Three hundred apologies about killings, bombings or actions during the Troubles are held in an archive in Queen’s University Belfast by a team who has looked for nearly a decade at the role they can play in dealing with past harms. “Some were terrible, some were essentially excuses,” said Prof Kieran McEvoy, who leads the Apologies, Abuses and Dealing with the Past project, along with Dr Anna Bryson and Prof Anne-Marie McAlinden.
A few “gold star” past offerings hold pride of place and are the ones most cited in the decades afterwards by academics – especially the carefully constructed statements from loyalist paramilitaries in October 1994 when they announced their ceasefire. Everything for that moment was carefully prepared, unusually so: the words uttered by the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster Defence Association and the Red Hand Commando had been through dozens of draft