People who have suffered from collusion between British forces, British controlled police and loyalist gangs in Ireland are trying to interest the European Community in what happened.
They are trying to get the European Community to do its duty and set up an international inquiry into the cooperation between British administrations and the armed loyalist groups which killed so many people.
The issue is clear as far as Irish people are concerned. The government not only did not protect people for whom it had taken responsibility, it attacked them.
Not only did it attack them with its conventional forces of military and police, it attacked them by arming and assisting groups which had announced their loyality to the government rather than to the people.
For the European Community one of the most important issues is clear – are they content that any European government should have as part of its normal forces some of the most politically violent elements in the state?
In other words are they going to face the fact that one European state, the British state, added to its conventional forces, and paid them with arms and protection and sometimes in other ways as well, people whose aim was politically motivated killing?
The hoods and unofficial killers were a section of the London administration's forces in Ireland.
They were as much a recognised and accepted part of the British forces as the Black Watch, the King's Own whatever or the UDR.
As such their actions should be either told and defended, or else compensated for by the London administration.
And if the London administration is unwilling to do this then the international community must see to it instead. And the European Community most of all.
If the European Community wants military and police who are allied to the most violent and politically motivated groups in each state then let them say so.
But let them not pretend that their governmental forces are clean if they allow even one state to be otherwise.
Clearly there is an issue which should be faced by the whole European Community. And now is the time for them to face it.
For many years London administrations systematically dismantled many of the decencies of political and legal systems which had been, often painfully, built up by Europeans.
London administrations used torture for information, paid armed gangs to help them, put people in prison without trial and without benefit of trial by open and impartial courts, dealt with political opponents by destroying reputations, by propaganda using the state broadcasting facilities which were supposed to be set up for the benefit of British subjects and Irish citizens.
In other words they brought us back to the days before the slow and painful development of European states towards democratic rule. To make that destructive process all the more complete London administrations made international agreements and bit by bit eroded and undermined them.
The end result is that secret killing, collusion with armed gangs, secret arrests, denial of the right of silence, of fair trial, of the integrity of homes were given a look of respectability.
For some reason which is difficult to understand London administrations were allowed to put a veneer of respectability on what they were doing in Ireland while what they were doing dragged European justice and decency standards back a hundred years.
Will members of the European Parliament help to create an international tribunal to examine what happened in Ireland's northeast?
It is in the interest of everyone including the British people that it should.
Will it insist that state forces should be recognisable and accountable, or at least not allied to those whom decent governmnents would prosecute?
If not, then we can expect that Europe is content to accept standards against which some of the European states say they waged a world war.
One of our problems is that the European Parliament has so little power.
That is something the European MEPs will have to change. But we as European citizens have to say what kind of European law and politics should emerge.
There is a possibility that Europe will accept more and more of the low standards of pre-democratic politics which London administrations have clung to through every wave of democratising that Europe has ever attempted.
There is a possibility that Europe will follow the present Washington administration's demand for more and more repression of its own people, repression of its own people with the pretence of helping prevent oppression of them by others!
As has happened so often in the past the struggle for decency and proper standards of governmental behaviour is being led by what administrations often refer to as "ordinary people", people who will take the road to Brussels or anywhere else to say what they know is true, that governments have abused the people and it is the duty of the whole international community to protest against it and prevent it happening again.
That is what this week's anti-collusion delegation of people from Ireland to Brussels is about.
