They engage with the process and for some of them the process is not fit for purpose or fit to deal with their concerns. There is no panacea here for one particular group but what kind of improvements does Mr. Thompson see and how best does he see them being made?

Mr. Mark Thompson:

When I talk about them being retraumatised, they have taken the brave step to come to an organisation and ask for support on their journey to receive justice or to receive reparations, and the processes have just denied the truth to them. I mentioned the case of Eugene Thompson. His mother worked with Ms Baker and made a square to her son before she passed away. The only other direct relative was his brother, Eugene. Eugene fought to get an inquest and we supported him on a 20-odd year journey. That inquest happened along with a number of other inquests and the legacy Act came. The coroner tried to get through it as quickly as possible. She made a recommendation about making a disclosure, which was objected to and taken to the UK Supreme Court, which I have outlined. He took ill. He was in the Somerton hospice and he died during the process, before the verdict was even delivered. That is one example.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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Would you see it as the length of time it takes for the case to be heard-----

Mr. Mark Thompson:

Yes.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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-----and the process in which the cases are heard? Is it a bit of both?

Mr. Mark Thompson:

Absolutely. It is dragging it out. We talk about the three Ds. First of all you deny, then you delay and then comes death. We have often said that. People say we die waiting on justice, truth or a proper process. On the other end of it, the psychologically and physically injured come forward, having maybe lost a limb, been severely injured or having a psychological condition meaning they could never work. It is a consequence of the conflict. They present and you detail that and do an application. They go through so many hoops they feel like either spongers or scammers, which are the terms they often use, or ask if it is worth it.

Those processes need to be more accepting. It needs to include the bereaved. The bereaved are trying to fit themselves into a round hole as a square peg by saying they are psychologically injured. This State, under John Wilson, made a payment to everybody, without discrimination, who had had someone killed. Eames-Bradley made a similar recommendation. I am saying it is nowhere near enough. There should be a substantial one-off payment to people with a direct link, like siblings, parents and spouses, that deals with that. The physically and psychologically injured should not have to go through the hoops they need to go through. The medical records are there. People know. It is as if they are telling lies. The schemes, by their prohibitive nature, invariably cause more harm. We need to get the schemes right but we need to finance them right too. It is not about saying we do not have enough money so we must exclude the bereaved or that we do not have enough money so we must exclude so-and-so, but when money needs to be found for something that is important and a priority, it can be found.

It is part of the political division that happens at Stormont too. Instead of coming at in a universal concept where human rights and humanity play a role, this is about defending the indefensible for some. We go before committees at Stormont. That is going into a bear pit.

It is a privilege to come here and talk to people without being disrespected or insulted. That happens. I commend the committee for that. On getting the processes right, I go back to the four key pillars. They are universally a declaration by the UN. They are truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence. This is not rocket science. Law is there. We know what needs to be done, but there are blockages to it by the people who hold vested interests and do not want the truth to emerge.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Mr. Thompson for that. Keeping with that theme, Ms Sherry mentioned the victims' pensions and the deadline of the end of August. Is there the same feeling there among those who are applying that it is hard to fit the criteria, as it were? Regarding the numbers she said that the Ashton Community Trust was dealing with, I think she said 4,000 people since-----

Ms Irene Sherry:

We have supported 45,000 people since its inception, but over the last three years, we are talking about 4,000 victims going through a range of services, particularly therapeutic services. They could be there with us for 12 weeks at a time or back in for a range of services. The pension is causing considerable difficulty and burden on individuals who are going through the process. There is a significant pressure on our five groups with the impending deadline of the end of August. There is no sense that it will be extended, particularly considering the judicial review in recent weeks in terms of people who have experienced punishment beatings or shootings.

We have a situation where some individuals went through the pensions process but it did not proceed anywhere. Perhaps that could be looked at again. Others did not apply because they were told not to on the grounds that there might not be enough time for their applications to go through before the end of August. All of us have significant waiting lists. The difficulty and pressure is not only on us in trying to support pension workers from a health and well-being perspective. Rather, there is huge exposure to trauma, with victims and survivors who wish to appeal having to bear witness to every minute detail of what happened to them. There may be instances where an individual has one incident that they want to put forward, but there are some who have 12 or more. Even though we try to work with them on narrowing it down because the more incidents there are, the longer it takes, some victims and survivors feel that it is important for them to put everything in. All of that in itself creates a huge opening for trauma. It is significant in terms of them then going through long processes. We are working with cases now that were submitted three years ago.

