Ulster Unionist Leader Mike Nesbitt  has launched the Party’s paper on “Dealing with the Past” at Parliament Buildings, Stormont.

Mr Nesbitt said:

“The way we deal with the past at present is through a series of mechanisms which focus on those most impacted by individual events, rather than with a view to enabling and empowering society to move on. Further, the current mechanisms are imperfect, incomplete and imbalanced, and are serving to re-write history, painting the state and its security force personnel as the villains. Clearly, this is not a tenable position.

Yet, the immediate future is of an added layer of legacy Coroners’ Court Inquests, which run the risk of establishing a narrative of actions by security force personnel, without a reciprocal narrative concerning terrorist motivation and activity, or any due attention to the security and political context of the time.

The Ulster Unionist Party will be tireless in countering the propaganda of others by highlighting the absurdity of claims of non-participation in terrorist organisations. If state files are to be opened to public scrutiny, the first should be those marked “McGuinness, M” and “Adams, G”.

The Ulster Unionist Party will continue to offer real support to those who volunteered to don the uniform, put themselves in harm’s way, and held the line against an existential threat to Northern Ireland that lasted nearly 40 years.

The Party will continue to press the Secretary of State and UK Government, the Government of the Republic of Ireland, and the EU to accept that a solution to Dealing with the Past requires honest brokerage, and that it is unacceptable to hide behind the assertion that these matters are now devolved, not least because many of the legal issues are European and best addressed by sovereign governments, not devolved administrations.

The past can be unpicked but not undone. It is the future that we can better influence. The Ulster Unionist Party wishes to agree a way to close the ugly chapter of Northern Ireland’s first century marked “The Troubles” and focus on the opportunities we can create for all in our second hundred years.”

Our paper on dealing with the past can be found here:

http://www.uup.org/images/dealing.pdf