Examination of Witnesses (Questions 92-116)
MR CHRIS
ALBISTON AND
MR RAYMOND
WHITE
29 APRIL 2009
Q92 Chairman: Mr Albiston and Mr
White, could I thank you both for coming and welcome you. As you
know, we are going to report to Parliament on the Eames-Bradley
Consultative Group Report and we thought it only right to give
you the opportunity to share some of your thoughts and views with
us. You will have heard most of the previous session and we will
of course give you the chance, as we gave the others, the opportunity
of sending in any supplementary evidence. We are slightly constrained
on time because there are going to be a series of votes in the
House of Commons at four o'clock and our practice means that I
have to suspend the Committee at that point; I do not want you
hanging around so we will finish our questions when the division
bells go, which will be at four o'clock or a moment or so after
or even before that. Would you like to say a word by way of introduction
on your initial reaction to the report? There are two of you here
but do you, in effect, speak with one voice, does your association
have a collective view or are there differences between you?
Mr White: We speak with one voice;
we have not fallen out as yet on this issue. Thank you for the
opportunity to address the Committee. Mr Albiston and I both serve
on a small sub group within the Northern Ireland Retired Police
Officers' Association, an association representing some 3000 plus
retired police officers. Our written submission obviously you
have before the Committee and you will see that we have confined
our comments to speak on issues relative to the Legacy Commission
and the residual issues regarding legal processes surrounding
that. We have left the care and welfare issues and recognition
of victim and survivor issues to our sister organisation, the
RUC George Cross Foundation, and I understand they have made a
submission as well. Could I say at the outset, Chairman, our recognition
for Lord Eames and Mr Bradley in relation to the work that the
Consultative Group on the Past has produced. It was an enormous
task that they had and every time we met with them we were met
with the utmost courtesy and they listened to us and we are extremely
appreciative of the work and effort that they have done.
Lady Hermon: That is very nice.
Q93 Chairman: Thank you for saying
that.
Mr White: The Committee will note
also that we make our comments primarily in defence of the interests
of our retired membership, so we can be somewhat selfish in terms
of making our remarks and our comments. We are some 10 years now
into the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement and we have available
to us, obviously, the cumulative effects of all the retrospective
investigations and inquiries that have gone on to date, so it
is within that framework that our comments have been made in the
submission given, and my colleague Mr Albiston will lead in that
respect.
Q94 Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed. As you focus very much on the Legacy Commission would
you like to put on the record—because this is going to be
a published record as you will appreciate—your thoughts
on the Legacy Commission: whether it is a good idea, if it is
a good idea how it is best executed, comment on timing and so
on, and then I will bring in my colleagues to follow up.
Mr Albiston: Thank you, Chairman.
To simplify issues we were present earlier and we heard the comments
on cherry picking, and we accept it is open to honourable members
to cherry-pick, but on a broad base we say that we do not accept
the proposals of the Eames-Bradley Report in relation to the Legacy
Commission and there are a number of reasons for this which we
have attempted to set out in our brief submission to this Committee.
To summarise those objections, firstly we are concerned about
the nature of the proposals for the Legacy Commission in respect
of the remit to investigate matters in the past. Our members—that
is retired members of the police in Northern Ireland—have
been involved in a number of attempts to re-investigate the past,
either through the re-opening of old investigations by the Police
Service of Northern Ireland or through the Historical Enquiries
Team or through some of the other investigations which have taken
place and of course with public inquiries, three of which are
still ongoing in Northern Ireland and in which our members are
participating. Our view collectively is that there is an agenda
operating within many of these inquiries, the purpose of which
is to question at best or to denigrate at worst the work which
our members undertook whilst they were serving police officers,
and that these inquiries and these mechanisms are in fact vehicles
for this form of unfair criticism. Our concern about the Legacy
Commission is that with inquiries such as the Stevens Inquiry
and so on failing to meet the test which the Director of Public
Prosecutions has set for prosecuting people for criminal offences,
this does not satisfy the political agenda and that this Legacy
Commission may be used as a vehicle for achieving the same objective,
criticising retired police officers but doing so by using a lower
threshold of evidence. That would be one of our principal concerns,
when we look at, for example, the mechanisms involving secret
courts, different approaches to evidence, the requirement on people
to attend and produce documents. We do not see any likelihood
of criminals, gangsters, terrorists, paramilitaries, whatever
term you like to give, attending with documents to articulate
their position and their mechanisms in the past. We see these
machines as being purely directed against retired police officers
and, therefore, we feel that the Legacy Commission proposals as
set out in the present document will act against the interests
of our members.
