The extraordinary scandal surrounding the Post Office’s faulty Horizon IT system is beginning to get the similarly extraordinary response it demands.
Between 1999 and 2015, around 700 subpostmasters and subpostmistresses - including in Northern Ireland - were prosecuted by the Post Office on the basis of data which made it look as if they were stealing from the organisation.
Reputations were destroyed and family businesses ruined. Many attempted to cover the shortfall in their accounts from their own savings, leaving them destitute. Some went to prison.
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The coldly aggressive manner in which the Post Office pursued these innocent victims of the vastly expensive Fujitsu computer system which it knew to be riddled with bugs and errors was breathtakingly callous.
It chose to systematically target pillars of the community as if they had been collectively seized by criminality, when it ought to have admitted that the dodgy Horizon software was to blame.
How an organisation which had for centuries occupied a central place of trust and dependability allowed itself to fall so far may never be satisfactorily answered.
To date a small number of subpostmasters and subpostmistresses have managed to have their convictions overturned and although a public inquiry began in February 2021, the scandal has largely remained peripheral to public discourse.
It took an ITV drama broadcast over Christmas, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, to trigger a wave of outrage.
That led to prime minister Rishi Sunak’s welcome announcement on Wednesday that the government will legislate to exonerate and compensate victims.
This means parliament will be bypassing the courts - a highly unusual step, which many will fully agree is justified to address what Mr Sunak has called “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history”.
Few will argue that the government is correct to take such drastic action. It does, however, further highlight the perversity of its legacy legislation. It has been designed to offer immunity to perpetrators and end Troubles civil cases and inquests, while the Post Office scheme aims to achieve the opposite result, by exonerating the innocent who were nonetheless found guilty.
The Post Office legislation won’t automatically apply in Northern Ireland - justice is devolved, so is another victim of the DUP’s Stormont boycott - but the government has undertaken to extend the scheme “as quickly as possible”. It needs to urgently provide more detail about how it will do this.
