THE director of the Northern Ireland Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, Mr Dave Wall, has said the peace process has suffered because no one is prepared to take risks on the release of prisoners.
At his organisation's annual meeting yesterday, he said that if the question "had been seriously addressed and if we had witnessed a more rapid process of prisoner release, that could have made a significant contribution to the overall peace process. "The risk taking involved in such an extreme exercise may have been the correct strategy for tying the conflicting parties into the peace process. Perhaps we are now experiencing the consequences of the failure to take such risks."
