and restorative justice

For me the final paragraph has the most to reflect on:
" haven’t forgiven anyone, because I have no one to forgive. No one was charged with this crime, and so for me forgiveness is still an abstract concept. But if I knew that the people who sent my bomb were now prisoners in themselves, then I’d happily unlock the gates – although I’d like to know that they weren’t going to make any more bombs."
There is clearly something here about the need to feel that some kind of repentance has taken place, that there is an admission of wrongdoing and that in so doing there is some kind of commitment to not repeating the wrong. I'm not sure from this how conditional Fr Michael is being in his feeling towards forgiveness and I'm not saying that it would necessarily be wrong to be conditional since this is partly what I'm trying to get my head and my guts around ... I know that I have felt similarly about wrongs done to me in the past: that I find it easier to forgive if I know that there is repentance of some kind; now why is that? I guess some of it may be that unrepentance would seem malicious; the refusal to recognise that harm had been caused and damage done or the justification of it in the name of a supposed greater-good that I do not acknowledge to be a greater good or even if I did to cause me to sacrifice without my consent. All of those seem wrong and to forgive might seem to condone or to agree with the wrongdoing. I certainly know people who have refused to forgive where they believed that in so doing their hurt would go unrecognised and the wrong would be condoned in some way....

Michael goes on to say: " I believe in restorative justice and I believe in reparation. So my attitude to the perpetrator is this: I’ll forgive you, but since I’ll never get my hands back, and will therefore always need someone to help me, you should pay that person’s wages. Not as a condition of forgiveness, but as part of reparation and restitution."
There's some interesting question her about forgiveness and justice. SOme versions of forgiveness would surely be about not seeking reparation but simply letting the offender go free, so to speak. I think I need to think more about the relationship between forgiveness and reparation. I am very warm to the ideas of restorative justice. Perhaps my unease at this part of what Michael says is that is seems to make forgiveness dependent on performance and so keeping the offended person potentially in thrall to the perpetrator's lack of response for as long as they don't make reparation. But we need to be able to move on. I suspect he isn't actually proposing that, given what he says in the first part of his piece about becoming a victor not just a survivor. But it is easy to see how the conditional forgiveness couold creep in -which is not forgiveness in the sense that it is a seeking of some kind of revenge?

I don't know; this area of it I find quite perplexing....