It isn't easy to admit that you don't favour an international inquiry into the implications of the Stevens report. People angered by what has gone on assume that your opposition to an inquiry is somehow connected with a desire to support those who seek to cover up the truth.
It is not. Rather, the opposition is more to do with a very genuine concern that a full international judicial inquiry may not and perhaps even cannot, by its very composition, get at the truth. I suspect that there may be some observers or even participants in the Bloody Sunday inquiry who are beginning to arrive at this regrettable, but possibly accurate, conclusion.
Judicial, courtroom type investigations, framed by and located within our adversarial legal system do not necessarily fit well with getting to the bottom of what really happened. This realisation has nothing to do with either the integrity or the ability of the personnel involved. It has more to do with how the whole complex judicial inquiry process has evolved. It is also to do with the checks and balances needed in a modern society to protect the interests of the individual and simultaneously the interests of the state.
What do people want when they demand an inquiry on the back of the Stevens report? I suspect that it's not so much about finding out what really happened, because even with the very abridged report, we are learning nothing new.
The report simply confirms what has been common knowledge for many years – that there were state paid officials involved in conspiracy to murder and in murder itself.
I guess the demand for action has more to do with finding out who within the state system authorised the agents of the state to break, with such outrageous impunity, the law that they were paid to uphold. Did the prime minister know or even order the state law guardians to do what they did? Was it sanctioned at cabinet level? If not, where in the chain of command did the orders emanate from?
As well as these sorts of questions there is also I am sure, a consuming need for victims families to tell their stories and to have them heard, and to hear someone in power, acknowledge and apologise for the wrong done to their murdered family member.
Let's firstly deal with the needs of victims' families to be heard.
A judicial inquiry will never be able to allow people to tell their story in their own way. Not only is this not possible when the process engages legal experts and rules of evidence, but, when a good barrister gets into his/her stride in close examination the possibility of the witness describing events in his/her own way goes out the window. That is just the way it is when we apply an adversarial approach.
This approach essentially requires one side to argue one thing and the other side to take an opposing position. It operates on a winner and a loser model. It is not, nor was it ever meant to be a sensitive instrument designed to probe gently for retrospective truth. At best it will establish the amount of proof, not the truth.
Too often, what the lay person hopes will be their opportunity to prove their loved one's innocence, becomes sullied in the rigour of a court type cross-examination. And the open wound of the unfair death remains unhealed.
There is another reason why an open and legally binding inquiry will in my opinion fail to get at the truth. It is simply this. No country will allow its intelligence agencies to be exposed to a rigorous and detailed examination under the spotlight of judicial proceedings with all the implications for follow up prosecutions that such an inquiry implies. Immunity certificates based on the need to protect those individuals who are there to protect the state will be produced by the state. Years of determined foraging by legal experts on the part of victims' families will result in frustration failure and bitterness.
You might think that this is a cynical view but it is what states do to protect their secret services, whether those services overstep the legal constraints or not.
My fear is that we could end up spending many years and enormous sums of money on judicial inquiries that by their very composition will fail to satisfy anyone.
When what we need is a truthful dialogue amongst all those involved in fighting what was a dirty war on all sides.
There is much to be told and much to forgive and the commitment to honesty should exclude neither government, nor paramilitary.
I don't know what would work but I do know that a judicial inquiry is not the medium to manage the complexities of such painful truths.