We are also working with individuals who, even though they could nearly tell you the name of the police officer whom they gave the statement to at the time of the incident, the evidence is not there when they go looking for it. Similarly in terms of solicitors and GDPR, a lot of evidence is not there now. That is quite difficult for victims and survivors. It is beautiful whenever we see individuals in their 80s receiving recognition and positive outcomes, but then you think of others of the same age who have had negative outworkings. We try to support them. As organisations, we are going through the process of the application, supporting people with health assessments, and then working on successful and unsuccessful appeal processes. It is very long.

We were talking this morning. As it stands, we have health and well-being case workers under PEACEPLUS. I am sitting this morning with 255 people waiting to see a health and well-being case worker. A total of 213 people are waiting for counselling and over 300 people are waiting for complementary therapies. As Mr. Thompson alluded to, we are sitting on the same level of funding that we had in 2017. It is huge pressure for us to be sitting not knowing how we are going to support those individuals going through these processes. A significant number of them are completely new to our organisation. We did not know them. We have been travelling regionally. There are also people who now live the South or in other countries where the pension workers have support as well. Something needs to be found to support people because, at the end of the day, we do not want to feel that we cannot support those who are being exposed to a serious amount of retriggering and retraumatisation.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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On the issue of the retraumatisation, we have acknowledged that as well in engaging with victims before the committee. I believe it was Mr. Thompson who alluded to the fact of giving evidence to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, NIAC, in 2004 and said that the evidence had not changed. It is still the same evidence, unfortunately. I acknowledge that, every time we ask victims or they appear here or in other fora, it is retraumatising for them.

From where have the criteria for the victims' pension been derived? Who is ultimately the arbiter of the scheme?

Mr. Mark Thompson:

It is British legislation. It is for people who can prove that they have a permanent psychological or physical injury as a consequence of the conflict. It is administered by a board. It has close to 400 staff. They mostly come from the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland, which administers the scheme. The chairperson of the board is a High Court judge called Mr. Justice Gerry McAlinden. The problem with the scheme is it takes far too long from application to assessment to conclusion. The majority of cases go to appeal. As Ms Sherry rightly pointed out, if you have been the victim of a punishment attack and the board says it was not part of the constitutionality question that was ion conflict, then you are not eligible. There are issues around eligibility. The bereaved are also excluded.

It would be useful if this committee wrote with two requests, namely, the inclusion of a scheme for the bereaved - this cohort gets smaller and smaller as time goes on - and that the scheme be extended to allow people proper time to consider and reflect. Ms Sherry rightly pointed out a case under Mr. Justice Scoffield. We were an intervenor in that case and an adviser to it as an NGO. That was a case where applications involving punishment attacks had been denied. We hope that the outcome of it, where he has determined that they should be included, does not lead to a case-by-case basis and that it instead set a precedent to overcome this-----

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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In terms of those two requests, have they been communicated to the Department of foreign affairs here through the organisations?

Mr. Mark Thompson:

No. We will do that, but I know that colleagues, including Ms Sherry, who was present, communicated that with the victims commissioner and the Executive committee recently.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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That is good to know.

Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for coming in this morning. A question was asked about the Good Friday Agreement and the witnesses' views on that, but if you talk to most people who are old enough to remember when the Good Friday Agreement came in, they would say that it is the frustration and the slowness of change that is the let down. It was mentioned that, having spoken to victims groups, the great expectation was that things would change. It is an imperfect piece. We know that people were killed post the Good Friday Agreement, but it brought about a peace.

Today, we are trying to deal with the idea of dealing with the past in the present and trying to come up with solutions to do that.

Many of the witnesses' requests relate to the financial situation. They are asking for funding and mentioned the PEACEPLUS programme. We recently had a briefing from the Minister of State with responsibility for European affairs who said there is agreement for the continuation of PEACEPLUS but that the funding and details have not been agreed. The witnesses also mentioned British Government funding and, unfortunately, the two are coming together and it is almost a double whammy. Any of the groups we have talked to about PEACEPLUS funding have said it was the difference that turned on the lights, that it was basic money, and that while they were not getting huge amounts of money, it was important. If the witnesses have any request, it is that the committee needs to follow up on that funding. It would be useful to bring in the officials and we will try to follow that up. That was an important suggestion.

