On Wednesday, Northern Ireland will be offered the equivalent of a “bad bank” to carry the unpaid debts of history. A Legacy Commission will be proposed to take care of the toxic inheritance of the Troubles and to allow the other institutions of state to get on with business.

The cost of dealing with the past will be borne by central government. That is why Gordon Brown, who must sign the cheques, was briefed on what was involved last Thursday by Lord Eames and Denis Bradley, whose consultative group on the past will publish its report this week.

The two have impressive credentials. Eames is a former Church of Ireland primate and an able negotiator who has acted as a troubleshooter for church and state for many years. Bradley is a multi-faceted former priest from Donegal; a former deputy chair of the Policing Board and a mediator between the British government and the Provisional IRA.

The “bad bank” idea helped Sweden through a financial crisis in the 1990s.

It required all of the country’s banks to own up to the full extent of their dodgy loans. Then the state put these debts in a “bad bank”, allowing the others to be refloated on the market. It wasn’t cheap but it was worth it, because while the bad bank processed the poison, the rest of the financial system was able to carry on with virtually a clean sheet.

In Northern Ireland the weight of the Troubles resembles a toxic debt. It cannot be wished away and it is poisoning everything. It didn’t leave a legacy of suffering only for those who were bereaved or injured. The bitter, disputed narrative is a drag on everyone. It is a blight on young people who must make sense of the uncertain myths handed down to them. It is a black hole of money and resources.

So far the means of dealing with it have been expensive, time-consuming and ineffective. Often they have revolved around the courts and police, whose methods, now that the trails on the 2,000-plus unsolved murders have grown cold, are producing diminishing returns. At one stage judicial inquiries were assumed to be the gold standard, giving victims their day in court and ripping aside the mask of official and paramilitary secrecy. The Bloody Sunday tribunal, impeccably conducted as it was, ended that theory.

When he announced it in 1998, Tony Blair set aside more than £10m (€10.6m) to cover the costs and thought it would be over in a few years. A decade later it still hasn’t reported and has racked up costs approaching £200m as it struggles to reconcile the differing accounts of 2,500 people who witnessed half an hour of mayhem 36 years ago.

Three ongoing inquiries into the disputed murders of Rosemary Nelson (a human rights lawyer), Robert Hamill (battered to death near a police van) and Billy Wright (a loyalist terrorist killed in prison) are supposed to be cheaper and more effective but so far have cost more than £70m. The Historical Enquiries Team (HET), a police unit reviewing over 3,200 Troubles deaths at a cost of £34m, has laid off staff due to a £1.5m funding shortfall.

The HET is a massive drain on the police budget at a time when there is a shortage of detectives and more and more current crimes go unsolved. The Police Ombudsman has also complained about the huge slice of financial resources and investigators’ time it must assign to researching historic cases where security-force collusion is alleged.

Not only is there no equity or fairness in this piecemeal treatment of the past, there is often precious little to show for it either. Money doesn’t bring results. In fact, the cheapest outfits — the HET and Police Ombudsman — have been the most productive. Yet the disparity in spending and attention between different cases has left many of the bereaved believing that there is a hierarchy of victims and they are at the bottom of it.

The problem is that the vast majority of killings and non-lethal attacks during the Troubles were unsolved. Security forces who colluded with terrorists have covered their tracks and destroyed the records. From the early 1970s onwards, paramilitary groups were well schooled in the police’s forensic and interrogation strategies. They had good alibis and left few clues. Proof to the level that will satisfy the criminal courts is seldom available, especially at this remove in time.

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