Warning that welfare cuts impasse will delay justice for Troubles victims in North

A strange indifference attends the threatened collapse of the Northern Ireland Executive. The impasse on welfare reform reached in Stormont on Tuesday represents a crisis, but that word has been worn out and is greeted by most people, north of the Border as well as south, with weariness rather than alarm.

However, for many of those awaiting some measure of truth or justice in relation to bereavement or serious injury as a result of the murderous years that some call the conflict, others the Troubles, the situation represents a brutal double blow.

This has come about because in late December last year the Northern parties launched an agreement, the Stormont House Agreement, which turned out in early March not to be an agreement. Earlier this month, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Theresa Villiers, threatened that if the parties didn't agree on how to implement the disagreed-upon agreement in full, the British government might not proceed with its commitments on dealing with the legacy of the past.

Villiers’s allegation that the Executive was becoming “increasingly dysfunctional” was stating the obvious, but her further contention that if the Northern parties could not get beyond the impasse on welfare, “progress on the past and dealing with the legacy of the past and improving outcomes for victims and survivors, that is all in jeopardy as well”, was controversial.

The human rights organisation, the Committee for the Administration of Justice, accused Villiers of using victims “to blackmail local politicians into falling into line with the UK government’s callous policy on welfare”, and said this would mark “a new low in dirty politics.”

Hardest hit

It is a sorry fact that the communities which will be hardest hit by proposed welfare cuts are also those which were most deeply embroiled in the Northern Troubles. It is disturbing that the legacy of decades of social injustice has not been tackled with more success by the regime that was set up as a result of the peace process. It is outrageous that, 17 years after the Belfast Agreement, the victims and survivors of the conflict should yet again be made to wait with their anguish and unanswered questions.

There has been a litany of piecemeal efforts to tidy up the carnage. Here is just one of many indications of the need to tackle this with due urgency: the backlog of Troubles-related inquests is such that the North’s Lord Chief Justice has warned that they could still be under way in 2040.

The Stormont House Agreement was also meant to deal with flags and parades. Yet, once again, we embark upon a summer that is likely to see disputes resulting in, at the very least, skirmishes along the “peace lines” – that melancholy euphemism – which will increase sectarian division and cost a fortune. (It has already cost £12 million to police the ongoing Twaddell dispute in north Belfast.)

Vested interest

There is no need for this, and it is benefiting only those who have a vested interest in keeping the truth about their own role in the Troubles/ conflict of the North/Northern Ireland hidden. (We do not even have an agreed language in which to discuss these fraught issues.)

It is not up to the Executive to legislate for the Stormont House Agreement; it is for Westminster. There was no “all or nothing” clause in the agreement, nor does the British government even have the right to renege on its commitments. It is in fact obliged to meet them under international law. The former police ombudsman in the North, Baroness Nuala O’Loan, one of the authors of a report on the UK’s compliance with the European Court of Human Rights, will tell an audience in Belfast today that as well as other pending cases, a new raft of alleged violations relating to “investigative delay” is now building up. O’Loan will also warn that “the easiest way to prevent things happening while giving the illusion of progress is to starve the processes of funding”.

Queen’s speech

The Stormont House Agreement was included in the queen’s speech yesterday, but since there is still no agreement as to what it actually contains, it will remain open to political manipulation. David Cameron’s proposal to repeal the Human Rights Act, which would put his government in breach of the Belfast Agreement, was also included.

In an elegy to people from his neighbourhood who had been killed in the Troubles, the poet Michael Longley posed the question: "Who is it who suggested that the opposite of war / Is not so much peace as civilisation?" A civilised post- conflict society in Northern Ireland cannot be brought into being without reconciliation. Here is the first "founding principle" of the Stormont House Agreement: "That the cause of reconciliation should be promoted."

Susan McKay is a journalist and the author of Bear in Mind These Dead