People in the North who have struggled to remake their lives and some who are still consumed by grief and craving for justice and vengeance will stand up in public over the next couple of months and tell audiences what they think, writes Fionnuala O Connor
There are some who want that opportunity, others for whom the idea is gall and wormwood.
The organisers - former Church of Ireland primate Lord Eames and former Catholic priest Denis Bradley - know well the range of opinion. But to judge from the histories of the many "victims" groups, these planned meetings might just reach a few more of those silenced and frustrated as time marches on from the violent past. It may well be their only merit.
The Eames-Bradley effort is the latest official attempt to process the human wreckage of the Troubles. Despite the obvious earnestness of those involved, the suspicion is that Peter Hain's direct rule administration appointed the two men and their group largely in the hope that the exercise would help exhaust demands for reinvestigations and further public inquiries.
Listening to the bereaved and wounded is only one facet of their brief. They have met, among others, the former police chief who four years ago produced a lengthy but still largely secret report into paramilitary-security force collusion, Lord Stevens. They have also met the Historical Enquiries Team, tasked, though only minimally funded, to work its way through all the Troubles' deaths of 30 years and, supposedly, decide where there are grounds for further investigation and prosecution.
Some would say that what Stevens and HET have in common is the sense of officialdom pushed into setting up inquiries, then closing off investigation when the conclusions are, or look likely to be, embarrassing.
Postponing the deadline for submission of ideas until late January and the promise of public meetings keeps up the Eames-Bradley sense of engagement. The announcement came in the wake of the murder of Paul Quinn, beaten to death, his family says, by republicans, and shortly before Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams spoke at a meeting in Canary Wharf, scene of a bombing back in 1996 which killed the two owners of a newspaper kiosk, Inan Ul-haq Bashir and John Jeffries, injured hundreds but merely shook up the fledgling peace process.
Adams arrived at Canary Wharf at the invitation of Colin and Wendy Parry. An IRA bomb in 1993 killed their 12-year-old son Tim and three-year-old Johnathan Ball near their homes in Warrington, Lancashire.
The Sinn Féin leader's apology to the Parrys - also made at an earlier point - and his praise for the "foundation for peace" established in the names of both children is the kind of speech that many hear only as crass or hypocritical.
Colin Parry's declaration that meeting Adams was a vital step towards reconciliation, though he could not forgive the IRA, will on past form be derided by some as an impossible ambition.
A number of groups which speak for victims of violence and for some of the bereaved maintain that reconciliation is never possible with murderers or those who ordered murder. There must be punishment of the guilty, they say.
But it has become painfully clear that many of the guilty in all directions will never be punished.
The recent inquest on Eamon Collins, battered to death near his home in Newry after a long personal crusade against former associates in the IRA, held out little hope that his killers would ever face trial. Nuala O'Loan retires next week as the first Police Ombudsman.
Her latest report uncovered no evidence that Gerard and Rory Cairns, two young Catholics shot in their home by loyalists four years ago, were killed with security force collusion, as their family believes. The report did excoriate the RUC handling of the investigation as sloppy and prematurely concluded. What happened next perhaps leaves the most damaging impact, however: records destroyed wholesale because of asbestos contamination. The family, not surprisingly, is dissatisfied.
There are so many cases where nobody has been convicted, and never will be. Some think investigation was limited in the first place to protect police agents and hide collusion. Others think the lack of prosecution is aimed at protecting republicans now in government from retribution for their paramilitary pasts.
Prosecutions might not need vast expenditure, of course, if there was an outbreak of honesty from the British but also the Irish government about the doings of their security services, their prosecution authorities, and the political direction of successive administrations. It would take self-incrimination from senior figures in Sinn Féin, loyalists from all the many paramilitaries, former Official Republicans, soldiers and police who served at ground level, and those who were in charge of intelligence and of operations.
But this is real life, and public hearings and groups which at least ventilate grief and anger may be the best accounting possible for the bad decades.