In the period between Christmas and New Year archives in both Belfast and Dublin are opened and documents are declassified. This regularly reveals some of the creative thinking which has been expended on the Northern Ireland problem over the years.

Suggestions have included staging an Old Firm duel between Rangers and Celtic in Belfast prior to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and have the Glasgow teams play in the opposing side’s kits.  Relocating millions of Hong Kong citizens to the province ahead of its transfer to China was an example of blue sky thinking mooted in the Thatcher era. Such was the quagmire of Ulster, politicians and their advisors would regularly grasp for the surreal.

The families of a whole host of terrorists would be entitled to this bonus on account of having a familial bad apple

A recent missive from the victims and survivors commission – one of the jumble of organisations set up post-1998 to act as guardians of the peace process flame – which was released over the festive period would be a fitting addition to that canon were it not so pernicious. In a paper presented by the commission to Northern Ireland’s slumbering devolved executive, it recommended that bereavement payments should be made to relatives of those killed during the Troubles. Amazingly, the commission has suggested that this also should include the families of those who were paramilitaries.

Ian Jeffers, the victims’ commissioner, damned his own recommendations with copious understatement when he said they could prove ‘contentious’. Under his organisation’s proposal, the family of Thomas Begley, an IRA bomber who was killed alongside nine other people when a bomb he planted in a fishmongers on Belfast’s Shankill Road detonated in 1993, would be entitled to a slice of the peace dividend pie. The families of a whole host of other terrorists from the Ulster Volunteer Force to the Irish National Liberation Army would be entitled to this unexpected bonus on account of having a familial bad apple.

Many in the mainland United Kingdom believe that Northern Ireland is a financial black hole. A perception has built up over the years of Home Counties’ hard earned being thrown into a void of peace walls, buying off paramilitaries through suspect community initiatives and a bloated public sector.

This will do little to change that view. For example, if bereavement payments of £50,000 were awarded regularly, this scheme would require funding of £650 million. An incredible amount, given the amount of bellyaching from the Stormont political class about the state of Northern Ireland’s finances.

This goes beyond money, though, into the realms of morality. Classing the perpetrators of these crimes as victims sits alongside ‘on the run’ letters and de-facto amnesties in an increasing trend of sanitising what occurred in Northern Ireland during that period.

It sullies the past to suggest someone like Begley, the Shankill Bomber, was somehow a victim, and should be held in the same category as the civilians he killed while they were out on a weekend shopping trip. It also distorts the future, by emboldening those who seek to rationalise and legitimise the actions of terrorists for their own present political aims.

Many worthy voices will opine and offer hack psychoanalysis about terrorists being victims in their own right, victims of the society they were born into. Yet, in the real world, nobody would ever sincerely suggest that the relatives of a drunk driver who mowed down a family should get a state stipend and that the driver, was, deep down, somehow a victim themselves.

Politically, economically and socially, Northern Ireland is still counting the cost of that violent period of time; the stubbornly high levels of antidepressant use afflicting the place is testament to that. It is right that the victims of crimes which took place during the Troubles are recognised and supported. However, that must be done without those who created the victims in the first place being whitewashed and, years later, being tacitly rewarded for their deeds.