Mary White (Fianna Fail)

It is an important moment to remind ourselves that after the partition of Ireland in 1921 the Catholics were discriminated against in housing, jobs and justice, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s was killed off by the events of Bloody Sunday. Yesterday, I listened to the live speech by David Cameron on BBC in my office. It was a momentous event to see and hear a British Prime Minister admit that the British state had killed innocent people. As has been stated already, it was the families of those who were killed on Bloody Sunday who drove this, sought the truth and overrode the whitewash of the Widgery inquiry.

The question in The Guardian yesterday — I do not want to delay but I want to put it on the record — was: "should the paratroopers held by Saville to have been out of control and to have lied about their actions afterwards, be prosecuted, either in a criminal case or a private, civil action? ... Murder is murder", wherever. I am a pacifist by nature. I have total empathy for all the innocent people who died over the 30 years' civil war, but it must be said that the Nazis were pursued after they killed innocent people in the war and there is no doubt that Saville left it open and did not give immunity to the paratroopers. Yesterday, the Financial Times stated:

The 1998 amnesty of paramilitaries, essential to the peace process, and the lapse of 38 years, makes prosecutions problematic — but that it is now up to the Northern Ireland's devolved justice system. For now, the UK state has apologised. The Parachute Regiment should follow, as should compensation for those unlawful killings.