Q95 Chairman: You feel bruised and
feel that you will be further bruised by the establishment of
such a body?
Mr Albiston: There are many people
who feel exactly that, yes.
Q96 Chairman: What about the continuation
of the status quo; you would be comfortable if HET remained and
the Ombudsman's investigative powers and historical section remained;
you would be happy with that would you?
Mr Albiston: We could articulate
some detailed views on the precise way in which we think enquiries
should be undertaken, but in principle, as I think honourable
members would expect of retired police officers, we believe that
allegations of crime should be investigated by the police. We
believe that there may be a tension between the interests of justice
with a capital J and the practicalities of politics and moving
forward, and we recognise that; we believe that that is one of
the difficult areas into which the Eames-Bradley group ran. We
are not sure that they have taken the right path out of that difficulty;
we do not claim to have a monopoly of wisdom in that, but as police
officers we believe that if crimes took place, which they did,
then police officers are the people to investigate those crimes.
Q97 Chairman: You heard the evidence
given a few minutes ago by the commissioners. Have you actually
had the opportunity as an association to talk to the commissioners
and, if you have not, would you welcome such an opportunity?
Mr Albiston: I am not aware that
any discussions have taken place but both of us certainly know
one of the previous witnesses fairly well and have spoken to him
fairly regularly over the years. I would say that it would not
be right to say that our organisation has spoken, as an organisation,
to Mr McAllister's organisation.
Q98 Chairman: Would you like the
opportunity to do so?
Mr Albiston: I am sure we would
welcome that opportunity.
Q99 Chairman: Because if we are going
to bring people together there has to be, as I see it, a series
of dialogues, and that is one obvious one that perhaps we could
help initiate. You would welcome that?
Mr White: We are certainly as
an organisation open for dialogue. We hear the warm and embracive
sentiments that are expressed in relation to HET and the investigation
of old offences, but we struggle to find as it were evidence of
what actually has been achieved short of some comfort being brought
to some families in relation to personal questions that they might
have to ask. When our membership looks to see, and as the Eames-Bradley
Report points out, 60% of the deaths due to the conflict that
occurred in the Province were carried out by Republican organisations,
30% by Loyalists and 10% by Her Majesty's Forces, of which less
than 2% are laid at the door of the police service. When we look
to see the work that the HET has done at this moment in time in
relation to making people amenable to the courts for old offences,
I find it very hard to find any cases that are actually being
run at this moment in time. Certainly HET will point to one case
and that is the 2001 case that actually sits outside its normal
remit which refers to the date in April 1998 which was supposed
to be its investigative period. They point to that as an illustration
of some work being done in that area, but I heard one of the Victims
Commissioners make mention of the fact that they would wish to
see the remit of HET expanded; we would ask in actual fact that
the recommendation that this Committee made some time back, that
the Northern Ireland Office conduct a review—which it has
very neatly sidestepped on such times as Eames-Bradley reported—that
that now as it were be put into place and that we have for the
first time something that we can use to illustrate to our members
what we call the cost benefit analysis of being involved with
HET. We are finding that it has a cost to our membership that
does not appear to manifest itself in any output from HET.
