Northern Ireland: Legacy of the Troubles

Lord Empey Excerpts

Wednesday 5th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

On 19 December 2013, two senior DUP representatives, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Emma Little-Pengelly, came to persuade my party to support their idea for investigating the legacy of the Troubles. The Historical Investigations Unit was the centrepiece of their plan. They expected that it would give victims a better experience. These proposals became part of the Stormont House agreement and, subsequently, on 28 September 2015, Sir Jeffrey said:

“The Stormont House Agreement provides a good deal for victims and survivors”.


As my colleague Mike Nesbitt pointed out recently:

“The fatal flaw with the HIU is that it excludes many more victims than it is designed to include. Specifically, it is proposed it will investigate only 1,700 of the 3,500-plus Troubles-related killings and none of the 47,000 injured”.


Sir Jeffrey was wrong to include survivors as no survivor will have access to the HIU. Imagine if the chief constable said that the PSNI will investigate only crashes in which someone was killed and ignore cases where six people suffered life-changing injuries—there would rightly be uproar.

The former Justice Minister, David Ford, made clear his assessment of the likely effectiveness of the HIU. On 7 October 2015, in answer to a question on the likely prosecution rate of the HIU, he said that,

“the HIU might at best produce one or two prosecutions”.

The Government seem to be driven by a false interpretation of how to be compliant with Article 2 of the European convention and have done nothing to challenge this.

Most victims see these proposals as another pay-off to Sinn Féin, to help it rewrite history and hound retired police and soldiers, using records from Kew, assisted by 300 investigators recruited to the HIU, which will become a parallel police force. Terrorists have no records and they will not tell the truth. The Government’s commitment to release records is not matched by the Irish Government, who reserve the right to redact documents.

I call upon the Democratic Unionist Party to withdraw its support for these proposals and not subject those who loyally served the state to a decade of anxiety and anguish as they wait for a knock on the door.