The community navigator service working in emergency departments was mentioned. How does that work? I was involved in a group called teenline which deals with children who are suicidal. One of the frustrations was that, after teenline staff talked the child down from suicide, in some cases they turned up at the emergency department and were told to stand aside. Is there co-operation? It is something for both jurisdictions to look at, particularly for trauma groups dealing with people so they are involved in the process. They have built up relationships with people, so it is important.

The witnesses went through a lot of cases. They talked about the Springhill massacre in 1972. None of the deceased should have been shot. None of the fatal shootings should have been carried out by soldiers who were acting in breach of the yellow card. They talked about the Seán Browne case, where there was again collusion. I presume one of the biggest challenges we face - I want to ask the witnesses about it - is that we are dealing with Ministers who in many cases do not have a clue what the conflict was about. We are dealing with lords who do not know what went on, depending on their age and so on. That is the biggest challenge the witnesses face, that there is no real understanding. There are politicians across the board, probably in this jurisdiction as well, who did not travel to the North and do not know what happened in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. There is a lot of catching up to be done, so it is important that people come in and we hear their stories of what happened in their lives.

There is a common denominator. I read recently Tony Blair talking about the Good Friday Agreement and he said there was pushback from unionism. The DUP was not in the room at that stage - it was the official unionists - and he said "None of us have clean hands in relation to the conflict". The parties came together and agreed the Good Friday Agreement, but that is an important lesson for all of us to learn, that politicians of all shades did not have clean hands. Ordinary people are still suffering to this day, and basic things like supports for bereaved relatives should not be big requests. They were accepted as a given under the Good Friday Agreement, but unfortunately, decades later, we are still talking about the basics.

I wish the witnesses well in their work. We need to hear the stories from families. It is awful they have to go through court cases. At the time of the Good Friday Agreement, people spoke about a kind of truth commission and looked at South Africa. That conversation is still relevant to this day. It is not ideal that we have to go through inquests and courts cases to try to get the truth. As we move on, that is what society is lacking.

My last question goes back to trauma, especially in north Belfast with the number of people who were killed. Recently, people were burned out of their homes and so on. Do the witnesses know whether that reignited the trauma for many families? In the few minutes they have left, will the witnesses talk about that and the importance of there being supports for families in such situations?

Ms Irene Sherry:

I love having the opportunity. It is picking up from Mr. Hughes as well. The community navigator service is perhaps another example of something that could be done on an all-island basis. I initiated it and I lead it with a colleague from another organisation, Start 360. It was born on the basis that I led a lot of suicide prevention mental health work in Belfast for 25 years. Historically, one of the biggest issues was that people were sitting in hospitals for ten hours, 12 hours or longer and leaving. They were at high risk of suicide and did not feel heard. That created negativity in communities. There were examples in Scotland and England in violence reduction where people were wearing pink t-shirts. I went with a colleague from Start 360 to the then co-director of mental health, who is involved with the transformation director in the children's hospital here. She was co-director for mental health in Belfast at the time and we brought the idea of having community navigators in the hospital who wore pink t-shirts. The idea was that they would use a psycho-social approach and do distress brief interventions, risk assessments and safety planning. It sits under the governance with the trust. The paperwork is co-designed with the health trust. The idea is that people go through triage in the hospital emergency department and then there is good interaction between the nursing staff and consultants who formally ask the navigators to engage and chat with them through a process that can be formal, such as waiting with people while they are waiting for a mental health assessment, or work proactively on de-escalating risk of suicide, look at safety planning and refer them to pathways in the community and voluntary sector.

On a Friday and Saturday night they work from 8.30 p.m. to 7.30 a.m. and Sunday to Thursday from 8.30 p.m. to 2.30 a.m., because they are the difficult times. The nursing staff say they want them there 24-7. We did that for approximately ten months observing patients who were waiting for inpatient beds. It has been independently evaluated by the Impact Research Centre, Ulster University and Queen's University last year. I am happy to share the report. At this stage, it has supported 9,000 patients with about 17,500 engagements. That includes linking with people after they have been discharged from hospital by following them up in support services. It is part of the distress brief intervention approach. The navigators do training in ligature removals and, thankfully, have been involved in the successful removal of 18 ligatures, supporting nursing staff in the hospital.