Q100 Chairman: You would like this
Committee to pick up where we left off in that previous report
which we deliberately did leave off because of Eames-Bradley and
not wishing to prevent that, but you would now like us to go back
there—
Mr White: We would welcome that
because, like yourselves and a lot of other people, expected within
Eames-Bradley a fairly detailed analysis of the work that was
actually ongoing and why it was that HET would experience considerable
difficulties in making people amenable to the courts. There is
a very brief reference to evidence issues and things of that nature,
but as you, Chairman, will appreciate it starts with the very
nature of murder itself in relation to a terrorist act. It is
not comparable to a domestic murder.
Q101 Chairman: No.
Mr White: There are major distinctions.
It flows right through not only the investigative process but
into the decisions of the CPS in terms of do we prosecute, is
it now in the public interest, is there an abuse of process here?
That flows over into the courts process as well, so the older
the cases get there are very real difficulties of investigation,
but when you map onto that the signals the government has already
set out in terms of the early release of prisoners as part of
the Good Friday Agreement; when you map on to it the Sentence
Review Commissioners' remit in the sense that no matter how heinous
the offence, no matter what the judiciary says about it, two years
is all that you are going to spend in custody, the big question
in our mind is what constitutes justice out of a system that has
that amount of what you call political interference in it? This
is where we would like the Committee's past recommendation in
respect of HET to be picked up on, so that we have an in depth,
very definitive and independent analysis of what actually is set
out to be achieved and how realistic is that, because the people
of Northern Ireland want that.
Chairman: We note your challenge and
we shall obviously reflect on that. Could I bring in Dr McDonnell?
Q102 Dr McDonnell: Thank you very
much, Chairman. I just wanted to touch base if I might on some
of the recognition payments. How do you feel about those or were
you happy that the Secretary of State removed those?
Mr White: The feelings of our
membership certainly reflected a lot of what was said in the press
in that people found it extremely difficult to come to terms with
a payment to an individual's family who had deliberately set out
to kill another individual, who had watched that individual's
funeral as it were have all the paramilitary trappings, have all
his hooded associates alongside his coffin, be they as it were
Loyalist or Republican and then be asked to accept that the payment
that they were going to receive was reflective in the same pain
and suffering as the family of the deceased paramilitary. They
just found it extremely hard to come to terms with and that is
where basically we stand on it. We did not see the payment as
it were as being something that was acceptable in that as it were
definition of victim.
Q103 Dr McDonnell: Others may wish
to pick up on that, but there is a second point I want to make
quickly. I feel very strongly myself about the mental health support
that victims received and I am sure that many of your members
were in the category of being not just traumatised physically
but traumatised mentally and scarred mentally. In your opinion
and the opinion of your organisation did the health service pick
that up, do they get adequate support in terms of mental health
support in terms of dealing with the scars that they live with?
Mr White: We were very fortunate
in respect of the Patten Agreement; it recognised the heavy psychological
impact that the four decades of the Troubles had on our membership
and as a consequence of that the PRRT was established at Maryfield.
They have 10 psychologists in employment, seven of which as it
were are looking after the interests of serving and retired police
officers. Some 250 new cases are still presenting themselves on
an annual basis to those people, so you can estimate for yourself
the numbers of ongoing new cases—that is not people who
have been treated and put back into care of the national health
service, this is 250 new presentations each year in respect of
their services. Certainly we were very grateful as an organisation
that that recognition was there. The military side, dealing with
officers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, have been looking
to see what sort of services are in place and how effective they
have been and I understand, Chairman, you may be visiting at some
stage with PRRT.
Chairman: Indeed.
Q104 Dr McDonnell: Is that service
open beyond former members of the RUC? Is it open to the families
of former members and is it reasonably accessible to the wider
community?
Mr White: The only people who
are excluded as far as we understand—and I would not hold
myself out to be an expert on it—are part-time members of
the RUC Reserve seen to be outside the framework as it is at the
moment, but serving officers, retired officers and the immediate
families of retired officers are eligible for treatment within
the psychological service.
