The Omagh Bombing Inquiry faces very difficult historical challenges

In January 2025 public hearings commenced in the statutory Omagh Bombing Inquiry. The existence of the Inquiry returns the spotlight to the single largest terrorist atrocity in Northern Ireland’s history: 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, were killed by a bomb on 15 August 1998. But it also raises important questions about significant challenges to effectiveness that such inquiries must overcome.  

The Omagh Inquiry is about settling a dispute about the past

No-one was ever convicted for the Omagh bombing but four men were held liable in a civil trial in 2009. The objective of the inquiry, announced in 2023 by then Northern Ireland secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, is to determine whether the state, including via collaboration between authorities in the UK and the Irish Republic, could have prevented the bombing. This is a very complex question, involving a lot of moving parts and challenges for both collecting and interpreting relevant evidence.  

Given how much has changed in law enforcement and intelligence practices since 1998, it is highly unlikely that the Inquiry will produce recommendations that would affect current practice in either field. The purpose of the Inquiry is instead to settle a long-running dispute about the past.

It started by hearing first from the bereaved and survivors, which was a very moving and powerful way to begin what is likely to be several years of effort. The strength of that public testimony underlines just how much rests on the Inquiry’s shoulders.

The Inquiry must make judgments about events of a quarter century ago

Reading the Omagh Bombing Inquiry’s terms of reference, it is striking how historically challenging some of its judgements will be for the Inquiry to make. This is not just a question of difficulties collecting evidence, albeit this will be more challenging after more than a quarter of a century than it would have been at a much earlier date. We should not underestimate the specific efforts required of the Inquiry to persuade the Irish government to cooperate fully. Without this, key elements of the Inquiry’s remit would be extremely difficult to pursue, given the likely cross-border nature of planning and preparation for the bombing. The Inquiry will need access to documents and probably witnesses to clarify what was known by authorities in the Republic and whether mistakes were made. Those are understandably sensitive issues. Negotiating such cooperation will be delicate and will take time.

The broader challenges for the Inquiry relate to what kinds of evidence it should collect, to whom it should speak, and how it should interpret all the evidence it accumulates. The challenge isn’t just to determine what the facts are, but to reflect counter-factually about what could or should have been done differently.

Much public understanding of counter terrorism operations and intelligence has been shaped by revelations in the post-9/11, post-7/7 and post-Snowden period, but the Inquiry must step back from these and must determine the reality of these processes and practices as they existed at an earlier point in time (1998) and as they were pursued in specific organisational contexts (Northern Ireland law enforcement and UK intelligence agencies).  

This means making judgements about the adequacy of processes and policies within and between different institutional actors – law enforcement, security and intelligence agencies – in the late 1990s. How did these agencies collect intelligence? How quickly did they process, analyse and report it? What were the restrictions on the ways in which law enforcement could use it? How did law enforcement use its own powers of collecting and analysing available evidence in the months prior to the bombing?

The Inquiry must ultimately address the question whether it is reasonable to believe that these authorities could have prevented the bombing, either immediately before it happened, or through acting differently on intelligence collected in the months prior to it – during which a series of bombings were perpetrated throughout Northern Ireland by dissident Republicans who rejected the Belfast Agreement. Is it reasonable to have expected a different approach in investigatory, or disruptive, operations targeting dissident Republican terrorists, and is it reasonable to believe that such different approaches might have led to different outcomes?

The Inquiry is trying to answer two different questions

The Inquiry isn’t starting from scratch: it will be able to draw on the several previous inquiries and proceedings related to the bombing that have taken place over the last 25 years. But not all the questions that the Inquiry needs to ask will necessarily have been asked before, or have been framed in the ways the Inquiry needs.

Not all data will still be available, nor will all relevant witnesses be alive. Where witnesses are available, they will be asked to recall memories of events more than 25 years ago. The Inquiry must also distinguish between two quite different type of information: what will help it decide whether mistakes were made within the existing institutional and technical processes, analytical or investigative mindsets, and organisational cultures; and what it needs to determine whether it is reasonable to have expected people to have overcome the existing structural barriers of the time to achieve different outcomes. The two questions are related, but they are different.

The first is challenging enough after so much time has passed, assuming that the totality of relevant, available data today is but a portion of what it would have been shortly after the bombing. But the second is much harder to answer from whatever institutional data the Inquiry is able to access and assess.

To explore the second issue, of what more could reasonably have been done, it probably would be necessary for the Inquiry to take evidence widely from people involved at the time, so that the Inquiry can derive a sense of the reality of what it was like to conduct counter terrorism intelligence collection, analysis and reporting in the late 1990s. The Inquiry must think historically, and collect evidence in a way that enables it to make some very complex judgements about what was reasonable and adequate at the time.  

The Inquiry faces a formidable challenge of historical thinking and counter-factual analysis

Reconstructing what standard counter terrorism operations looked like in the late 1990s will require establishing what technologies and tools were available, and the impact of issues such as prioritisation, resource allocation, staffing and analytical tradecraft. The Inquiry will need to understand how intelligence was meant to contribute to the wider counter terrorism effort, and why the process of interaction with law enforcement was structured in the way it was. Additionally, it will need to probe the question of whether there was a judgement made to modulate disruption operations against dissident Republicans, so as not to endanger the peace process – and whether any judgment, if made, had a disproportionate effect on operations that might have prevented the Omagh bombing.

The Inquiry faces considerable challenges in collecting sufficient evidence and interpreting it to determine whether this whole system of counter terrorism law enforcement and intelligence activities could have acted differently in a way that could reasonably be believed to have led to preventing the bombing. That is a formidable challenge of historical thinking and counter-factual analysis.

The Inquiry understandably has the weight of public expectation on its shoulders. Much of its evidence will necessarily require closed hearings, due to official secrecy protecting sources or methods, for example surrounding the issue of information provided by informants. This should not prevent the Inquiry from accessing the evidence it needs, but it will affect what it can say publicly about it and is an additional burden. 

The Inquiry can overcome all these obstacles, and retain public trust and confidence, but it may not be possible to satisfy everyone, as difficult as that is to acknowledge.

Dr Joe Devanny is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He is writing here in a personal capacity.