Editorial: Ireland is suing the UK on legacy yet now it offers to help Omagh bomb probe, one of many republican atrocities - just at the UUP predicted it would

​In an opinion piece on these pages days ago (July 29, click her to read it), Doug Beattie predicted what would happen on the opening day of the Omagh bomb inquiry.

The Ulster Unionist Party leader said that there would be opening statements by the inquiry chair, and then by lawyers representing the families of those murdered by the Irish republican terrorists. Then he said: “It is then possible a representative from the Irish government will make a statement giving an Irish commitment to cooperate fully with the inquiry. With that statement the Irish government will then, once again, slip away from calls to hold their own parallel inquiry into the terrible events of that day.”

Yesterday a representative of the Irish government said on the opening day of the inquiry that he there to signal in the “clearest terms our commitment to facilitating and supporting the work of this inquiry”.

Mr Beattie was right to be cynical about this, just as the Ulster Unionist Party was right to object to the Stormont House Agreement on legacy – an agreement that among many other failures, established processes that would turn against the security forces and let Ireland entirely avoid scrutiny on its central role in the murder and mayhem in Northern Ireland, by making the Republic a comfortable space for IRA mass murderers.

The legacy of terrorism, as it should be called (republican terrorists killed by far the most people and Omagh was an atrocity in a long barbarian tradition of massacring civilians in republican car bombs), has taken a turn for the worse. The new government has been gushing about an Ireland that actually sued the UK on legacy over a partial amnesty when Ireland has operated a flagrant amnesty for the IRA.

Irish co-operation in the Omagh inquiry will not even be close to rectifying the imbalance on the past from which Dublin has benefited so handsomely.