Profile - Nuala O'Loan:Sensitive, spiritual and socially aware, Nuala O'Loan has many admirers on both sides in the North, but others are still out to get her in the long grass, writes Susan McKay.
Lady Sylvia Hermon is furious over Nuala O'Loan's devastating report on police collusion with loyalist murderers.
However, it is not the Police Ombudsman who has angered her, but her own Ulster Unionist party colleague, Ken Maginnis.
"Nuala is a woman of the highest integrity. She is very strong and very fair and it is simply outrageous that he has resorted to personal abuse of her," says the MP for North Down.
O'Loan's report on "Operation Ballast" revealed that the Special Branch of the RUC/PSNI protected serial killer and local UVF leader Mark Haddock from prosecution and continued to use him as an informant until 2003, even though it was aware of his involvement in murders, assaults, extortion, threats, punishment beatings and drug dealing.
Maginnis dismissed O'Loan's new report as "rubbish", and claimed she had "an alternative agenda".
After her Omagh bomb report revealed in 2001 that Special Branch had failed to tell the police about two advance warnings and that the RUC investigation had been seriously flawed, Maginnis said she was like a "suicide bomber" and called for her resignation.
Ronnie Flanagan, chief constable in 1998 when the Real IRA carried out the Omagh atrocity, claimed O'Loan had misunderstood everything and that if what she said was true, he would commit suicide. Peter Mandelson, former Northern secretary, patronisingly called her inexperienced and gullible. O'Loan stood over her findings.
Her new report isn't an attack on the police, she stresses. She's praised the chief constable, Sir Hugh Orde and his new regime. By the end of the week, she points out, some unionists were admitting the report was credible. "Nobody has denied it happened," she says.
Unionist attacks started when her appointment was announced in 1999. The position was a central plank of the Patten reforms. A DUP councillor in Ballymena, Co Antrim, where O'Loan lives, said a nationalist simply couldn't oversee complaints against the RUC and be fair.
After she demonstrated fundamental failings in the investigation into the loyalist murder of GAA official Sean Brown in 1997, the DUP said she was out only "to blacken the name of the RUC". Last year, the deputy leader of the UUP, Danny Kennedy, said she was "compromised" by family links to the SDLP.
O'Loan's husband is the SDLP councillor, Declan O'Loan, a sharp thorn in the side of unionists on Ballymena Borough Council. The Ombudsman's spokesman commented that it might surprise some politicians that "women can have independent views from their husbands". Evidence, not politics, is her passion. Monica McWilliams, Chief Commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, praises her bravery and her willingness to engage with her detractors.
She is strikingly popular, with approval ratings of around 80 per cent from Catholics and Protestants alike. Members of ethnic minority communities and gay people have also expressed confidence in her impartiality and ability to improve policing. She is immensely proud of all this, and works hard at gaining trust. While "desperately tired" by the end of this week, she nonetheless honoured long-standing speaking engagements.
O'Loan is English, and was educated by the kind of nuns who expect girls to pursue professional careers. She was a brilliant student of law at King's College, London. She met Declan in London, married him, and returned with him to Ballymena, despite her mother's misgivings about Northern Ireland, where the Troubles were raging.
In 1977, while teaching law at the University of Ulster, O'Loan was seated near the Lord Chief Justice when an IRA bomb exploded. She was pregnant with her first child, and miscarried within hours. Talking about the incident still brings tears, but she says that since then, she has had no fear of dying.
Late into her second pregnancy, she and Declan took off to Africa for several years. They didn't want to sit in a Ballymena bungalow becoming middle-class and smug, she says.
Back in Ireland, O'Loan moved into a series of positions that secured her as a respectable member of the establishment - the Police Authority, the Northern Health and Social Services Board, the General Consumer Council and various high-powered working groups. She held the Jean Monnet chair in European Law in the University of Ulster from 1992 until her appointment as Police Ombudsman.
She is deeply religious. Speaking at an ecumenical conference last year, she said Christians could not separate their spiritual life from their secular life of family, work and social responsibilities. She often quotes from the Biblical book of Micah; "This is what the Lord asks of you, that you act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with your God."
She's done voluntary work as a marriage guidance counsellor and with a diocesan sexual abuse victim unit. Last year she spoke out about what she claimed was the unfair treatment of priests accused of sexual abuse. When the Rape Crisis Network and others accused her of minimising clerical abuse, she was furious. "She is a tough cookie. She's great but she can be high-handed, and accepting criticism is not her forte," says Paul O'Connor of the Pat Finucane Centre.
Lady Hermon admires her listening skills. "I've been at meetings at which people have shed tears of anger, tears of regret, tears of sorrow," she says. "Nuala handles it all with great sensitivity. She is also good at defusing confrontations. " The women meet also as friends. "We talk about our families, our faith and ourselves," says Hermon.
The Guardian's Simon Hattenstone got O'Loan exactly when he described her as "part austere lawyer, part rockabilly queen - elegant gold and diamond earrings, sober grey suit topped with Teddy boy velvet collar, and sensible black shoes with more heel than you would expect".
Magnificent and formidable, but also friendly and charming, she was the undoubted star of the 2003 Re-Imagining Ireland conference in the US. She spoke with passion about her job, and joined with great gaiety in the company of poets and musicians.
She loves spending time with her family, "doing crosswords, playing chess". She has five sons. aged between 19 and 27, and she has fought hard to protect them. She was devastated last year when one of them was savagely beaten up in a sectarian attack near his flat in north Belfast.
During the menacing loyalist picket on Harryville Catholic church in 1997, her youngest son asked her, "Mum, what is a f**king Fenian bastard?" She replied that this was "mere vulgar abuse" but was hurt for the child. She has got down on her knees on more than one occasion to scrub sectarian graffiti off the church walls.
Operation ballast came about after Raymond McCord walked into her office in central Belfast in 2003. McCord felt the PSNI just didn't want to know about the murder of his son, a UVF drugs courier. He was immediately impressed by O'Loan's courtesy, her willingness to listen and by her commitment to finding out the truth.
Every obstacle was put in her way. The Northern Ireland Office provided inadequate funds, which not only delayed Ballast but meant other inquiries had to be put on hold. Letters were ignored. She was lied to. Evidence was destroyed.
She persisted, mindful in her brave tenacity that John Stalker had been thwarted before her, and that John Stevens had even had his office burned down. She says she was warned after the Omagh report that "they would get me in the long grass".
Her term of office ends on November 5th, to the dismay of her devoted staff. She hasn't had time to consider what she will do next, but says it will probably be something in the criminal justice world. She is 54. "The knitting needles and the armchair aren't beckoning," she says.
O'Loan likes to quote from a book by Cardinal Bernardin: "Like Jesus, we will love others only if we walk with them in the valley of darkness, the dark valley of sickness, the dark valley of moral dilemmas, the dark valley of oppressive structures and diminished rights."
She has just emerged from a very dark valley indeed, and there are others yet to explore. She and her team are preparing reports on the IRA's Claudy bomb and the UVF's Loughinisland gun attack. When she stood up in front of a blaze of flashing press cameras in the Stormont Hotel last Monday to deliver her findings, she says she felt overwhelmingly sad. "That was the predominant feeling, just sadness."
The O'Loan File:
Who is she?
The Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland
Why is she in the news?
Last week published report revealing collusion between the RUC/PSNI and loyalist murderers
Most appealing characteristic?
Courage
Least appealing characteristic?
Reluctance to admit that she may sometimes be wrong
Most likely to say?
"Never mind the politics, we've got the evidence"
Least likely to say?
"I don't think we will be allowed to do this"