I’ve seen the atrocities of the Troubles firsthand – but ending prosecutions is the right move to secure peace

When, 22 years ago, Tony Blair gave me the task of implementing the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland I steeled myself for what everyone told me would be hard, thankless graft. “You will be kicked around all over the shop, you will never please all the parties all the time and when finally you start to please none of them, you will know it’s time to go,” a No 10 official said to me as I left to meet my fate.

In the event, I did manage to implement the agreement – devolved government, arms decommissioning, police reform and all – and it was others on my own side who conspired to cut short my time there, not the Northern Irish parties. Nonetheless, I was reminded of the original warning when last week my successor as Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, drew the ire of all the Northern Irish political parties when he proposed a statute of limitations that will end all future prosecutions, inquests and civil actions against those responsible for the killings and maimings that took place during the decades-long Troubles.

The DUP’s Paul Givan accused the Westminster government of wanting to “wipe the slate clean” on the past, abandoning victims and their families. Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald said that the government was delivering “an incredibly cruel and shameless body blow to victims and survivors”. Nichola Mallon of the nationalist SDLP urged all the parties to unite to block the government’s plan. And, perhaps most worrying of all because of the party’s pivotal role, the Alliance leader Naomi Long said that if the new law was passed her party would have to think about whether or not it could take on the role of justice minister again.

Even by Northern Ireland’s standards, this combined reaction was tough and uncompromising. But it was also unfair because the British government is not proposing to do nothing about the past. It is proposing to create a new body that will retrieve and publish all available information about those responsible for the atrocities committed. The success of its proposals, however, will hinge fundamentally on the independence, funding and remit of this information retrieval body. It has to be fearless in its approach.

When families do not want the past raked over again, they should be able to make that clear. For those families that want to get answers, the body must be able to seek access to information and find out what happened. It could not equivocate when it established reasonable accounts of what happened. It would have to publish and be damned.

This is far from ignoring the continuing suffering of the many who lost loved ones at the hands of republican and loyalist paramilitaries and, it is claimed, British soldiers and agents with knowledge of, and possible collusion with, certain killings. Mr Lewis’s attempts to win support for his plans were immediately undermined by Boris Johnson talking about “drawing a line” under the Troubles. This has inflamed the opposition of victims’ groups with very good reason. They cannot simply throw a switch and turn off their grief and their search for justice as the prime minister crassly implied.

The grief of bereaved families was brought home to me in Northern Ireland when I became personally involved with those who lost loved ones in the 1998 Omagh car bombing. Killing 29 people and injuring over 200 others – the deadliest single incident of the Troubles – this atrocity was carried out by an IRA splinter group opposed to the ceasefire and Good Friday Agreement signed just months before. As time went on, I became increasingly agitated by the slow – and I feared faltering – police investigation, and said so privately to the Chief Constable who had operational responsibility.

Eventually a man, Colm Murphy, was tried and convicted for the bombing but was released on appeal after a fault was revealed in the interview case notes made by the southern Irish police. Murphy’s nephew Sean Hoey was also tried and acquitted. In 2009, victims’ families won a £1.6m civil action settlement against four defendants who were found liable for the bombing. Later on, Seamus Daly was charged and that case also had to be withdrawn as recently as 2016.

I recall this to illustrate two things relevant to the government’s proposals. It is incredibly difficult for victims’ families to give up the quest for justice – which of us in their position would do so? – especially when sheer patience and determination may eventually bring a case to court.

But, at the same time, we have to recognise that the police are currently considering almost 1,200 cases, which represent only a proportion of the 3,500 deaths and wider cases involved, and only a tiny fraction of which will reach any sort of conclusion, given the paucity of court-standard evidence available to obtain convictions.

There is also another factor. The criminal justice process, fair as it must be to the accused as well as the accuser, and surrounded by tight legal procedure in which any wrong step can impede prosecution or conviction, will frequently hinder the successful exposure of information that should be made public. This information could at least lead to some form of restorative if not retributive justice for the families, including an acknowledgement of responsibility by those whose wrongdoing would be revealed.

The awful truth is that, with the present unending process continuing to take its course, the vast majority of families affected by the killings will simply face more pain, suffering and disappointment, with only the very slenderest, theoretical possibility of gaining legal satisfaction.

The absence of prosecution is devastating for many families, which is why I cannot blame the Northern Irish political parties for maintaining their stance by the side of victims’ families who feel so let down. But I can also understand why some associated with the paramilitary organisations might prefer the tiny risk of prosecution to the greater likelihood of revelation by a new body dedicated to exposing the truth, and I do not believe they should receive this comfort. This alone makes it desirable to take the government’s proposals seriously rather than simply dismiss them, as happened last week.