Bear in mind the dead

Peter Smith examines a new book by Sir Hugh Orde and Professor Sir Desmond Rea chronicling the biggest terrorist attack in Northern Ireland that caused ‘seismic’ challenges for society as well as investigators in the province. In his poem Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto, John Hewitt sought respect for the individual victims of the Troubles, and it is with this in mind that the authors of Bear In Mind These Dead – the Omagh Bombing and Policing refer to those who died in Omagh on a fateful summer’s day almost 20 years ago. Agreement on the future governance of Northern Ireland was reached in Belfast on Good Friday, April 10, 1998. It included provision for the reform of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) by means of an independent commission, its terms of reference set out in the text. In May 1998 the agreement was endorsed by referenda in both parts of Ireland and on June 3, 1998, an eight-person commission was established under the chairmanship of former British Cabinet minister and last Governor of Hong Kong Chris (now Lord) Patten. Ten weeks later, on August 15, 1998, arguably the most terrible atrocity ever perpetrated in Northern Ireland was inflicted by republican terrorists on the quiet County Tyrone town of Omagh. It resulted in the deaths of 29 people (including a woman pregnant with twins) and injured some 220 others. The Patten Commission reported on September 9, 1999. Its 175 recommendations included the establishment of a powerful policing board comprising both independent members and members of the Northern Ireland Assembly tasked, among other things, with holding the chief constable publicly to account for the performance of the police. In the autumn of 2001, the RUC was renamed the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and the Northern Ireland Policing Board (NIPB) came into being under the chairmanship and vice chairmanship of two independent members – namely Desmond Rea and Denis Bradley. But there was one issue in particular which did not derive from the Belfast Agreement but was to prove by far the most challenging. This was the suggestion that the RUC had received intelligence in advance of the Omagh bombing which, if pursued and acted upon, would have prevented it. Obviously a matter of great importance, it understandably caused profound concern to, in particular, the families of those killed in the outrage and the injured survivors. Thus, within weeks of its establishment the NIPB had to set about dealing with what the authors describe as “tough realities and questions” relating to the bombing involving not only the police but also the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI), an independent statutory officer tasked with handling complaints of police misconduct whose office was already in existence prior to the appointment of the Patten Commission and which featured in its report only to the extent of some recommendations as to the fine tuning of the Ombudsman’s role. The first incumbent of the office of Police Ombudsman was (now Baroness) Nuala O’Loan and the book deals in considerable detail with the interaction between the her office, the Policing Board and the PSNI in relation to the intelligence issue to which I have referred. The authors, Sir Desmond Rea and Sir Hugh Orde (who became chief constable of the PSNI in 2002 and later went on to become president of the Association of Chief Police Officers), have adopted an unusual format for their book, involving quoting extensively from contemporaneous documents where available and minimising the use of narrative. Although a degree of perseverance is required of the reader to adjust to this approach, it is rewarded by the emergence of a more objective and authoritative picture than that which would have become apparent from conventional narration that would inevitably have been vulnerable to distortion resulting from the subjective interpretations of the authors. The outworking of the issue to which I have referred took place over many years and was paralleled by the NIPB’s engagement with the Oma