The appointment of a liaison officer to go through investigation files with the families of car-bombing and shooting victims in the State was pledged by the Garda Commissioner yesterday.
On the last day of the hearings of the Oireachtas sub-committee on the Barron report, the Commissioner, Mr Noel Conroy, made the offer to the families of those murdered in 1971-73, prior to the more infamous 1974 Dublin/Monaghan bombings.
He was responding to a question by Senator Jim Walsh (FF), who said the families of the victims and those injured felt abandoned by the State. The Minister for Justice had offered to open Department files to the families. He asked if the commissioner would also co-operate.
The commissioner replied that the Garda would appoint an officer to liaise with the families. The officer would stay with them while the relatives looked at the investigation files.
"Maybe what we could do, I would suggest, is make a member available to the individuals and go through the files and answer any questions posed to us and see if we can answer them. We will definitely give them an indication of what the intelligence was at the time," he said.
Mr Cormac Ó Dulacháin SC, for Justice for the Forgotten, said he welcomed the development.
"The Garda Commissioner is making a very important concession or rather it's a development, the fact that families can have direct liaison with the gardaí. It may mean we get an awful lot of answers to an awful lot of questions," he said.
There was far more detail available on what was done than came through in the Barron report about the investigations. The families were hearing greater detail all the time, Mr Ó Dulacháin said. He referred to a retired garda who said earlier yesterday that in the investigation into two murders in Buncrana, evidence such as a gun had disappeared from the forensic science section in Northern Ireland.
Mr Ó Dulacháin said this was new and illustrated how important details could emerge from discussions.
Ar the core of the issue was the response of the British government, he said. Two letters written this time last year had come to light at the committee hearings. The first was to a relative in Scotland from the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, who said his government was committed to doing what it could.
On the same day Mr Blair wrote to the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, and said they had not been able to begin "a further major and time-consuming search" for documents, Mr Ó Dulacháin said.
The committee chairman, Mr Seán Ardagh, said he received a letter from the Northern Ireland Office on Tuesday which stated that it was unable to continue the time-consuming search.
Mr Ardagh said he had written back to the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Paul Murphy, asking for specific documents and was awaiting his response.