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Bloody Sunday Inquiry

My Lords, I entirely understand that. I also appreciate that even in comparison with the paucity of the money devoted to those legal inquiries, the amount of money devoted to caring for victims’ emotional needs is pitiable in my experience of working with some of these people. My concern is precisely that we focus too much on judicial inquiries of any kind. I have noticed in the recent past that people in Northern Ireland—former journalists, academics, victims on all sides, former paramilitaries, those who have lost loved ones, former security force members—have started to come together to tell each other their stories away from the limelight and reporting and with no support from government at all. I am rather more hopeful that that kind of rebuilding and knitting together of relationships among ordinary people in Northern Ireland may do more to heal our broken society than any further major government interventions other than the normal, proper due process of the administration of law done with a human face and a human heart.