Was political failure to compensate deserving victims of the troubles inevitable given the incoherent thinking in the 2006 Victims and Survivors Order?

 There is a clear consensus abroad in Northern Ireland that the 2006 Victims and Survivors Order No. 2953 (N.I.17) permits the terrorist who takes the life of an innocent member of the public to be deemed as much a “victim” as the unwitting individual he or she kills.   The conflation of the innocent and those who terrorised them is achieved through the definition of the term “victim” in section three of the Order.  The Order’s approach to the meaning of “victim” is such that it can apply equally to the innocent citizen who finds herself in the vicinity of a bomb, and to the terrorist who planted it.

This brief essay argues that the meaning of the term “victim” cannot consist in a definition. Moreover, the Order’s…