Tribunal should continue despite cost rise - SDLP

The Bloody Sunday Tribunal must continue, despite spiralling costs, an SDLP Assembly woman has said.

The Bloody Sunday Tribunal must continue, despite spiralling costs, an SDLP Assembly woman has said.

The tribunal has already cost £56.5 million sterling and in a reply to a parliamentary question, Mr Jeffrey Donaldson, the Ulster Unionist MP for Lagan Valley was told that the total predicted cost of the inquiry would be more than £100 million.

Mrs Annie Courtney, in whose constituency Derry city lies, said that the events of January 30th 1972 were still a "running sore" in the city's nationalist community.

"It's a lot of money but it has to be spent to lay what happened on Bloody Sunday to rest," she said.

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Mr Donaldson said victims of other incidents, such as the Enniskillen bombing, for which no one had ever been charged, felt they were not being treated fairly.

Mr Donaldson called for a cap to be put on the costs of the inquiry and said it was "inequitable" to spend "all this money investigating one tragic situation when there were many tragedies arising out of many atrocities in the past thirty years".

The British Prime Minister defended the cost of the inquiry, saying it was important to lay to rest some of the claims that have been made and "important in the context of Northern Ireland and the peace process that we made progress and had such an inquiry".