Northern Ireland
Dail Éireann — 2022-11-22
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Simon Coveney (FG), Cork South-Central

I agree. I have been holding the line on this issue because I believe that not to do so would be to dishonour the commitments we have made to victims on all sides. I have repeatedly said to victims' families that we cannot support legislation that shuts off the opportunity to take a case should there be an evidence base that allows for that to happen in the future. The idea that we would effectively introduce an amnesty so that people who perpetrated awful crimes could potentially talk and write about that, glorify those actions in the future and have no possibility of a case being taken is not protecting victims or helping Northern Ireland to move on into a period of reconciliation. Privately and publicly, I have appealed to the British Government to work with us on this. We will try to accommodate some of its concerns, but it needs to listen to victims in particular.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-11-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:19+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-11-22