The wider unfairness in the legacy processes for ex RUC has still not been resolved

This can happen in cases, and has led to the mis-reporting of legacy rulings in which the authorities were criticised over inadequate investigations into past killings but were not ordered to carry out further probes (and then it was reported as if they had been).

While it is welcome that the court yesterday said the Police Ombudsman’s office, when the previous ombudsman was in charge, over-stepped the mark in findings of criminal collusion, there remain troubling aspects of this saga.

In 2018 Mr Justice McCloskey fiercely criticised collusion findings over the Loughinisland massacre, which he found unsustainable in law.

It was a scathing ruling. He said that the ex RUC officers “were, in effect, accused, tried and convicted without notice and in their absence. None of the essential elements of the criminal or disciplinary process existed”.

He found that “the Police Ombudsman’s ‘determination’ of police collusion in the Loughinisland murders is unsustainable in law as it was not in accordance with the Ombudsman’s statutory powers”.

The judge said that “sections in the Ombudsman’s report ... including the ‘determination’ that [an officer] was guilty of an ‘act of negligence’, are in breach of the legal requirements of procedural fairness and unlawful in consequence”.

But then, in a development with few precedents, Mr Justice McCloskey was accused of bias due to a previous case in which he acted as a lawyer, but which he could not recall, and while he entirely denied bias he stepped aside as courtesy to families of the men murdered in the massacre.

It is hard to imagine a judge being accused of, say, nationalist bias without a massive outcry, let alone stepping aside and then another judge coming in with a judgment utterly different to the judge who stepped aside.

But Mr Justice McCloskey did recuse himself and then a very different ruling replaced his.

The ex RUC officer’s appeal against that latter ruling has had success on some limited points but it has by no means resolved the matter emphatically.

While yesterday’s ruling was less scathing than the McCloskey finding, the former ombudsman does not come out of it at all well.

Yet what criticism has there been in recent years outside this newspaper of the handling of historic allegations against RUC?

In 2014 the DUP and a Tory led government allowed a mooted legacy investigatory body to include a police misconduct element, which was said to be a good thing because it got such cases away from the ombudsman, but various essays on these pages have merely shown that it posed an even worse fate for RUC.

While Dublin agitates for nationalist legacy demands, London seeks to reassure them, yet at the same time it is hinting at a tougher approach to legacy. Hinting at a retreat from this grave, grave scandal on legacy is simply not good enough.

It is not as if the UK is unable to apply pressure on republicans, given their decades of terrorism, or on the Irish Republic, which was a haven for terrorism, leading to many people being slaughtered, particularly in border areas.

Key to the rectifying the legacy scandal is putting an end to the way in which only state forces, and not terrorists, face an array of investigations that are decided to a sub criminal standard (where guilt does not need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt).

The UK must set out a path in which terrorists are also judged in civil actions and inquiries that are not decided to the criminal standard, which, as we know, terrorists can so easily evade.

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