Q105 Chairman: This is perhaps a
good point to ask you one question before handing over to Lady
Hermon. This Committee has often made the point that victims are
not just the bereaved; many people suffered during the Troubles
who did not lose a loved one but perhaps had one mutilated, all
sorts of terrible things happened within families. I was heartened
that the Victims Commissioners made reference to that this afternoon;
would you go along with that wider definition?
Mr Albiston: We have been very
fortunate, Chairman, as my colleague Mr White has said in the
facilities which have been available to us, particularly in the
last 10 years. It will be for the Committee to see when they visit
PRRT and not for me to speak from any position of expertise, but
it would be fair to say that they have seen a large number of
clients and they have been able to adopt a fairly generous and
broad brush approach within the limits of the legislation which,
as Mr White said, excluded the part-time reserve. What you will
find when you speak to them is a generosity of spirit, perhaps
not of resource because resource is always limited, but an expertise
has been developed there and there is almost certainly from my
contact with them a willingness to share that expertise with other
organisations. In much the same way as Belfast developed a reputation
for dealing with traumatic injury I think now the PRRT is developing
a reputation for dealing with these post-traumatic injuries.
Chairman: I take that to be a yes to
my question about the wider nature of victims, the wider nature
of the definition. Lady Hermon.
Q106 Lady Hermon: Just staying with
the PRRT for a moment could I just ask you to comment on whether
in fact you were surprised in fact or disappointed that the Consultative
Group on the Past did not seem to mention the PRRT at any stage
or even the health care problems of retired police officers. Did
that omission surprise you?
Mr White: It did not really mention
the police service at all in any great comment. Certainly the
work of PRRT would have been brought to the attention of the Eames-Bradley
group and they would have been made fully aware of that. Certainly
it was just one of the issues that we noted in relation to the
report, that we had not had much in the way of a mention. We would
not wish to see it interpreted that somehow or other all our needs
were met and therefore we were outwith any recommendations that
they were making.
Mr Albiston: There was a Freudian
slip in the drafting, if I may apologise in advance, where paragraph
14 of our submission suggests that the silence in the Eames-Bradley
Report was not intended as a slight and an "e" has appeared
in the word -sleight—which is not consist with the Oxford
Dictionary's interpretation of the two words. I do not think this
was meant to be a sleight of hand, nor do I think it was meant
to be an insult to the PRRT or to the RUC or to ex-members. What
we hope it is not is an indication of any thinking in official
circles that the police have got enough, we can forget about them
and concentrate on other people. We welcome the attention which
the report gives to the needs of ex-members of Her Majesty's Forces,
for example, and we see this as being additional to the provision
which has already been made. We do not expect it to be considered
to be a substitute for or instead of the existing provision,
Q107 Lady Hermon: Just following
on a little bit from that could we just come back to the Legacy
Commission? Could you describe to the Committee please what you
would expect to be the impact on retired police officers and perhaps
say a little bit about the impact that HET has already had, the
Police Ombudsman's investigations have already had and that other
inquiries have already had on the psychological welfare of retired
police officers and indeed the morale of retired police officers.
Mr White: This is certainly one
of the key concerns that I mentioned at the beginning to Sir Patrick.
As I said, 250 new cases present themselves each year to PRRT.
PRRT will tell us that a proportion of those are triggered by
requests from the Police Ombudsman's Office, from public inquiries
and from requests from HET to assist with old investigations.
If you can imagine your average detective serves maybe for 20
years in the CID going from detective constable to perhaps detective
superintendent. Attending six murders a year—which would
not be a big number of murders—that is 120 murders potentially
that he or she could be required to assist HET with in terms of
its review. Even if they only revisit 50% of those it is still
a considerable number. It is not a paper exercise as far as our
members are concerned; it takes them back to dark corners of their
past that they do not wish to visit again. It may have been 20
years ago and they have come to some degree to terms with it,
but if you spend two or three hours on a reinvestigation and you
are walking through inquest photographs and investigative processes,
that is real live time memory recall as far as those officers
are concerned.
