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Good morning and welcome to the Independent Republic of Mike Graham right here on talk radio.

The weather might be freezing again this morning, but there's plenty of hot news out there to talk about and debate, as you would expect from the home of common sense.

First up this morning, I'm delighted to announce that the disgraceful case against two former paratroopers has collapsed over in Belfast.

They were accused of the murder of an IRA terrorist,

who himself was guilty of killing 15 soldiers in a case dating all the way back to 1972,

when Joe McCann was shot three times at a British Army checkpoint after he resisted arrest from the RUC.

This morning, the former Veterans Minister Johnny Mercer has called the prosecutions of

Soldier A and Soldier C, both men in their 70s, by the way, an appalling national scandal.

And he's now hopeful that a series of other cases will now be dropped for lack of evidence.

There could be as many as 200 other veterans who served in Northern Ireland during the

troubles who are now in some way being found to have

been wanting in terms of how they behave, how they conducted themselves and what they did.

Johnny Mercer, of course, resigned from amid claims that the government had failed in its duty

to protect these brave men who had simply put their lives on the line for their country

during those troubles and to be dragged through the courts 50 years afterwards is nothing short of an abomination.

Boris Johnson should fix this problem and fix it now because it's another stain on the way

that this government has not kept its promises to the very people who it relied upon

to calm the troubled waters of Northern Ireland during a very, very difficult time and a very turbulent era.

We'll be asking commentator and embarrassed to Bobby Friedman why things went so far in the judicial system following the Good Friday Agreement being signed in 1998,

which of course led to many IRA terrorists being released to walk the streets of Ireland quite freely.

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