The idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is back in favour this week and it's easy to see why. Rarely has the phrase 'both sides are as bad as each other' been more self-evident, while the sulking silence from unionism in general and Sinn Féin in particular feels like the first real peace we've known for years.
So why not seize this opportune moment to balance the blame?
I decided to do some amateur research on TRCs in other countries to see how they work.
Truth and reconciliation is practically an international industry.
The first TRC was set up in Bangladesh in 1971 and since then more than 40 other commissions have operated in countries as diverse as Argentina, Bosnia, Chile, the Czech Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Haiti, Rwanda and Uganda. The 1996 South African TRC is the best known but was actually a fairly late and relatively straightforward example.
Each TRC was set up to address very specific grievances ranging from abductions to genocide but all have had five features in common which bode ill for a similar process in Northern Ireland.
Firstly, TRCs operate on a basis of 'national healing', aiming to secure a country's future by binding it back together again after a shared trauma.
Although Northern Ireland's population has experienced a shared trauma, that trauma occurred because half of us don't want Northern Ireland to have a future.
This looks like a pretty fundamental obstacle.
Secondly, no TRC has ever operated under the basis that 'both sides are as bad as each other'.
In every case the commission in question has investigated a clear case of one side clobbering the other and even taking the 'faults on both sides' line has always ended in controversy.
Last year Rajeev Bhargava of New Delhi University advised the Indian government against setting up a TRC to deal with Muslim/Hindu violence, claiming that such "symmetric barbarism" could never ultimately be judged as anything more than criminality.
You can imagine how that argument would go down around here.
Thirdly, a TRC has to set itself strict time limits to avoid turning into some sort of national perpetual-motion grievance machine.
These limits apply both to the period under investigation and to the length of the investigation itself. The Ugandan TRC gave itself 10 years to investigate Idi Amin's 16-year rampage, so how long should we spend staring up our collective backsides?
And which part of our history's long intestine should we examine? Unionists might say 1969-1998. nationalists might prefer 1922-1998. When this point was 'debated' at last year's West Belfast Festival one member of the audience shouted: "It'll need to go back 800 years!" Waiting until that particular gentleman has died of old age would probably be quicker.
Fourth: "Truth without justice is neither," as our very own Bill Rolston of the University of Ulster warned the South Africans in 1996.
The concept of the 'blanket amnesty' has fallen quickly out of favour as a means of reconciliation, to be replaced by a clear understanding that some crimes will always merit punishment and that few victims will ever be satisfied with collective apologies. The South African TRC received 7,000 requests for amnesty and 4,500 of those were rejected.
It heard testimony from 21,000 victims and has just recommended a one-off one% capitalisation levy on all the companies listed on the Johannesburg stock exchange to finance compensation.
The businessmen reckon this isn't fair, and the phrase 'life isn't fair' now hangs heavy over the veldt. None of Northern Ireland's three official languages even contain the phrase 'life isn't fair'.
Fifth and finally, TRCs are always a disappointment.
The guilty confess, but their guilt remains.
The bereaved forgive, but their loved ones are still dead.
Advocates of the process explain that accepting these disappointments is part of the healing, that it would be superficial to expect all the horrors of the recent past to melt away in one emotional national moment and that it is facile to talk about the 'success' of something so complicated.
All this is true – but there'd still be a riot in north Belfast anyway.
Northern Ireland doesn't have a formal process of truth and reconciliation, but we are living through its natural equivalent.
The recent revelations about collusion have come about because former agents are demanding compensation and former handlers are demanding recognition.
As the conflict recedes into history the combatants lose their fear and the truth drips out at a 'safe' pace. It isn't reconciliation of course, but you can't have everything.
A Dutch human rights monitor at South Africa's TRC, observing the bewildered trauma as confession after confession failed to magically 'heal' the victims, recalled a quote from Emily Dickinson: "The truth must dazzle gradually, or all the world would be blind."
In our case I think the wordsof Jack Nicholson might be more apt: "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth."
