Last week, Fine Gael’s Charlie Flanagan — whose distinguished career included being Irish minister for justice — pinpointed the terrible flaw in the Omagh Bombing Inquiry.
Published: 7 February 2025
Although taoiseach Micheál Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, and tanaiste Simon Harris, of Fine Gael, had promised full co-operation with the inquiry — and repeated their assurances last week — there is little substance to their promise.
To recap, on 15 August 1998, 31 people (including two unborn), were murdered in Omagh by die-hard Provos who rejected the peace process and rebranded themselves the Real IRA.
The dogs in the street all agreed on who was responsible, and could name several individuals, but largely because of the power of omerta and the fact that the bomb-makers and transporters mostly lived across the border, they couldn’t get enough evidence to make charges stick.
I was involved with several of the bereaved families for years, as they struggled to get the funding and political support for a civil case.
My book did not just tell a story of carnage and suffering, but also the terrible frustration caused by secrecy and buck-passing in legal and political circles. Especially if there are cross-border complications. And although they won the civil case, the legal wrangles go on.
We learned the hard way that people will make great efforts to avoid blame. And that goodwill is not enough to overcome the unwillingness of any establishment to conceal their dirty linen.
Especially if taking the lid off the basket would be both financially and politically very expensive indeed.
The Irish have seen many millions being spent by British governments on inquiries (£191.2 million on Bloody Sunday alone) and have understandably been determined to evade following suit.
How much better to utter fine words and avoid legal commitments.
I know how craven British politicians can be when it comes to negotiating tricky issues with their Irish counterparts.
Irish diplomats, politicians and media are brilliant at using grievances about the past — both real and confected — to blackmail their British counterparts emotionally into making foolish concessions, but it has staggered me that both a Conservative and Labour government should authorised such an absurdly one-side investigation.
Flanagan has always stood out in Irish public life as an honest man and a truth-seeker, so in response to the British government going ahead with a judge-led inquiry while the Irish government held to their disgraceful refusal to set up a parallel process in the Republic, he explained his unease with the lucidity of an experienced lawyer.
He accepted fully the promises about co-operation, “but I think an opportunity has been lost by not having a parallel process. It would have been grounded in our own legislation and been based on statute passed by the Dail, and the inquiry chairman could have worked in tandem with the UK statutory inquiry and that would have allowed any gaps to be closed”.
He now feared “that there will be gaps. I am concerned that the Irish state will overuse national security, that they will use national security issues too liberally”.
Of course they will. Ably assisted by the British government, which seems to be the most naïve and gullible in my lifetime.
