Gnomic quote of the day….

Jonathan Powell commenting in front of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on the Secretary of State’s remarks that those who recieved OTR letters should no longer rely on them as a defence… “One of the things I have discovered after leaving government is that people in government know a lot of things that people outside government don’t know, and it’s sensible to be quite cautious about opining on those things without that knowledge.” So is Jonathan just saying that he …

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Boston College tapes unlikely to lead Adams to gaol but suggest any truth process is pointless

The arrest and charging of Ivor Bell has been covered already on Slugger and below Mick has mentioned the fact that Gerry Adams has made himself available to questioning by the PSNI. Although the McConville family remain hopeful many have suggested that it is inconceivable that Adams will be prosecuted. Adams has repeatedly denied that he had anything to do with Jean McConville’s murder just as he has denied that he was ever in the IRA. He has also claimed …

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OTR scheme review judge named, and NI Affairs Committee launches inquiry

Sinn Fein’s Alex Maskey might well think “it would’ve been better to have left the issue alone”  [I couldn’t possibly comment… -Ed].  But that’s not happening.  Today the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Theresa Villiers, informed the House of Commons that “the Rt Hon Lady Justice Hallett DBE has been appointed to conduct an independent review of the administrative scheme to deal with so-called ‘on-the-runs’”. The terms of reference of the review are: to produce a full public account of the operation and …

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OTR crisis begins to abate: totally inappropriately

The crisis has begun to abate, without the direct threat of Stormont collapsing in the immediate future. Despite various claims from the predictable sources in both former government and pliant media circles this was and remains a major scandal and a colossal indictment of the whole political process. The first suggestion at minimising the relevance of these events has been that the suggestion that these letters to suspected terrorists as arranged by Sinn Fein (was the old term Sinn Fein …

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“Just to confuse matters, some elements of the tale of the On The Runs appear to have been hidden in plain sight.”

BBC NI political editor Mark Devenport with, perhaps, the best description of the mechanism used to address the issue of on-the-runs.  From Mark Devenport’s BBC blog While republicans insist unionists knew all about what was happening to the On The Runs, that is not strictly true. Senior PSNI officers answered some questions posed by Northern Ireland Policing Board members and the scheme got a glancing reference in the voluminous Eames-Bradley report on dealing with the legacy of the Troubles. But when former …

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“The Government communicated back the response to Sinn Fein via a letter from the Northern Ireland Office…”

Via the Guardian politics live-blog.  Worth noting the written ministerial statement from the NI Secretary of State, dated yesterday, which details the mechanism of the on-the-runs administrative scheme [added emphasis throughout] The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Mrs Theresa Villiers): On 21 February, Mr Justice Sweeney ruled that an abuse of process had taken place in the prosecution of John Downey for offences relating to the Hyde Park bombing which took place on 20 July 1982. Mr Downey was part …

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