The British Army is renowned for its exhausting bureaucracy, every form filled out in tripilicate and filed away in offices bunged full of filing cabinets. What a surprise then to discover that the Ministry of Defence has ‘lost’ the personnel records identifying the soldiers involved in the Ballymurphy massacre of August 1971, when British paratroopers gunned down eleven civilians.

In this important article in the current edition of An Phoblacht, the SF paper’s editor John Hedges discloses that not only have these vital records gone AWOL but a member of the inquest staff has been re-assigned to another post, meaning that his learned knowledge has gone with him. Meanwhile the coroner’s office has been told by the PSNI that the resources available for historical inquiries are ‘finite’, a veiled warning that money may be cut off to the Ballymurphy investigation.

All this is in sharp contrast to the resources…