SOMETIMES, what seems unpalatable can be swallowed for the common good.

Yet there are occasions when a suggestion offends against all notions of natural justice, and should therefore not be acted upon. The possible payment of compensation to the families of terrorists is one such case. At present, this is only a recommendation – which is how it should remain. The idea may work as a piece of cold theory, but once it is exposed to the human realities of the situation, it collapses.

Northern Ireland’s Consultative Group On The Past has come up with this proposal as a seemingly even-handed way to compensate all victims of the Troubles. This may make a strange sort of sense when seen as a piece of cold bureaucracy, but it falls down when set against real individual cases of loss.

The parents of Glenn Goodman, the North Yorkshire Special Constable who was shot by Paul “Mad Dog” Magee, are rightly outraged by what they regard as a shameful idea.

Their reaction is natural in parents who lost a loved son to the actions of an IRA terrorist, even though Magee was not tried as such in the Goodman case. Indeed, his intentions on that fateful day on the A64 near Tadcaster have never been fully understood.

Mr Goodman’s father, Brian, supports the idea of compensating genuine victims of terrorism, although he had no idea whether his son’s widow and son would benefit from any such scheme. But he is correct to say that it would be plain wrong to compensate the families of terrorists.

Selby MP John Grogan, whose backing for the early release of IRA prisoners in the late 1990s brought him into conflict with the Goodmans, is fully backing their cause this time. Such a scheme would, as Mr Grogan suggests, open old wounds rather than heal them.