Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland must face scrutiny for its scandalous 20-year delay in the investigation of a former officer

News Letter editorial of Friday October 8 2021:
News Letter editorialNews Letter editorial
News Letter editorial

It is scandalous that a former detective endured a 20-year Police Ombudsman (PONI) investigation, before finding that he is not being prosecuted.

The special branch officer, now aged in his 60s, faced a claim that he and other agent handlers could have prevented murders — an allegation that had its origins in the word of a disgruntled UVF murderer.

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It is hard to think of any other person in any situation who has had a two-decade legal cloud hanging over them. It would be a huge proportion of the life of even the longest-lived person — it is an unpardonable delay that must itself now be examined.

Yet when the News Letter reported on our front page in 2018 the fact that the investigation was then already approaching 19 years, barely any other media outlet picked up on the story. We reported then that in 2006 five PSNI vehicles turned up at the officer’s home with PONI investigators.

This newspaper will continue to raise hard questions about the ombudsman’s office’s handing of historic investigations but it is alarming that so few politicians are doing the same.

Retired officers have little support, and last year felt unable to take the disgraceful legal saga around the PONI Loughinisland report to the Supreme Court, where it belonged (after an initial court ruling that was scathing about PONI collusion findings was substituted by later rulings).

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Retired police can now have their reputations destroyed by findings of ‘collusive behaviours’. Ray White in this newspaper wrote a devastating essay in August about how officers face such findings without due process, despite there not being enough evidence against them for criminal charges.

Among observers who think security forces prevented civil war in the Troubles it is now widely felt that the ombudsman’s office is not a fit forum to adjudicate on past allegations against police. Yet to move such probes away from the ombudsman after the 2014 Stormont House Agreement, politicians almost made the situation even worse by subjecting ex RUC alone to non criminal misconduct legacy probes.

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Acting Editor

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