I entirely understand where the hon. Gentleman is coming from and I entirely understand what he says about the range of views within victims’ groups, and even within individual families, about how they want to approach this. In a sense, there is no right or wrong thing to do here. These are matters of judgment, and the view that the Secretary of State and the Government have come to on how we proceed is that this gives a chance for a degree of reconciliation that is not delivered by the existing institutions.
For those who take the view that the hon. Gentleman describes and want to be cut off from the process and freed from thinking about it, often because what happened is so intensely painful to them that the pain of connecting to the events and to the losses is overpowering, we totally and utterly respect that. No one will be compelled to participate in an oral history or a remembrance of an event if they do not want to, but for those who do, it will be there. We will set it up as I have described, involving victims’ organisations and the cross-sectoral, cross-community advisory panel, to try to make it as inclusive and as embracing as it can possibly be.
Rather like the information recovery body itself, however, the success or otherwise of the memorialisation process will be judged only when it is up and running. It will be judged only when people can see what is happening and can make a judgment call on whether we have achieved, in the institutions we are creating, the objectives we set ourselves and the chance for greater reconciliation in Northern Ireland.