Your chance to comment

This is Slugger O’Toole’s new consultative website, offering you the chance to comment on the detail of the recently-published Report of the Consultative Group on the Past. It is intended to start a wider civic conversation on this issue.

You can get straight into commenting on this now. The first chapter is here, and the rest of it is in the sidebar. 

What you can do now:

• Look at the links on the left - each chapter has a number of subheadings
• If you have a comment to make - or more importantly, if you have evidence or information that may materially effect this report, you can add it by finding the relevant chapter using the menu on the left - and using the comments form
• All comments will be subject to moderation and we reserve the right to delete or edit comments that don’t meet the standards that Slugger O’Toole would expect to have applied to a report of this gravity

Remember - play the ball and not the man. If you have something to say - some evidence that you believe to be relevant - then post it here. We expect commenters to deal with the substance of this report, and the comments left by others. This exercise will only work if we stick to these rules.

We are aiming to provide the the Consultative Group with a round-up of your comments and evidence, and we’re looking at other ways that Slugger O’Toole can illustrate the issues raised here in a way that can improve the conversation.

Alternatively, if you want to you can look at the printable PDF format from the Consultative Group’s website which can be seen in full here.

The Eames-Bradley Report - Press reactions

A fortnight on, rage is still the story, much of it voiced by politicians who lost nobody to violence. - The Irish Times

 

It is not amusing at all, of course, given the painful emotions involved. But you would still need a heart of stone not to laugh when a row breaks out at a reconciliation event. Squabbling scenes at the launch of the Eames-Bradley proposals recalled the line from Dr Strangelove: “You can’t fight in here. This is the war room.” - Irish News

 

The political responses were fairly predictable. The DUP cannot afford to be outflanked by Jim Allister and his Traditional Unionist Voice and this is one issue which could serve to do just that. So a raft of DUP ministers took to the air to condemn the Eames/Bradley report. - Irish News

 

It does nothing to heal the wounds of Northern Ireland. Instead, it picks at the scabs, and rubs salt into the wounds, and makes the brutal past live again. - Daily Mirror

 

…the natural urge to discriminate between perpetrator and victim of violence, so richly denied by this proposal, is a very necessary one. The loyalist UVF terrorist Lenny Murphy, for example, who led the infamous Shankill Butchers gang, certainly deserves “recognition”, but only as a psychopathic killer who spread untold misery. - Sunday Telegraph

 

…as experience shows, partial disclosure of the truth of the past is not only less than satisfactory, it is also highly amenable to political manipulation. By those lights, Bradley and Eames’s sincere effort to draw the bitter poison of the past to the fore are doomed when so much of it will remain partially hidden. - Slugger O’Toole

 

By allowing this one negative recommendation to overshadow the other 29 they have distracted attention from their over-arching theme: that what the people of Northern Ireland need is recognition, not in the form of a financial settlement, but in the provision of a non-adversarial platform from which their stories can be told and the truth, as far as possible, established. - Scotland on Sunday

 

Despite what Lord Eames and Denis Bradley may say about the need to unravel the past, the reality is that, for pragmatic political reasons, such an unravelling is simply impossible. In the meantime, what the Eames/Bradley report is offering is both a subterfuge and a substitution for a Truth Commission. - Sunday Business Post