Editorial: Jon Boutcher doubles down on his legacy demands and his criticisms

​Last month a former Presbyterian moderator wrote to this newspaper (click here to read him), challenging a BBC report that said that Michelle O’Neill had apologised after the Kenova report.

The report had called for an apology from the “republican leadership” for the IRA’s “abduction, torture and murder” of agents.

Rev Normal Hamilton pointed out that the first minister’s expression of regret "for every single loss of life" was not an apology, yet the BBC was reporting online that it was (the BBC story still uses that word, click here to to read it). Rev Hamilton wrote that “these words fall far short of any credible understanding of what an apology is”.

It was good therefore to hear the SDLP MP Claire Hanna say yesterday in Westminster to the NI Affairs Committee, to which the Kenova author Jon Boutcher was giving evidence, that "I thought the Sinn Fein vice-president's remarks were very inadequate, insufficient and non-specific."

But while it is important to expose SF’s slippery language it was quite wrong for Mr Boutcher to call for apologies in his report into the handling of the IRA informant ‘Stakeknife’ and all the more so to demand that the UK government do so alongside the political representatives of the IRA.

Regrettably, the PSNI chief constable chose yesterday’s hearings to double down on his criticism of prosecutors in NI, albeit he did so in a long-winded way that appeared to be friendly – when it wasn’t.

This all comes on top of his contemptible claim that the running of Stakeknife cost lives, rather than saved them. So again it needs to be said clearly that prosecutions of state forces for their handling of Stakeknife, a symbol of their overall stunning success in penetrating the IRA murder machine and bringing its terror campaign to a close, saving many lives, would be outrageous, as would be any apology at Mr Boutcher’s behest.