Editorial: Ministers should stand up to the courts on legacy

​The weakness of the political system with regard to the courts, in particular in how pans out on legacy matters, was on display yesterday.

A high court judge ordered the government to provide in writing work towards identifying a chair for a new inquiry into the Omagh bomb.

The mere announcement of such an inquiry is not good enough. Oh no. The elected government must jump to the judge and (in effect) make clear when this will happen.

Some will say that the order yesterday will have minimal effect. The government can come back with some vague answer. But that would be a wholly inadequate response to the use of the legal system to decide policy and compel government action.

Let's recap on this saga. The 1998 Omagh bomb was an Irish republican terrorist outrage in a long tradition of Irish terrorist outrages, of which there were so many in the Troubles. Most of these massacres were carried out by fanatical murderers, well known to the authorities, but whose flagrant guilt could not be proved to the criminal standard. In Omagh barabarians such as that mass murdering thug Colm Murphy, who died recently, escaped justice for killing 29 people including a mother of unborn twins.

Yet over time much of the blame for Omagh has fallen on the RUC, an outstanding police force which helped prevent civil war in this society, for its alleged investigative failures, starting with ombudsman report of 2001.

When the inquiry was announced, Claire Radford, sister of the Omagh victim Alan, expressed concerns that an inquiry would turn against the RUC, rather than the terrorists. Having foolishly decided to initiate an inquiry, the government is entirely right to take its time to get the right chair who will handle such a probe professionally.

In 2021 the courts ord Justice Horner held that the bombing could arguably have been thwarted by police and ordered probes on both sides of the Irish border, based on a legal duty under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

This is where the government should have come in long ago, challenging the disgraceful citing of Art 2 to cause a one-sided legacy process that focuses on claims against the UK state.