Former Church of Ireland primate Lord Eames has urged sceptics about the Consultative Group on the Past to judge the body on its final report in the summer and not on "untrue reports and speculation".
Lord Eames said in Ballymena, Co Antrim, last night that the group was set the "almost impossible task" to "move out of the darkness" of the years of the Troubles.
He insisted suggestions that the group had already written an interim report and had recommended an amnesty for everyone implicated in the conflict were untrue. Equally, the suggestion that the group wanted to characterise the Troubles as a "war" was untrue. He said the group should be judged on its final report due in the summer.
The meeting in the Tullyglass House Hotel in Ballymena, which is one of six being held in Northern Ireland this week, was attended by about 50 people. Local unionist councillor Deirdre Nelson said in "no way" could the conflict be described as a war. "This was a dirty terrorist campaign carried out against my community by people whose main intention was to bomb us back into the stone age", she said.
Ms Nelson said that if the conflict were a war, then IRA members, who were "primarily" responsible for the Troubles, should "be brought to The Hague and tried for war crimes".
SDLP Assembly member Declan O'Loan said he supported the attempt to address the past because it was the only "chance of finding healing in this society".
In addition to victims directly affected by the violence, he believed the whole of society was damaged by the Troubles and "we need a return from those who perpetrated that upon us".
Mr O'Loan said the role of the British state in the conflict must also be confronted by the group, as well as the role of the "combatant groups". The key was to try and achieve reconciliation and that required "an acknowledgement and an apology from those responsible for the violence".
Robin Sterling, another Ballymena unionist councillor, said he did not have faith in the group, and neither did the Protestant people in Northern Ireland in general. He believed the members were selected because they were perceived as "politically correct" and because they would produce a report that would "sanitise terrorism".
A man whose brother was killed in the Teebane massacre by the IRA said he believed members of the group had privately floated the idea of an amnesty which, if it happened, would be a "victory for the IRA".
Hugh Rowan, who spoke from a wheelchair, said he was "shot like a dog" in August 1972 and had survived due to the great work of surgeons.
