Editorial: Glimmers of hope that Omagh probe can be part of a balanced approach to legacy

After the horror show that has been legacy in Northern Ireland over the last 10 years, the anti state juggernaut has been turning.

One such apparent example of the turn was last year's announcement that an inquiry would be held into the 1998 dissident republican Omagh bomb. But this newspaper feared that it was in fact a bad decision, because as Claire Radford, whose brother Alan was one of the 29 massacre victims, could see there was a high possibility of it all turning against the RUC, as other inquiries into terror have done.

Calls for the Republic to hold a southern inquiry into Omagh are fraught with the same peril, that an Ireland which has the audacity to chase the UK in Strasbourg over its form of legacy amnesty when Ireland itself has had a de facto amnesty for IRA, would use any inquiry to shift blame on to the RUC too.

Even so, we applaud the spirit of Baroness Foster, the ex DUP leader, for calling on the UK to sue Ireland for not holding an Omagh probe, and we applaud the spirit of the UK government for suggesting similar, because even if it is a misguided course it is an attempt to make things difficult for the hypocritical Irish. It is far better than Michael Gove telling Dublin last year that it suing the UK would not harm relations.

And there is another glimmer of hope. The terms of reference of the Omagh probe, which we report on page 6 (click here), seem to be good. They wisely seem to be looking at things such as whether appeasement of terror encouraged the attack.

Michelle O’Neill says she has long supported an Omagh inquiry. What about the role in Omagh of the culture of car bomb atrocities pioneered by a Provisional IRA that you say had no alternative, Ms O’Neill?​

A grim aspect of legacy has been watching human rights obsessives successfully curtail security force work against terrorism, then joining criticism of those same force’s supposed security failures when the said terrorism succeeds.