There is very proactive engagement. An onward referral rate of about 18% is very high. A quality-improvement process has been gone through within the trust. Nobody knew what the initiative could develop into, but it has developed and, thankfully, is very successful. There could be opportunities to learn from it in terms of how to do something similar here. The first point is that if somebody feels heard and has somebody to talk to, it brings their stress level down. It gives them the space and the capacity to consider what has happened.

Fundamentally, particularly when somebody is in an emotional crisis, it is often the circumstances around them, such as their personal situation, environment, family, community or employment, that will have brought them to that crisis point. Having a first point of contact allowing engagement with somebody who will sit and listen to them and allow them to feel heard helps them to consider who they think could help them with a safety plan and help them to steer them along a path.

It has been an excellent service. In addition to it, we are considering how we can provide crisis de-escalation. We have been working with colleagues in the Belfast Trust on how we can get people to access community-based crisis de-escalation in the north of the city before they get to hospital. Once they go to hospital, it increases the cost. The service is actually very proportionate in terms of value for money.

With regard to recent developments, we work around the corner. One of our offices, the original one, is based in the New Lodge. When you think about it, you note that within that small locality, or within a square mile, 635 people were killed and 2,500 were injured.

The riots presented a very complex situation for community navigators. The night of the riots, I had community navigators going on shift in the Mater Hospital, which was just beside them. They were stopped by the police and told to show their ID badges to the protesters. When they asked whether the police were serious, they said they were and that the navigators should just drive very slowly up to the rioters and show them their ID badges. It was very scary. I had navigators going into a hospital to work to support people in situations of crisis, yet those navigators were faced with having to show ID to people in balaclavas, who had to shout at the roundabouts for the bins to be moved to let the navigators through. It was very difficult and created a lot of fear for families and, indeed, a lot of retraumatisation. In fairness, much excellent work was done by people on the ground to keep people safe and to try to get people from our communities who work in the hospitals safely to work.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Ms Sherry. There is more work to be done on that aspect of it. I ask Mr. Thompson to come in briefly. We have about six minutes left.

Mr. Mark Thompson:

I take the point about the passage of time from 1998 to now, and I acknowledge what went on. The past is ever-present, in a sense, until it is dealt with. People come afresh to it if they have a grasp of law, human rights and what is required. That is a logical starting point. If something has happened that was wrong, the natural thing is to investigate it properly, in accordance with the law and in an ECHR-compliant manner. That is really what is required in doing the job.

With regard to the recent events, the rise of the right is something we have seen in Britain with Brexit. We see all the problems there. The veterans’ community in Britain is latching on to that. We all have a duty to challenge the right. We all have a duty to stand up and make sure that social justice issues are addressed.

The outstanding thing from the Good Friday Agreement is the failure to have a proper bill of rights, which was promised under it and which would give ownership to people coming from other countries. We sent people from pillar to post all over the world, and sometimes they had to go for the wrong reasons, so the reality is that we should embrace and welcome people who decide to make this country their home. Our health system would fall without them. They are wonderful people. Like every other community, they are part of us, and that is the reality.

I commend the work that Senator Black has done. Our experiences do not need to be spoken about when we meet people who have similar experiences. Whether they are fleeing other countries and making this their new home or coming here for economic reasons, we can understand the systems they had to endure and face.

I commend the work on Palestine. I lived and worked in Ramallah in the 1990s for a period. I saw what had been done there and took first-hand learning from that. There are times when unspeakable things have happened and at such times experience does not require words. You simply understand. As a nation, we need to consider this and also the social duty and social justice responsibility we have, not only to people who come here but also, by way of example, to other nations. We must call out what is wrong. This committee does that in monitoring developments under the Good Friday Agreement, and I commend all the members for that.

Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Mr. Thompson. That was a perfect ending. I thank the members for their attendance and their questions. I realise some members had other committee meetings to go to.

On behalf of the committee, I thank Mr. Stanley and Mr. Thompson from Relatives for Justice for their opening statement and all the answers they gave, and Ms Sherry and Ms Baker from Ashton Community Trust. I thank them all very much for their attendance here today.