The Government has no option but to establish a judicial inquiry into the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the Oireachtas sub-committee on the Barron report was told yesterday. Alison Healy reports.
Mr Eoin McGonigal SC, for two families of victims - the O'Briens and O'Neills - rejected speculation that the tribunal's work would be blocked by the refusal of British and Northern Ireland authorities to release relevant documents.
The Northern Ireland Secretary was not refusing to make documentation available, Mr McGonigal said on the final day of the sub-committee's hearings
To support this, he quoted from a letter to Mr Desmond Doherty, solicitor for the two families, from the private secretary of the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Paul Murphy.
It said the information provided to Mr Justice Barron would be "made available to any further inquiry with similar terms of reference, but any other request for information will need to be considered on its merits".
"We have not shared original intelligence documents with Mr Justice Barron, but we have supplied all relevant information from these documents, consistent with the Secretary of State's obligations to safeguard national security and the safety of individuals," the letter said. "We would repeat this approach in supplying information to any judicial inquiry."
If a judicial inquiry was established, this "public interest immunity" would be determined by the tribunal, Mr McGonigal said.
He pointed to the Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday, and said sensitive documents had been made available to the inquiry but not released to all the parties.
If a judicial inquiry was set up, it would be "inconceivable" that the British and Northern Ireland authorities would not have regard for it, Mr McGonigal said.
He said that Mr Michael Mansfield QC, who is acting for these families, had no peer when it came to issues of public interest immunity.
He had acted in cases such as the Birmingham Six, the Judith Ward case and the inquest of Princess Diana.
Last month Mr Mansfield told the committee that legal action would be taken against the State if a full public inquiry into the atrocities was not established.
Yesterday Mr McGonigal said the Government was being "coerced or forced" down the route of a public inquiry, and if one was not held, further action would be taken.
He said an inquiry along the lines of the recent inquiries by Judge Peter Cory would run into problems as it would not have the power to compel witnesses to attend.
He said the suggestion that there might have been collusion by a neighbouring sovereign nation's security forces in the placing of a bomb in another sovereign nation would be seen as an act of war by President Bush, yet all that resulted in this State was "a paltry investigation".