Nelson inquiry critical of RUC and NIO failures

ANALYSIS:The report into the murder of lawyer Rosemary Nelson found the RUC not guilty of collusion but guilty of a corporate failure

‘ALTHOUGH ROSEMARY had been pushy and difficult I had respected her and quite liked her, but because of her combative style she was disliked by many in the establishment including civil servants, the legal profession and the police.”

Thus opens Chapter 25 of the Rosemary Nelson Inquiry report. It’s a quotation from former Northern secretary Mo Mowlam’s 2002 autobiography. Boil it all down and that’s as good a summation of the 505-page report as you are likely to get, and as good an analysis of the toxic culture of the period. In high and low places, as spelled out in the report, the Lurgan solicitor was indeed viewed as a turbulent lawyer.

Some police members viewed her essentially as a “Provo” lawyer. She did represent many leading republicans, including Colin Duffy, now on remand charged with the dissident republican murders of British soldiers Patrick Azimkar and Mark Quinsey.

Adding to that hostility was the conviction among RUC special branch that she was conducting an affair with Duffy whom she had successfully defended on one murder appeal and two murder charges – two of the victims being RUC officers and the third, a former member of the UDR.

She was also lawyer for the nationalist Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition during the troubled, sometimes murderous, Drumcree standoffs. All these factors contributed to her being a marked woman. When the Loyalist Volunteer Force, using the cover-name of the Red Hand Defenders, killed her in a car bombing at her home in Lurgan in March 1999 there was shock but not surprise.

Certain police officers and officials found it impossible or difficult to make the necessary distinction between a person’s political beliefs and his or her standing as a lawyer, just as they did with another murdered solicitor Pat Finucane – givens in a normal society.

The inquiry found no evidence of any act within the RUC, Northern Ireland Office (NIO), the British army and MI5, “which directly facilitated Rosemary Nelson’s death”. It found that overall the murder investigation was “carried out with due diligence”.

In his statement in the House of Commons Northern Secretary Owen Paterson majored on this element of the report. “Those who are looking for evidence that the state conspired or planned the death of Rosemary Nelson will not find it in this report,” he said.

He acknowledged the many negative findings of the inquiry and said he was “profoundly sorry that omissions by the state rendered Rosemary Nelson more at risk and more vulnerable”. It was also “deeply regrettable” that no one has been charged with her murder.

It was a carefully scripted statement, covering all the bases and noting all the criticisms, but weighted to support and defend the establishment.

The last Labour Northern secretary was Shaun Woodward, whose party was in power in 1999. In responding, his particular emphasis was more in tune with the serious tone and critical thrust of the report, even if it did not directly make the finding of collusion.

Reading the report you are carried back to a time when Northern Ireland was just beginning the slow slog out of conflict, a time when there was still much poison in the official system.

The report did not rule out a “rogue member or members” of the RUC or British army assisting the killers. The inquiry team was “sure” that some RUC members publicly assaulted and abused Nelson on the Garvaghy Road in 1997, “having the effect of legitimising her as a target”.

It believed there was “leakage” of intelligence that “found its way out of the RUC” that increased the danger to her life and that some RUC officers “made abusive and/or threatening remarks” about her to her clients, which when they became public also made her a target.

There are many criticisms of how the RUC failed to protect her or prevent officers abusing her, encapsulated in the finding: “There was a corporate failure by the RUC to warn Rosemary Nelson of her vulnerability and offer her security advice”.

In the two years before her murder – a period when the aforesaid Mo Mowlam was Northern secretary – numerous local and international lawyers and groups such as the Committee on the Administration of Justice complained of the threats against Nelson, and against other lawyers who had republican clients.

But, according to the inquiry, the NIO dealt with this threat in a “mechanistic way”. The report complained that the combined effect of “omissions” by both the RUC and NIO “was that the state failed to take reasonable and proportionate steps to safeguard” the solicitor’s life.

During the inquiry the former RUC and subsequently PSNI chief constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan denied describing Nelson as an “immoral woman” because of her alleged relationship with Duffy but the inquiry believed he did make these remarks.

The inquiry found that the RUC special branch provided levels of information to the RUC murder investigation team that was “unprecedented” in its history but that it was “over-possessive” about its intelligence and was “unjustifiably resentful and defensive about any inquiry which they interpreted as treating them as potential suspects”.

Nationalists will not be surprised about the litany of criticisms of the NIO and RUC, particularly of special branch. After all this was also a time when the special branch had a “serial killer on its books”, the UVF member Mark Haddock who was involved in up to 15 murders, as exposed by former Police ombudsman Nuala O’Loan in 2007.

Some unionists take offence at this focus on the past and particularly how the IRA, responsible for virtually half the deaths in the Troubles, never have to face the same inquisition that still applies to the RUC and British army.

It’s a fair point but if politicians properly took on the issue of the past then there might be greater parity of scrutiny of the official security and paramilitary forces.

In the meantime the family of Rosemary Nelson will find some solace and some resolution in this report. They believe the findings are tantamount to collusion. They might also take some comfort that the Patten reforms begun the years after Nelson was murdered are now virtually fully implemented and that lawyers now get proper respect and protection.