I feel privileged to have been trusted with the stories of those impacted by the ongoing delay over the victims’ pension, along with those excluded from that redress scheme.
The Troubles pension has been estimated to cost between £100m and £800m depending on whose calculations you’re working off.
Where that money is coming from remains unresolved, as Westminster say Stormont has to foot the bill and our local executive rightly point out that this is impossible given current budget constraints.
Looking at that in greater depth I’ve been talking to people, many of whom will be excluded completely from the scheme. Not because they were injured by their own actions and not because they were convicted of any offence either before or after their injury.
Those issues have already been dealt with by Westminster legislation and more recently a High Court ruling.
A High Court judge ruled in the case taken by Jennifer McNern that the Executive Office was deliberately stymieing the commencement of pension payouts in order to pressurise the government into funding it and, in Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill's case, getting the eligibility criteria changed.
Those who served a prison sentence of 30 months or longer will have to go in front of a judge-led panel and make a case to be awarded the pension.
The pension scheme was originally only intended for those who suffered severe and life changing physical injuries.
Those who lost limbs or their sight, or who suffered injuries that have left them in a lifetime of pain and are the very visual casualties of our conflict.
We can see their injuries and that makes understanding their suffering easier to empathise with.
They need and deserve their pension, and that should happen at the next available opportunity as was ruled in the High Court last month in the scathing judgment by Mr Justice McAlinden.
The primary legislation passed in Westminster ruled out anyone whose injuries were caused by their own actions, therefore removing the handful of ‘hard cases’ that is not going to change and now only serves as a distraction.
However, the criteria was changed by Westminster to include PTSD, which will open the scheme up to many more people than originally intended, including first responders and members of the police and army who attended scenes.
But it excludes ‘secondary victims’, meaning those who didn’t witness the event that claimed the lives of their loved one.
The mainly female bereaved victims who were not at the scene at the time.
We can’t see the psychological injuries they suffered, their burning scars are hidden inside and remain a barrier to healing our society as generational trauma is passed down to the next generation.
For the widows, the children, the mothers who suffered life changing and life debilitating trauma their fight goes on.
And so once again we have victim being pitted against victim, trauma measured in terms of who was at the scene and who wasn’t.
The Consultative Group on the Past, also known as the Eames/Bradley report, dealt with the issue of the bereaved in 2007 in a comprehensive look at legacy that fell at the first hurdle.
The report proposed the nearest relative of someone who died as a result of the conflict should receive a one-off ex-gratia recognition payment of £12,000.
While that doesn’t recognise the suffering of families with multiple siblings it does accept that the bereaved deserve recognition.
There are groups such as Relatives for Justice who are raising this issue but in the main it has been lost amongst the recent rhetoric over who is and isn’t deemed worthy.
Last weekend, while I was in a supermarket shopping, I received a call from a person who lost a brother in the most horrendous circumstances.
As I walked around the shop on a Saturday afternoon, we talked and talked some more, about the impact on their family’s life, the devastation of constantly reliving the murder of a much cherished loved one and the failure politically to properly heal this place after a conflict that has damaged so many of us internally, irreparably.
It was a conversation I’ve had many times, with many people, but my location, doing an everyday task while a person on the other side of the phone struggled so badly with their everyday life somehow hammered home how neglectful our ‘peace’ has been of victims and survivors.
All they wanted was that I help tell their brother’s story, so that people will remember his name and know he loved and was loved and that there be official recognition that his death was wrong.
It doesn’t sound like much, does it?
Official acceptance that wrong was done and that people suffered as a result.
A sorry, an acknowledgement, a token gesture.
Is that not something that we can all agree on?
