Editorial: UK threat to sue Ireland on legacy is welcome, but Omagh is not the best way to hit back

​It has been reported that the UK might sue the Republic of Ireland for not investigating the Omagh massacre.

The Daily Telegraph has said London is considering the measure in retaliation for Dublin taking the UK to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over the controversial Legacy Act, which offers a conditional amnesty for Troubles killings.

It reports that the government is considering the action over the 1998 Real IRA Omagh car bomb, in which 29 people were murdered. Ireland at Strasbourg argues that the Legacy Act is incompatible with human rights law because it replaces police investigations with a commission offering immunity.

In 2021, a High Court judge in Belfast recommended that the UK government carry out a probe into whether the bombing was preventable. He also urged the Irish government to do likewise. The UK has established such an inquiry. The Republic has not.

It is very welcome that Britain is now threatening to respond in kind to Ireland, which has taken an outrageous case to the ECHR. This is a country that has operated a flagrant de facto amnesty for IRA terrorists since 1998, including for IRA leaders. But it is important that such threats do not just remain at the stage of briefings to the press, which will achieve nothing. Ireland must see that it will face consequences for its aggression on legacy.

But there are further problems with this idea. The government should not in fact have acceded to an inquest into Omagh. It will quite probably descend into a subtle attack on the state for being to blame for Omagh, when in fact it was barbarian Irish republican terrorists, in a long tradition of Irish terror car bombs.

So Omagh is the wrong way to get back at Ireland. There are other avenues, such as putting the spotlight on Irish facilitation of terror by refusing to extradite IRA all through the Troubles.