Q108 Lady Hermon: Yes.
Mr White: And they are asking
for what benefit and for what purpose. They are not seeing prosecutions
being pursued or people being brought before the courts, but there
is this psychological damage trail that is now beginning to emerge
through the figures of the PRRT. I have no doubt that the Chairman
of the Committee will follow up on that and knows a much better
place for that, but it is a balancing effect and it is the intrusion.
The other side is that we have now 10 years of retrospective investigation,
from public inquiries to controversial inquests, to HET inquiries,
the Police Ombudsman inquiries and a disproportionately small
number of our officers who either served in Special Branch or
served in CID are now almost on call, as it were, as unpaid public
servants to be at the beck and call of whoever wishes to revisit
the past. This is our fear, that in respect of the Legacy Commission
this is yet another imposition. I can only use myself as an example.
I am approaching seven years now into retirement; I have not had
a year in retirement that I have not had a letter arriving either
from a public inquiry or the Police Ombudsman's Office in relation
to, as it were, "Can you assist? Or we wish to interview
you." It is not just a matter, Chairman, of an hour. At least
six weeks out of my life was taken away in relation to the Rosemary
Nelson inquiry, between attending to make statements, receiving
documentation, meeting with my own legal advisers, making further
statements and then attending the hearing itself. That is now
due to be repeated for me in relation to the Hamill inquiry. I
am only a small representative example—I probably do not
even represent in respect of what the CID officer might be required
to go through. It is this intrusion on us in an Article 8 sense
into our privacy: when do retired police officers actually get
retired in the same fashion as other members of the public?
Q109 Chairman: Would you like there
to be an age at which a police officer cannot be summoned to give
evidence?
Mr White: You are arriving at
that age with some of us now, where early Alzheimer's is setting
in!
Q110 Chairman: No, it is a serious
question: do you think there ought to be an age after which a
retired police officer cannot be obliged to give evidence? Do
you think that would be a realistic approach?
Mr Albiston: Our position is that
if there is a suggestion that a police officer has been involved
in criminal conduct whilst he was a police officer there should
be no hiding place for that person and that any body which is
legitimately charged with investigating crime should be able to
deal with that retired police officer in the same way that they
can deal with any other suspect for a criminal offence. I am absolutely
and unequivocal on that—and no age limit, no medical excuses,
nothing. But if you are taking retired police officers and asking
them to help you by explaining procedures that they may have been
involved in 15 years ago and you are taking up their time—and
it is not just Article 6 about the fair trial and Article 8 about
the right to privacy, what about Article 4 of the European Convention
which prohibits forced labour? This man was taken away for six
weeks and I am aware of the cancelled holidays and all the rest
of it and I think this is an abuse of the powers that have been
given to public inquiries and other bodies, and we very much fear
that the same thing will happen with the Legacy Commission. We
are particularly concerned—we put it in our submission but
we have not mentioned it today and I do not know whether honourable
Members are going to come to this—the proposals for the
Legacy Commission make no reference to any form of appeal mechanism,
accountability or control. We went through and we are still going
through a horrific experience at the hands of the Police Ombudsman's
Office partly because, completely contrary to the clear provisions
of Article 13 of the European Convention, when the Government
established the Ombudsman's Office no mechanism was put in place
for anybody to challenge the conduct of the Police Ombudsman's
Office for their handling under the Office. There is a mechanism
for addressing issues of maladministration, which is common with
other parts of the Ombudsman structure in the UK, but the Ombudsman's
Office has police powers; it has powers to arrest, search, detain,
interrogate and recommend for prosecution. Any other body in the
UK which has those powers would have a complaints system. There
is no complaints system for the Ombudsman's Office; and we fear
that the same thing might happen with the Legacy Commission.
