The Bloody Sunday inquiry was warned today that it could "quite seriously, take years" to deal with demands for intelligence material about civilian witnesses.
|
|
|
Barrister Mr Philip Sales raised the prospect of the huge investigation dragging on even longer as said security agencies including MI5 would use public interest immunity certificates to fight any bid to force them to make all the material public, setting off a series of wranglings through the courts.
Acting for MI5, the RUC and Metropolitan Police, Mr Sales said: "It would be a public interest immunity exercise unlike anything that has been remotely attempted in court proceedings."
The warning came during a second day of special hearings into whether the tribunal should admit intelligence material found in background checks of the 1,200 people who have provided personal accounts of events - and if so, in what form.
Intelligence material about the witnesses is being demanded by lawyers for the soldiers, who insist it is needed to evaluate their credibility and to unearth new information about the IRA and what it did that day.
|
However, Mr Michael Lavery QC, acting for most of those bereaved and injured that day, warned that allowing the material in any form would damage public confidence in the inquiry.
"I am sure the tribunal will be astute to avoid such a perception, however unjustified, and particularly when the exercise is unnecessary and the exercise is in high degree of probability unlikely to produce anything of substance," he said.
Demands for full disclosure of the material - "suggestive, never conclusive" about IRA links, according to Mr Sales - would be met with public interest immunity applications in every single case.
However, the security agencies have proposed a way around the PII hurdle - "intelligence summaries" on each of the "significant" number of witnesses whose names have turned up on their files for circulation among the lawyers. Those summaries would contain no source material - although the tribunal would have access to that - and would take around six months to compile, according to Mr Sales.
Earlier, Mr Dennis Boyd, a barrister acting for one of the witnesses, warned that any moves to produce intelligence backgrounds on witnesses were "dangerous and fundamentally suspect".
He said the tribunal would have to assume that the MI5, RUC and British Army allegations about the individuals concerned were true, if it was to use them at its hearings to evaluate their credibility.
"In my respectful submission, given the questionable legitimacy of material of this nature, that would be wholly wrong," said Mr Boyd, representing witness Mr Sean Collins, who was aged 10 on Bloody Sunday.
The inquiry was adjourned until Monday.
PA