External reviews of the Belfast City Council and PSNI handling of the Bobby Storey funeral are welcome but not enough

It seems that both the PSNI and Belfast City Council are moving towards external investigations into their handling of the Bobby Storey funeral scandal.
News Letter editorialNews Letter editorial
News Letter editorial

This is essential, but should be just the start of a far wider review of the special treatment of terrorists.

As aerial photographs show, and as was in any event clear on the afternoon of the IRA godfather’s funeral last Tuesday, it was a huge affair, drawing thousands of participants.

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Michelle O’Neill has been largely devoid of remorse, even truculent, for her flagrant breach of her own Covid guidance.

The PSNI closed part of west Belfast for this violent and determined terrorist. Unlike most of his senior fellow terrorists, Storey served significant time behind bars. But he never faced legal scrutiny remotely commensurate with his terror.

That such men have been treated so leniently by a British legal system that their sectarian and driven apologists demonise and that somehow low-ranking soldiers now face murder trials for single shootings is a scandal that the UK government, and most unionists (with notable exceptions such as Doug Beattie and Jim Allister) have not even come close to properly engaging with.

There is plenty of hot air about vexatious prosecutions but a fundamental failure to call for the sort of root and branch reform of the legacy approach to which nationalist Ireland will never agree, and so which must proceed unilaterally from London (beginning with funding for legal actions and a raft of public inquests against terrorists, but also as Trevor Ringland said the setting up of teams of detectives to examine IRA murders and their leaders).

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In other words, the Storey affair should not be allowed to descend into a witch hunt against two senior council officials, and perhaps one or two senior PSNI officers, as if they are somehow to blame for the entrenched culture of appeasement of terrorists in which this scandal happened .

It is the wider context of this scandal that needs scrutiny, at least on the scale of the RHI inquiry.

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