Northern Ireland Secretary Sir Chris Bryant has said that all sides are “going to have to give a bit” to reach legislation on dealing with the past.
He said work is ongoing on the Troubles Bill which will replace the previous government’s controversial Legacy Act.
The 2023 Act halted scores of court cases, including inquests, concerning incidents from the Troubles, with a view to transferring those to the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR).
Parts of the Act were found to be incompatible with human rights, and also undermined the rights of victims in breach of the Windsor Framework, which was signed following the UK leaving the EU.
The Troubles Bill is to see a reformed Legacy Commission, reconstituted from the ICRIR, to investigate and fact-find for families affected by the Troubles across the UK.
It also proposes an Independent Commission on Information Retrieval (ICIR) jointly with the Irish Government, and is expected to provide effective protections for veterans, as well as enabling bereaved families, including of service personnel, to get answers about what happened to their loved ones.
Sir Chris said they are “full steam ahead” on the Bill.
“I am just going through precisely whether the package of amendments we’re thinking of taking forward is the right package, but it’s complex to get it right. I definitely want to get it right,” he told media in Belfast on Friday.
“Everybody is going to have to give a bit if we’re going to get a piece of legislation that can really stand the test of time, and delivers what everybody wants, which is that people have the security of knowing what really happened.”
He described the Troubles Bill as a “complex balancing act”.
“Just to remember why we need to get that right – there are an awful lot of families who simply don’t know what happened, and that’s just morally offensive, let alone socially divisive and a form of cancer in society,” he said.
“I was partly brought up in Spain, and I knew when we lived in Spain in the 1970s the problems of the Spanish civil war still lasted then, and they still do today because they were left unresolved because people just didn’t know what had happened.
“So for me as an historian, that is just a really important part of getting things right.”
Sinn Féin MLA Caoimhe Archibald said the “litmus test” for legacy arrangements would be whether they had the confidence of victims, and whether they were human rights compliant.
She said that during a meeting with Sir Chris at Hillsborough Castle, her party made it “very clear” that they “cannot give preferential treatment to veterans”.
“We made that point very clearly to the Secretary of State today and we made very clear we will reserve our judgment until we see legal text,” she said.
Ms Archibald also said they pressed Sir Chris to call a public inquiry into the murder by loyalist terrorists of GAA official Sean Brown in 1997 in Bellaghy.
