NORTHERN IRELAND’S future should not be sacrificed “on the altar of its troubled past”, Ian Paisley junior told the audience at a political panel discussion on the Falls Road last night.
“Let’s stop kidding ourselves. We are never going to believe in each other’s versions of the truth. And I think it’s about time that we moved on,” he said.
Answering a question from the floor on how Irish society should go about dealing with its past he replied: “The cost of doing any inquiry is going to go into hundreds of millions of pounds, and I don’t actually believe it’s actually going to get us any further.”
The north Antrim MP was following in the footsteps of other unionist politicians, like Jeffrey Donaldson and Nelson McCausland, who have made the journey into the traditionally republican area to take part in the West Belfast Talks Back event.
Joining him on the panel were Irish Timescolumnist Fintan O'Toole, east Belfast MP Naomi Long, and Sinn Féin's west Tyrone assembly member, Barry McElduff.
The night was hosted by BBC presenter Yvette Shapiro. Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams also attended.
Ms Long said that what was needed was “a comprehensive strategy for dealing with the past”, as opposed to the “piecemeal approach” taken up to now.
Disagreeing with Mr Paisley’s reference to the prohibitive costs of a process of truth and reconciliation, Mr O’Toole said that the reason for the astronomical price of the Saville Inquiry was lawyers.
In explaining why such a process was absolutely vital for “the whole island”, he referred to the fact that young children, who had never lived during the conflict, had recently travelled up from Dublin to throw rocks and stones and petrol bombs at police.
“They did that because they have bought into an already mythologised version of what the conflict was. It’s really important that there is a proper account of the conflict, which is impartial, of what happened to each and every one of these individuals, that does not allow the obscenity of their deaths to be mythologised into a rhetoric that somebody is going to use again in future.”