Two senior gardaí are to accompany the North's Chief Constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, this morning to what is expected to be a tough meeting with families of the Omagh bombing victims, write Dan Keenan, Gerry Moriarty and Mark Hennessy.
The private meeting is designed to detail his response to the controversial Police Ombudsman's report on the Omagh investigation, issued last month.
Assistant Commissioner Kevin Carty and Det Supt Tadhg Foley will also brief the families on the how the investigation is progressing in the Republic. They are heading the Garda investigation into the bombing and their presence in Omagh does not require Government sanction, according to the Garda Síochána.
The victims and the relatives of the deceased may intensify calls for radical changes to the investigation. Nobody in Northern Ireland has been charged in relation to the bombing. Dundalk man Colm Murphy is due to be sentenced on a charge of conspiracy to cause the bombing at a court sitting in Dublin tomorrow.
Sir Ronnie will reject claims that he and the police were seriously deficient in their handling of the bombing investigation.
In his reply to Mrs Nuala O'Loan's report, which has been seen by The Irish Times, Sir Ronnie contests her findings, branding many of her conclusions as "significantly factually inaccurate", "unwarranted assumptions", "misunderstandings" or "material omissions".
He flatly rejects the call by Mrs Nuala O'Loan for an outsider to lead the investigation.
He says: "It is a matter of profound concern that the Chief Constable and other affected police officers were denied fair and reasonable opportunity to make a considered and informed response to the [Ombudsman's] draft report."
He adds: "The case against the Chief Constable and other affected officers was at no time put to them for response fully, adequately or at all . . . The PSNI accepts that, inevitably, there have been errors in the conduct of this, as of any investigation. However, it does not accept either the broad thrust or most of the detail of the Ombudsman's criticisms." His response to Mrs O'Loan's withering report is a paragraph-by-paragraph rejection of criticisms made by her of the RUC investigation.
The first volume of Sir Ronnie's report runs to 87 pages and challenges in detail many of the conclusions arrived at by Mrs O'Loan and her team. The second volume, at more than 100 pages, deals, among other issues, with six recommendations on the way forward raised by the Ombudsman.
Sir Ronnie refers to intelligence provided by the informer known as Kevin Fulton three days before the Omagh bombing and says: "The Ombudsman fails to mention that by 1994 Fulton was regarded by Special Branch as unreliable . . . At no time prior to Omagh did Fulton provide relevant material in respect of the bombing." Also rejected is the claim that intelligence tip-offs could have prevented the bombing.
Mrs O'Loan has claimed: "The Omagh Bomb Investigation Team was deprived of significant lines of inquiry." But Sir Ronnie counters: "The PSNI absolutely rejects the charge that the Omagh Bomb Investigation Team has been deprived".
He concludes: "The report has done a great disservice and caused great hurt to the PSNI and to individual officers within it and has inflicted further unnecessary grief and anxiety on the relatives of those murdered and those injured. The PSNI regrettably concludes the Ombudsman's investigation has lacked the necessary rigour, evidence and fairness that would legitimately be expected."