Three NI sub-postmasters get £1.8m payout

“They lived under the cloud of tarnished reputations for years, and separately experienced devastating damage resulting from the miscarriage of justice,” he added.

Mr Madden added that while the redress payments are “greatly welcomed”, it does not undo the damage done.

Those who received payments include a woman from the Craigavon area who was convicted of false accounting, a woman from mid-Down who was convicted of theft and a Belfast man who was convicted of theft and false accounting.

Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of former sub-postmasters were wrongly convicted on the basis of incorrect data from a faulty IT system called Horizon, which was developed by Japanese company Fujitsu.

The software made it appear that money was missing from Post Office branches when in reality no thefts had occurred.

In 2017, a group of 555 sub-postmasters took legal action against the Post Office and in 2019, it agreed to pay them £58m in compensation.

A law quashing the wrongful convictions of sub-postmasters was introduced last year, and victims were offered compensation under the Horizon Convictions Redress Scheme.