BELFAST — Investigations into hundreds of bitterly disputed killings from Northern Ireland’s conflict could be reopened under a wide-ranging agreement published Friday by the British and Irish governments.

Standing side by side, Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn and Irish Foreign Minister Simon Harris announced joint plans to create what, until now, has proved impossible — a fact-finding pathway for families scarred by bombings and shootings to find out, finally, who was to blame.

The two leaders said the main goal was to help families finally get answers from a combination of new investigations, testimony from witnesses or participants in attacks, and reviews of long-secret government records.

“Our shared duty is to ensure that trauma does not pass to another generation,” Harris said at the joint press conference with Benn at the U.K. secretary’s official Hillsborough Castle residence outside Belfast.

The Legacy of the Troubles agreement covers the entire three decades of bloodshed over Northern Ireland that claimed more than 3,600 lives before the U.S.-mediated Good Friday peace accord of 1998. That death toll includes nearly 250 people killed in bombings and shootings in England and the Republic of Ireland.

While ceasefires by the rival Irish Republican Army and so-called “loyalist” paramilitary gangs have largely held since the mid-1990s, veterans of those outlawed groups have refused to come forward to admit their role in specific atrocities. Their steely silence reflects, in part, a desire to avoid imprisonment for admitting crimes, as well as the risk that their victims could use any confessions to sue them for damages. The Provisional IRA, in particular, imposes a code of omerta — silence — on its members.

No immunity

The strengthened fact-finding body being proposed in Friday’s plans, to be called the Legacy Commission, will not, however, offer conditional amnesties for ex-militants to come forward and tell the truth. That approach would have opened reputational dangers for both governments — because those militants might finally reveal the extent of their collusion with police, soldiers and intelligence puppet-masters.

A range of British and Irish anti-terrorist agencies recruited and directed agents within all of the illegal groups — and, some victims’ groups contend, played a leading role in deciding who lived and died while maintaining their agents’ cover. The plans published Friday leave unclear the extent to which the new Legacy Commission will pursue investigations into allegations of state collusion with terrorists.

It’s a can of worms that the U.K.’s previous Conservative government tried to bury for good with its own, unilateral Legacy Act that ended Troubles-era criminal investigations and judicial inquests. That 2023 law was drafted principally to shield former British soldiers from potential prosecution for decades-old killings.

The Tory plan met universal opposition from all Northern Ireland parties and still faces a European lawsuit filed by the Republic of Ireland, which represents the interests of Irish nationalists north of the border. The Council of Europe condemned it, too.

As part of Friday’s agreement, Benn and Harris stressed that new criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits would remain live options alongside new, strengthened fact-finding bodies overseen by judges.

That’s a difference from the approach originally envisaged in the Conservatives’ 2023 legislation. The fact-finding panel, officially formed last year, would have been empowered to offer former militants immunity from prosecution or civil lawsuit in exchange for sufficiently honest, revealing confessions to their victims. But a Belfast court quickly shot down that central immunity concept as illegal.

Benn said offering immunity to ex-terrorists could never have won sufficient public support and “caused great pain and anguish to many people in Northern Ireland.” Any evidence uncovered by the Legacy Commission could be used for potential criminal cases in the future, he said.

Equal partners

Another key contrast between Friday’s intergovernmental pact and the previous Conservative legislation is that this plan is being billed as an equal partnership between London and Dublin — mirroring the level of trust and cooperation that delivered the Good Friday breakthrough.

Harris called it “a night-and-day improvement” over the Tories’ legislation.

Harris said his government has committed to providing previously off-limits access to its own records of Troubles atrocities. It will establish a dedicated  investigatory unit to support this work at the Dublin headquarters of Ireland’s national police force, the Garda Síochána.

Friday’s commitments will require enabling legislation to be passed in Dublin as well as London, which will take several weeks at least. The Irish government is expected to drop its lawsuit against the U.K. as part of this process.

Any Legacy Commission investigations will avoid duplicating the work of existing civil and criminal probes, including a fact-finding commission exploring the Real IRA car bombing of Omagh in 1998 and the murder trial of a British soldier involved in the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972.