Blasts victims’ families urge Government to press for international inquiry

FAMILIES of those killed and injured in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings have called on the Government to press for a full-scale international inquiry into the atrocity.

Solicitor for the Justice for the Forgotten Group Greg Neill yesterday said there was a “burden of responsibility” on Irish politicians to bring the inquiry onto an international stage. He said that now was the time for the Government to show “political courage” on the matter.

Mr O’Neill was responding to the startling outline in Justice Henry Barron’s Report into the 1974 bombings, that revealed an extraordinary lack of co-operation by the British authorities to the inquiry team.

In a year-long period that Justice Barron said led to frustration, the inquiry team encountered long delays in being furnished information. It was finally supplied in the form of a 10-page letter from then Northern Secretary John Reid, and a six-page appendix, and none of the millions of potentially relevant documents that might have been available.

The judge said the lack of this documentation had limited the scope of the enquiry. The lack of evidence also trammelled the inquiry into the most serious allegations, those involving collusion between the British authorities and loyalist paramilitaries.

“The question of British co-operation goes back to 2002.

“They are, in essence, political issues that are outside the Barron inquiry (and are therefore separate from the three-month inquiry now being undertaken by the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice). Politicians have an obligation to internationalise,” he said. “What the families are interested in is to find out if political mandarins hoisted a counter-insurgency operation in Ireland which was predicated on the use of people like these (the loyalist bombers).”

Mr O’Neill said the Irish State has to look at its obligations in 2003. “The (British authorities) have thumbed their noses.

“That is what is unforgivable,” he said. In his first public comments on the report, Foreign Minister Brian Cowen echoed the sentiments of the Taoiseach, welcoming the report but refusing to be drawn on its findings.

Independent TD Tony Gregory condemned the behaviour of the British Government.

Mr O’Neill said that the families would seek compensation at some stage, but that it may well be from the British authorities rather than the State.