Labour’s Legacy Act repeal doesn’t match pledge

The Labour government’s repeal of the controversial Legacy Act does not match a pledge made by Sir Keir Starmer, a Sinn Féin MP has said.

John Finucane said it was not “repeal as people understood it when Labour first made that commitment prior to the election”.

Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn described the act as “completely wrong”, after beginning the process to formally repeal it on Wednesday.

Brought in by the Conservative government, the act put a ban on inquests and civil actions related to incidents during the Troubles.

It also offered a conditional amnesty to people suspected of Troubles-related crimes in exchange for co-operating with a new information recovery body.

The act was highly contentious in Northern Ireland, facing opposition from victims bodies and the main political parties.

Labour had pledged to repeal it if they won the election.

On Wednesday, Benn told the House of Commons he was laying a “remedial order”, which would formally remove the conditional immunity clause from the act and the ban on new civil actions.

Benn said the conditional amnesty was “deeply offensive to many people in Northern Ireland” and that there was “almost universal opposition” to the act.

He told Good Morning Ulster on Thursday that it could not be justified that “there is one part of the United Kingdom where people are denied their right to bring a civil case or to have an inquest”.

However, Finucane said there were concerns with the announcement and that he would be “slow to describe this as repeal in the way in which it was described by Keir Starmer when he spoke in Belfast”.

The MP, whose father was shot dead by loyalists in 1989, added that while the ability to reopen civil cases has been reinstated there was a “very staged and deliberately slow process around inquests”.

He said Benn’s plans to consult on new laws meant that some families “who have been waiting 50 years for an inquest… are hearing that ‘there needs to be further delay’.”

Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MP Gregory Campbell said while the move was a step or two forward there was still “an awful long marathon journey ahead of us”.

“We want to see more meat on the bones of yesterday’s statement,” he said, adding there would still be former members of the security forces wondering if they would be investigated “and face the potential of a court case that will probably end up nowhere”.

“We are going to have to try and tease out as much information as we can following yesterday’s statement,” he told Radio Foyle’s North West Today programme.

“He has moved on but at a very slow pace and with a very long way to go.”

Finucane was also critical of the secretary of state’s plan to retain the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR), a new commission for investigating Troubles killings set up by the Legacy Act, saying it was “permanently tainted and damaged”.

He said “cosmetic” changes would not save save the ICRIR and a “completely changed” body was required.

Benn said on Wednesday that the ICRIR would be retained and reformed instead of scrapped.

He added that legislation would be brought forward by him in response to recent court judgements to ensure it complied with human rights law.

Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) MP Claire Hanna said that while she welcomed Benn’s statement on Wednesday, there were still challenges including making the ICRIR complaint with human rights law.

“Failing to deal with the past properly limits our ability to have a different and shared future,” she added.

Chief commissioner of the ICRIR, Sir Declan Morgan, said the focus needed to be kept on the families who have been “shamefully treated in this process”.

He added that the ICRIR was “committed” to achieving the “the unvarnished truth for all of the victims”.

When asked about getting to all of the necessary information related to cases, he said the ICRIR had been given powers from the high court and the court of appeal to retrieve such information.

“We have the power to go into these agencies and take this information ourselves,” he told Radio Ulster.

“The first duty that we have is to ensure that information that the government might want to prevent, which is embarrassing, and existing from something that requires to be preserved for national security, that information is disclosed and if it is not disclosed to call it out,” he added.

Martina Dillon, whose husband Seamus was shot and killed in 1997 in a loyalist attack in Dungannon, County Tyrone, said the statement from Benn “is a lot of spin”.

“The secretary of state is wrong not to bring back inquests at the first opportunity,” she said.

“All I want is the answers I’m entitled to; I deserve the truth.”

Mrs Dillon, who was among a group of families who took a legal challenge against the Legacy Act, said that her message to Benn was that “we’ve waited long enough, everyone entitled to an inquest should have one”.

The chief executive of the Wave Trauma Centre North West, Sandra Peake, said the move was “a positive first step”.

“It is positive they are going to reinstate inquests and civil actions, that is most important for families going forward, but for many families where they will rest in relation to the ICRIR – that really is a fundamental issue we need to get right.”

The act was introduced by the government to attempt to “draw a line” under the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

It was first proposed in 2021 by the then prime minister Boris Johnson as a solution to ending what he called “vexatious prosecutions” of former soldiers, and was passed in 2023.

It created a new legacy body known as the ICRIR to take over all Troubles-era cases from 1 May 2024, including those on the desk of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

The act shut down all historical inquests and it also offered conditional amnesty to suspects.

A court ruled the conditional immunity part of the act was incompatible with human rights’ legislation and the Windsor Framework.

In late July, the Labour government wrote to the Belfast courts abandoning an appeal against the striking out of the amnesty clause in the legislation.