There was nothing Christmassy, for all the family rejoicing, about the acquittal on December 20th of a man accused of responsibility for the 1998 Omagh bombing. Because it came just before the holiday, ringing tills and jingle bells muffled Mr Justice Weir's verdict, writes Fionnuala O Connor
It should reverberate nonetheless. It was the most brusque critique there has been of the Crown Prosecution Service and the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
The Weir judgment suggested that initial faults in investigating the Omagh bombing have now been so compounded as to make any conviction unlikely.
Evidence has been lost and damaged. So it is probable that no one will ever be convicted for 29 murders, one of a woman pregnant with twins.
The dead will not have justice. Their relatives have been permanently short changed. There may be particular pain in the knowledge that human failure has compounded the evil done by inhuman fanaticism.
Unless, of course, humanity and civic spirit save the day, and those who know who bombed Omagh go to the police.
This is what Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde says must happen. But it is a circular argument, presupposing confidence in the supposedly reformed police service.
Why give such grave information to a machine apparently incapable of processing it? The Weir verdict might also be seen as part of a new era, delivered almost a year after the end of the trial and just ahead of the disappearance of the "Diplock courts", in which a judge sits without a jury.
Against the grain of some Diplock judgments, it left no doubt that police and prosecution had failed to make their case - to a degree that would sound comical if the subject were not so tragic.
For many people, the absence of controversy about the judgment, and perhaps even more so the closing of police ranks in its wake, must have pulverised any confidence they had begun to feel in the supposedly new dispensation. News traditionally falls away in the run-up to Christmas. But where was the outcry from Sinn Féin, so recently signed up to take their places on the supervisory policing board?
In undramatic language for the most part, the judge laid out a picture of a case holed from within - by police carelessness in collecting evidence, by grievous flaws in forensic practice as well as reliance on a form of DNA testing with the flimsiest of pedigrees, by the attempt to create a composite case from evidence which failed to meet a "reasonable standard", and not least, by the deception practised by two officers.
The chief constable strove later to establish that the PSNI team had done their best with "exhibits gathered historically." The effort was "genuine" but the "evidential trail" as a whole was flawed. Blame the RUC, in other words. Blame the past, not today's polished-up police service.
To implicitly bolster his own reforming credentials Sir Hugh invoked the name of first police ombudsman Nuala O'Loan, harking back to her excoriation of the first investigation of Omagh under Sir Ronnie Flanagan - last chief of the RUC and first of the PSNI. It is clearer than ever that O'Loan was right to lambast that effort. The PSNI may indeed have inherited evidence compromised by sloppy procedures. But the judge's conclusion which most damages the notion of a new policing slate was that two police witnesses lied to him in court and that others may have been party to their deceit.
The judgment on this point read: "The effect of this, as I find deliberate and calculated deception in which others concerned in the investigation and preparation of this case for trial beyond these two witnesses may also have played a part, is to make it impossible for me to accept any of the evidence of either witness since I have no means of knowing whether they may have told lies about other aspects of the case that were not capable of being exposed as such."
Some still credit Flanagan for taking the RUC through the reforms that remodelled it as the PSNI. Many journalists still see today's chief constable as a new broom, even as he enters his last stretch in office. No questioning by the media, or others, gave Sir Hugh the least trouble. But to watch the police officer who headed the investigation face cameras and microphones with a number of the bereaved supportively behind him and hear him interrupted angrily by another, was to see the strains this protracted debacle has imposed on already suffering people.
Television footage of the officer fleeing the cameras with no attempt to respond to queries sent the message that the police service feels no proper shame.
To witness a police press officer snapping "because he won't" at a somewhat plaintive journalist asking "why won't he answer questions?" was to see the North's new deal tarnishing in plain sight.