A priest whose sister was shot in an IRA ambush called on the Gardai today to apologise for failing to catch the killers.
Fr James Carr, from Fanad in County Donegal, said there had been no searches, no house-to-house inquiries and no forensic examination after Brid Carr died on the Donegal-Tyrone border in 1971.
"It wasn't just what the IRA did to us, it was what the state did to us. If the state had acted properly, there would be retribution for my family," he said.
On November 19 1971, Brid Carr was returning from a grocery shopping trip when a three-man IRA unit began firing at a British army patrol on the bridge between Lifford and Strabane.
The 26-year-old, who worked in the Intercounty Hotel in Lifford, died just inside the border of Northern Ireland.
"It's accepted by all that it's the IRA that actually killed her. She was clinically dead before she hit the ground," said Fr Carr.
Three witnesses identified the Lifford-based IRA men responsible in interviews with Gardai but refused to give written statements.
Fr Carr, who is now working in the Donore Avenue parish in South Dublin, said he believed the Gardai might have been told to "go soft" on the IRA.
"There was no question of picking up the spent cartridges and having them examined or carrying out house-to-house searches. It gives me the impression that the IRA were in control of Lifford at the time," he said.
The events surrounding Ms Carr's death were examined last year by Judge Henry Barron as part of his investigation into the Dublin-Monaghan bombings.
His report noted that the Garda investigators regarded further pursuit of the possibility of interviews of the three suspects as a futile exercise.
A Garda spokesman said that Assistant Commissioner Martin Callinan, who was appointed as a liaison officer to victims' families in the wake of the Barron report, would be contacting Fr Carr to discuss his concerns.
PA