Presbyterian General Assembly:Inquiries taking place in Northern Ireland into past events could "destabilise the future" and should be shut down "straight away", one of the most respected Irish clergymen said yesterday.
"Maybe in 50 years' time, we can have a look at them," he said.
Addressing the Presbyterian General Assembly in Belfast, the Rev Dr John Dunlop said the Bloody Sunday inquiry, the Billy Wright inquiry, which had just begun, and those proposed into the deaths of solicitors Pat Finucane, Rosemary Nelson, and Robert Hamill were "very unsatisfactory" ways of dealing with the past. They, along with a proposed inquiry into the death in the Republic of Lord Justice Gibson and his wife, had arisen from recommendations in the Cory report, compiled by a Canadian judge who had "no competence where the political implications of his recommendations" were concerned, Dr Dunlop said.
The UK government, however, had decided "in a thoroughly spineless way" to carry out whatever the judge recommended. So the inquires were set up, apart from that into the Gibson deaths, which did not take place at the request of the family.
Dr Dunlop quoted from an address by the former ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Senator Maurice Hayes, at Magee University in Derry on Monday.
Senator Hayes had said: "The general political will that the institutions should be made to work [ and] should be allowed to do so could easily be frustrated if we insist on picking at old wounds, raising old ghosts, revive old animosities and suspicions and most of all shattering the burgeoning trust which is a prerequisite for peaceful co-existence and co-operation."
He had also said the Bloody Sunday inquiry would not uncover the definitive truth surrounding the killing of 14 people on a civil rights march in Derry in January 1972 and that its £188 million cost could have been put to better use. Reflecting on the logic of current thinking in Northern Ireland where such inquiries were concerned, the Senator had asked "if Bloody Sunday, why not inquiries for every other atrocity beginning at Abercorn and ending at Omagh?"
In his address to the assembly yesterday, Dr Dunlop also noted "the vast number of murders not being inquired into at all". Meanwhile, the Police Ombudsman continued to investigate the past activities of the RUC, he said.
He said he would take as an example what happened in the Republic after the civil war. "They closed ranks and said, 'let's see if we can get on together'," he said. It had led to stability. "I would shut down these inquiries straight away," he said.
l At the General Assembly yesterday, it was decided after a lengthy debate not to sell Church House in Belfast, rescinding a decision made in 2004. The vote was 332-234.
The decision to rescind was made at last year's assembly, but had to be repeated this year to have effect, according to church rules.