A shallow document

First of all, you type it on one side of each sheet; then you provide generous spacing between the lines, and then you give it wide margins. The report is hardly worth the cost of its publication. This report tells us very little that was not already known. The able spokesperson for the Omagh Support and Self-Help Group, Michael Gallagher, who lost his son Aiden in the bombing, has summed it up succinctly: “This report is another narrow-focused report which hasn’t delivered all the answers for the families.” Had the Omagh bombing occurred on mainland Britain, there would have been a Public Inquiry long ago. It was the worst single atrocity in the recent Troubles in which 31 people, including the unborn twins, were massacred, and more than 250 injured, many of them seriously. And as Michael Gallagher correctly maintains, there are many questions still unanswered, such as, for example, what was the precise nature of the advance warnings relayed from the GCHQ at Cheltenham, and could the bombing have been prevented? Such questions remain, especially when intelligence officers who served at the time insist that “More was known than was let on about”! And why was the red Vauxhall Cavalier not followed and intercepted on this side of the border when there was information that it was suspected to have contained a bomb? Moreover, why is it that the incident book, in which threats were recorded, mysteriously went missing from Omagh police station?

Whilst there are questions still to be satisfactorily answered, the number of questions is actually relatively limited, as is the number of persons qualified to answer them. Consequently, a Public Inquiry would not have to take an indeterminate amount of time, nor would it need to be unduly expensive.

After the phone hacking scandal in England, in which no one was killed, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, immediately announced that there would be an inquiry. As a result, the Government then spent over £40 million on it, and another £100 million or so on subsequent legal cases. Whereas the Government has stated that it does not want long and expensive inquiries, it is disingenuous for it to fail to admit that it gets about half the cost back again in the form of taxation from lawyers’ fees.

What is more, the Government has declared that each case for a public inquiry must be judged upon its merits. What, then, could be more worthy of inquiry than a public investigation, at much less cost, into the Omagh bombing? Had the atrocity occurred on mainland Britain, it would undoubtedly have been the Prime Minister who would have been calling for an immediate inquiry, rather than leaving it to a junior Secretary of State like Theresa Villiers to decide whether or not to do so. She thought that the public in Northern Ireland could be fobbed off with the Police Ombudsman’s poor substitute for a Public Inquiry, when it is only such a public inquiry that can get to the bottom of what really happened.

Mrs Villiers’ judgement must be called into question as inadequate and substantially flawed, and it makes it easier to agree with Ann Treneman in her Times column when she referred to Theresa Villiers as being “remarkable only in that she is unremarkable in every way.” Basically, however, she has shown herself to be out of her depth when taking a decision of such magnitude and importance.

When Baroness O’Loan criticised the PSNI’s handling of investigations following the Omagh bombing, her conclusion expressed the hope “that a positive way forward will be found which will facilitate the thorough and effective investigation of the Omagh bomb.” Justice in this regard has been denied and delayed for far too long; and only a Public Inquiry can fulfil her wish and achieve this objective.

Yours faithfully, NEIL C. OLIVER Castle Toppy, Newtownards.