Opinion

Newton Emerson: Why can't police just 'lift the lot of them'?

Rescue workers and police search for survivors following the Omagh bombing in 1998
Rescue workers and police search for survivors following the Omagh bombing in 1998 Rescue workers and police search for survivors following the Omagh bombing in 1998

THE fundamental question posed by Mr Justice Horner in the High Court last week applies not just to the Omagh bombing but to the Troubles and the present day.

“Any investigation will have to look specifically at the issue of whether a more proactive campaign of disruption, especially if co-ordinated north and south of the border, had a real prospect of preventing the Omagh bombing and whether, without the benefit of hindsight, the potential advantages of taking a much more aggressive approach towards the suspected terrorists outweighed the potential disadvantages inherent in such an approach.”

A long-forgotten Troubles cliché put this question more bluntly. Why were paramilitaries not simply arrested - or as it was usually phrased, “why don’t they just lift the lot of them?”

This was asked with general bemusement by the vast majority of right-thinking people, as the non-terrorist population was referred to at the time. Bemusement turned to anguish after each atrocity.

Lifting the lot of them was not a call for internment or even much of a ‘security crackdown’. We were constantly told there were only a few hundred active paramilitaries, up against 13,000 police officers and 30,000 soldiers.

Republican and loyalist leaders were household names and their subordinates were local celebrities. Yet most remained seemingly untouchable, year after year, decade into decade, ruining this great wee place for the rest of us, as another cliché had it.

Explanations for this could include high-level political management of the Troubles or an unacknowledged official view that terrorism would never be completely defeated. Major historical themes would emerge from examination of these issues but it still appears to suit almost nobody to confront them.

Instead, the Troubles are examined through an ever-expanding definition of collusion. Initially taken to mean security force connivance with loyalists, it now effectively covers any intelligence operation where every subject is not arrested or stopped before they commit a further offence.

Political sophisticates will chortle at now naive people once were to ask ‘why don’t they just lift the lot of them?’, yet the definition of collusion we have arrived at amounts to saying the same thing.

Although victims should always be entitled to discover if crimes could have been prevented, framing this in terms of collusion has become meaningless, reducing all the complexities of security policy down to a trite question about informers.

It avoids the real questions of how overarching decisions were made - assuming they were made. Some former intelligence officers allege they were left to make policy up on the hoof to keep responsibility at their level.

One grimly mundane explanation for the long stalemate of the Troubles is institutional co-dependence.

Like any bureaucracy, the intelligence system is poorly motivated to end the problem it exists to solve. This requires no grand conspiracy: it arises organically.

If you are an intelligence officer with a prized high-level agent, why would you ever turn that agent in? Inter-agency silos and rivalries add to the inertia.

These are all suspected to have been factors at Omagh, where intelligence was split across the border and officers believed letting a bomb factory operate in the Republic had enabled them to prevent multiple attacks.

When the potential risk of this was weighed, to paraphrase Mr Justice Horner, what was it weighed against? Did the intelligence services think a more aggressive approach towards dissidents in 1998 would have destabilised mainstream republicanism? Perhaps it would, but on what authority was that judgement made?

Identical questions can be asked about dissidents today. There are reportedly around 200 of them and their leaders are well known. Intelligence operations seem highly successful in frustrating their activities but Lyra McKee was still murdered in 2019.

Three months before, a car bomb exploded in Derry just after a crowd of young people walked past. Who would object to a more pro-active campaign of disruption against those responsible?

Dissidents claim Northern Ireland’s existence makes republican violence inevitable. There is a danger of the authorities tacitly endorsing that rhetoric by leaving proscribed organisations in existence.

The indulgence of loyalism is a far wider case of co-dependence, with numerous state agencies drawn into a mire of appeasement, funding stitch-ups and perceived peace process ‘imbalance’ towards the Provisional IRA.

None of that should obscure the question of why police cannot simply lift the lot of them. At the very least, the PSNI should say what additional resources, powers and political support the task requires - and our leaders should be constantly pressing for that assessment.