DAVID ADAMS: Prof Desmond Rea, chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, and his deputy, Denis Bradley, have suggested that a commission be established in Northern Ireland to consider how we might properly address the issue of victims.
Thank God for a sensible suggestion at last.
Nowadays, with banality lauded as profundity, and "wrong" becoming such an outmoded concept that "right" seems no longer to have any opposite other than "left", I suppose it shouldn't really surprise that we previously adopted an idea that ought to have been afforded no more weight than the inane ramblings of a run-of-the-mill TV agony aunt.
I'm referring to the notion that everyone in Northern Ireland is a victim while, at the same time, we must all share responsibility for what took place here.
This approach may have proved harmless enough if, from the outset, proper boundaries had been established and rigorously maintained.
But of course they weren't, and the line between victimised and victimiser was progressively blurred to the point where they became almost indistinguishable.
The recasting of perpetrators as victims and victims as partial authors of their own misfortune has led us almost to forget there is a profound difference between the two. Of course a society that had already elevated self-absorption and delusion to near art forms didn't need much coaxing to swallow an extra dose of post-rational, non-judgmental nonsense.
For perpetrators especially, being deemed a "victim of circumstance", and thereby entitled to share culpability with all and sundry, had an immediate and obvious attraction.
For the rest of us, picking up a tiny fraction of the tab was a small price to pay for having the legitimacy of our already well-developed sense of victimhood so roundly endorsed. Meanwhile, the actual victims have been left hurt, confused, angry and abandoned.
While the argument raged about an unspoken hierarchy amongst victims, the real absurdity was the lack of any clear distinction between genuine victims and everyone else.
By elevating us all to their status, victims became part of the crowd. Instead of being afforded the special position they deserve, they were relegated to the ordinary. And, to add insult to injury, they were then told they must be prepared to forgive and forget.
They should "draw a line under the past" or, if they couldn't manage that, to at least stop going on about it.
In effect, this demanded that victims either suppress their most fundamental human emotions, or feel guilty about being unable to do so.
But, thankfully, not all victims were prepared to settle for the role of bit players and to go quietly along with the script we so carefully constructed for them.
Not all were prepared to let the rest of us write their loved ones off as mere collateral damage: best forgotten in case proper acknowledgement upset the sensitivities of the peace process or robbed perpetrators of a contrived legitimacy.
The people of Ardoyne, a small working- class nationalist district in north Belfast, decided to publish a book, Ardoyne: The Untold Truth, telling the story of the 99 people from their community who were killed between 1969 and 1998 as a result of the "Troubles".
Some died at the hands of loyalists or the security forces, some on behalf of the IRA or at its hand, and still others because they just happened to be in the "wrong place at the wrong time".
All are given their place in the book.
And, just as important, the people most directly affected by those 99 killings, the relatives and friends of the deceased, get to tell the story of their loss, in their own words and from their own perspective - with anger, frustration and all.
Refreshingly, no effort is made to toe the impossibly ludicrous, semi-official line of "let's forgive and forget, and then we can all live happily ever after". They refused to follow anyone's script but their own.
The world-view of the Ardoyne community is a long way removed from mine, and their truth will certainly not chime with the various truths of others - or, in large part, my own - but it is their truth and, as such, has a perfect right to be heard.
As do the personal stories and truths of all of the victims.
Perhaps now, after Prof Rea's intervention, we will spend less time trying to push victims into the background and a little more on encouraging communities and individuals to come forward to speak openly and honestly of their loss and how it has affected them.
That way, we may just get a little closer to reconciling the future with the past. Trying to pretend that victims don't exist, or that somehow we are all on an equal footing with them is a patent nonsense. It can only build resentment and heap further pain on those who have already suffered enough.
It's time to dump the patronising banalities and remember there is such a thing as wrong - and then accept that we have been doing it by the victims.