Serious questions need to be asked of Ombudsman's office

It will take some time for the ruling to be properly assessed.

There will be another sitting in the new year, when the court will decide whether to quash last year’s report.

But one of the key responses so far to yesterday’s developments was that of the PSNI chief constable, George Hamilton. Mr Hamilton accepted last June’s ombudsman report into the 1994 loyalist massacre at the Heights bar, in which six Catholic men were murdered as they watched the Republic of Ireland play in a World Cup football game. It was one of the most depraved atrocities of the Troubles.

But Mr Hamilton, while he accepted the report last year, questioned why police officers were not even being reported to prosecutors given the strength of language in the report.

This was certainly an important question to pose.

Yesterday’s court ruling is another controversy to embroil the ombudsman’s office.

The watchdog has been criticised by the Police Federation after a court case against two PSNI officers collapsed after failures by the office made it impossible for them to get a fair trial.

There is meanwhile an ongoing investigation into how sensitive ombudsman documents were found outside the office.

There now needs to be an examination of how best to oversee the ombudsman’s office. The office performs an important role, but in the same way that all bodies with significant power need to be overseen in the exercise of their power, including police forces, so too do those who carry out that oversight.

Meanwhile, there is also going to have to be an examination of the sweeping use of the term collusion in legacy investigations.

Sinn Fein have seized on the widest use of the word to imply that the RUC colluded widely in murder, which is nonsense.