Q111 Stephen Pound: On that point,
Chairman—and I am very grateful, you have certainly fleshed
out the statement you made in your written submission when you
talked about retired police officers being dragged from their
well earned retirement—you paint a nightmare picture here
where if someone was getting confused with age, which does happen
to us, and they give a statement which contradicts an earlier
statement then that would then open up an entirely new range of
inquiry which would then have knock-on effects in other ones.
I think we need to get that on the record. What I want to ask
you is about the sheer practicalities of it. You are formerly
Metropolitan Police and the only one of these that I have ever
been involved in involved the MPS and we found that all the retired
officers live in either Spain or Florida—none of them were
living in Southall. The fact remains that they were out of the
country, they were not subject to subpoena and a number of them
actually returned to give evidence at their own expense. How does
the mechanism work? Is this a voluntary process? Are you subpoenaed,
are you summoned, and how does it actually work in practical terms?
Mr White: If it is the Ombudsman's
Office then I can either be a witness or a suspect, so I can be
interviewed under PACE as a voluntary attendee, in which case
I get legal assistance in that respect. If I am attending in respect
of a public inquiry the only aspect on which I am paid, as it
were, mileage allowance is in respect of my attendance to make
a statement to one of the inquiry solicitors. All other contact
that I have with my own solicitor in the collecting of papers
and discussing issues with him are all paid at my expense. My
time, as I say, when I add it all up in terms of reading all the
papers that have been served on me, in terms of correcting statements
that have been drafted and given back to me and in terms of all
the work you normally do in terms of appearances is unpaid; it
is borne by myself; it is complained of by my wife to a great
extent in terms of the time loss. And in respect of the Nelson
inquiry I was listed for appearance on no less than four occasions,
starting in March, put back to May, put back to September and
I finally appeared in December. So my entire year was lost to
myself in terms of, "When am I going to appear?" The
same thing now has happened in respect of Hamill—I am into
my third adjournment and I do not know when the next one will
be. So this is the mechanism; we are treated, as it were, as some
sort of public object that is still tied somehow or other to the
force.
Q112 Chairman: In the context of
today's session you are fearful that the establishment of a Legacy
Commission would compound those problems?
Mr White: Exactly because it has
compellability powers which no doubt will be backed up by a High
Court subpoena if we did not appear.
Mr Albiston: Absolutely, and to
complete the answer to your question about age limits, Chairman,
I spoke about retired officers who are suspected of criminal offences.
If we go on to talk about retired officers of whom it is believed
they may be able to assist with various types of inquiry our submission
would be that that should be on a purely voluntary basis. We think—and
from reading the letters columns in newspapers and listening to
the television debates with the vox populi and so on—that
there is a perception that retired police officers are under some
sort of moral obligation to give of their time because they have
agreeable pensions and this sort of thing. I think it would be
right to put on the record that all police pensions have been
paid for through 11% contribution during the service of the police
officer.
Q113 Stephen Pound: Not disputed.
Mr Albiston: But that is not to
say that retired police officers such as Mr White and myself would
be therefore, ipso facto, unwilling to give of our time;
we would not. There are many occasions on which we would be quite
willing to give up our time and we have both been at public inquiries
and given what we believe to be help to those inquiries.
Q114 Chairman: You have made this
point with graphic clarity but we have this report before us from
Eames-Bradley and you yourselves have generously paid tribute
to the courtesy with which you were treated and we would certainly
concur with that; we believe that the conduct of Eames-Bradley
was impeccable—that is not to say that we are going to agree
with the report, but the conduct fine. The Legacy Commission,
the central recommendations now that the Secretary of State has
said he is not going to move forward with the payments, you do
not want the Legacy Commission, so what is your alternative? Maintenance
of the current situation, the creation of some other body, the
ending of all such inquiries? What is your solution? We want to
have that on the record so that we can consider what you would
like when we come to decide what we wish to recommend.
