Truth and reconciliation models from around the world are to be examined, but there is no off-the-shelf commission to meet the North's specific requirements, writes Dan Keenan
The British government has made it clear. It wants to plot a course away from Northern Ireland's past because it has a habit of infecting the present and stalling the future.
The trouble is it is not at all sure which point of the compass leads to that future.
Mr Tony Blair said that much last Thursday at his monthly Downing Street press conference.
"I do think it is important that we do try in Northern Ireland to move beyond the past. These things have to be gone into, but we should start to move beyond the past."
Then came the admission: "I do not know whether necessarily a truth and reconciliation commission is the right way to do it, but I think there needs to be some way of trying to both allow people to express their grief, their pain and their anger in respect of what has happened in Northern Ireland without the past continually dominating the present and the future, and that is what we will try to do."
So the search is on for "some way" to tidy up Northern Ireland's post-conflict mess.
Mr Paul Murphy, the Northern Secretary, is to announce the first consultative step in the next few weeks.
However, it is admitted that at present there is no real clue as to what the consultation process will comprise, who precisely will be consulted and how the effort to gauge opinion will be constructed.
Other truth and reconciliation models around the world will be examined, but it is accepted that there is no off-the-shelf commission which would meet the North's specific requirements.
To be fair, monumental jobs such as this have been handed to government officials at Stormont before.
The Patten commission on policing started from a similar point, as did the effort to come up with a structure to address victims' interests.
But, while vagueness exists, there is absolute clarity that both Mr Blair and Mr Murphy cannot continue to be trapped by what went on before.
They have common cause with others in Belfast. Prof Desmond Rea, chairman of the Policing Board, and Mr Hugh Orde, the chief constable, also would like to see the end of the past.
For both the PSNI and the board which runs it, some 1,800 unsolved murders over 30 years is weighing down efforts to establish a new policing dispensation.
Last February, Prof Rea called for the British and Irish governments "to discharge their rightly duty, and to immediately establish a commission which would deliberate on the past, and consult with the Northern Ireland community, \ make proposals to government as to a more constructive way forward".
Mr Orde concurred: "I think far more people are now realising that without some thoughtful process to deal with history Northern Ireland will find it very difficult to move on.
"My task is quite clear. I have to deliver policing for the present and define policing for the future. What I have said as a police officer is that I know I cannot do that if I have to continue to look backwards. That is not to say history is unimportant - history is directly the opposite."
Sceptics, and there are plenty on this topic, point out that the clamour to establish an as yet unspecified form of truth commission seems to have arisen in direct proportion to the pressure for inquiries into collusion-related murders.
While the British government may well want the IRA and other paramilitaries to admit to what they did and then go away, there is a firm belief in some Northern circles that the British government must also follow its own advice about clarity and closure.
Unless it does that, the argument runs, the British state will continue to maintain an atmosphere in which myth and misconception persist. The past will prove as inescapable as ever.
The IRA and others may indeed hesitate to own up about their roles in the "dirty war", but last week's government announcement on a Finucane inquiry sounded to some ears as if there was no real desire on London's part to come clean either.
It is contended that there is insufficient appetite on the part of this British government to face down elements within the security community and too much of a desire to keep the past under wraps.
Why else would the Cory report have been censored so much, and why would London have given the censored version of it to the Irish Government even though the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, had co-commissioned it?
To borrow a phrase, the past hasn't gone away, you know.
Many fear it may well persist until such times as all feel free to come clean.