Mr White: Certainly our view,
Chairman, is that going down what you would call the legalistic
investigative path of inquiries and certainly of using what you
would call criminal investigation as a mechanism for finding the
broad issues of truth and things that are being sought, is running
out of time in terms of what can be achieved in that respect.
I think before anything moves forward we need to have an appraisal
of what actually is in place at this moment in time because the
feeling coming out of Eames-Bradley is that there is yet another
layer of bureaucracy put upon the work of organisations that are
actually in place and have been doing good work. So if we had
some sort of capacity to stop, to take a good, honest and hard
assessment of where we are going in relation to this, and answer
some of the harder political questions. Is it really a political
objective? As I said before, we hear the words that, yes, all
people should be made amenable—murder is murder and therefore
you should appear before the courts. But other political signals
have been put out which more or less puts terrorist murder into
a slightly different category than domestic murder, if I can use
those words? Then let us unpick those things and let us tell the
people exactly what the real difficulties will be if you are going
to go down the investigative path where time is running out in
terms of it, where the difficulties are as regards evidence, where
the difficulties are in relation to actually framing, as it were,
a prosecution case and where abuse processes and things might
ultimately result in a rejection. If you want to academically
find out then what are the broader issues—why did terrorism
occur and what issues arise in relation to the use of informants
and things of that nature—then they can be addressed in
a more academic sense rather than, as it were, all this business
of compellability and quasi-legalistic, as my colleague has said,
Star Chamber type approach to trying to find out the past. Perhaps
as somebody has said, we are running out of time in terms of the
justice process but we are still too close to events in terms
of the truth process, and we are somewhere in between that and
I think we need to stop and take a collective long breath and
see what is working and fund those issues, and then if there are
residual issues that the community at large feels it needs to
be addressed then certainly look for softer mechanisms to try
and tease out those issues. I do not personally feel a lot of
issues can be resolved in the fashion that the Legacy Commission
has been thought of and resulting in.
Mr Albiston: Perhaps I can add
to that. There was an answer given by a previous witness, Ms MacBride,
in relation to a completely different question, which seemed to
me to be absolutely pertinent and spot-on. When Ms MacBride was
asked whether she thought that the issue of payments had increased
tensions in Northern Ireland, to paraphrase her reply I think
she said something like the tensions are there and this produced
a focus for those tensions. I think one of the things we would
be concerned with is whatever comes out of the Eames-Bradley Report
carries with it the potential for producing a focus for existing
tensions and that is why it needs such careful handling.
Q115 Kate Hoey: Chairman, just a
quick point to get it on record. We have talked earlier about
sometimes when the law in Northern Ireland is very different in
terms of appeals and the Ombudsman and so on, would you like to
see a re-definition of the word "victim" in legal terms?
When I listen now I wonder that we all passed it. Did anyone at
the time ever raise this point about the fact that a victim is
a victim and the definition now has led to all these problems
that it did in Northern Ireland. Would you like to see it re-defined?
Mr Albiston: I think the short
answer, through the Chairman, is that we did not make a submission
when the legislation was being passed. I do not know what our
submission would have been had we made it.
Q116 Kate Hoey: I just wondered because
it seemed like it is one of these things now that at the time—and
maybe I need to go back and read my Hansard—whether
anyone ever actually questioned what now seems amazing, that we
agreed such a definition. I have just been told that it was an
un-amendable Order in Council.
Chairman: There we are; and at that moment
I am obliged by the practice of the House of Commons to suspend
this sitting. I will declare it at an end because there will be
more than one vote. Gentlemen, thank you very much indeed for
coming and thank you for your clear and helpful evidence, which
we shall certainly take carefully into account. It may well be
that we would want to write to you for a little bit more and it
may well be that you want to send us a bit more because on the
way back you may think, "I wish we had told them that."
Please feel free to do so. Thank you very much indeed and safe
journey back. The session is closed.
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