Before I discuss the legislation and the legal mechanisms of co-operation between states, it is important to pause and remember exactly what we are about today. This is by no means just another Bill. It is about the 29 people and two unborn children killed in Omagh, the 220 people injured and the families who, nearly three decades later, are still searching for answers. It can be too easy for atrocities to become a moment in history, a date or an event. That should never be allowed to happen. For the families, this atrocity is their present and something they carry with them every single day. Sometimes the scale of loss is so overwhelming that it risks becoming abstract. We must never allow that to happen. I will name just a few of the victims of that day. Alan Radford died helping his mother to do the weekly shopping. The deaths of Avril Monaghan, her 21-month-old daughter Maura and her mother, Mary Grimes, saw three generations killed in one horrific moment. It was Mary Grimes's 66th birthday that day. Avril was 33 years old and heavily pregnant with twins, Eimear and Evelyn, whose lives never even got a chance to begin. Avril's daughter Aoibheann put it more powerfully than any of us ever could when she said: The pictures of Eimear and Evelyn's scan are a reminder of the futures that never became a reality. The loss that we as a family have experienced cannot be measured and there is no replacement for the time we would have had with our mam, Maura, Eimear, Evelyn and granny. That line alone should stop every single one of us in our tracks because it shows how the Omagh bombing took entire futures. As we discuss this Bill, we must be very clear that the process must always come back to people. Michael Gallagher's son Aiden was killed that day. He was 21 years old. Michael Gallagher did not just grieve; he fought. For 25 years, he fought through the courts, against institutions and against every obstacle placed in front of him. His legal challenge produced the 2021 High Court ruling that found there was a plausible case that the bombing could have been prevented and that directed the establishment of a human rights-compliant investigation. Without Michael Gallagher, there would be no inquiry. It is important to state that clearly in the House today. The inquiry we are legislating to support exists because a bereaved father refused to accept that either state could simply move on. That is what citizenship looks like at its most determined. We owe it to him and to every family affected to match his determination with our own. The Omagh bombing inquiry is examining whether this atrocity could have been prevented. It is a profound and difficult question but a very necessary one. For the families, the question has never gone away as to whether something more could have been done, whether the bombing could have been stopped, whether lives could have been saved and whether those murderers could have been prevented from doing their dastardly deed. To answer that question, the inquiry needs access to evidence, co-operation and transparency. Crucially, it needs the full participation of the State. We need to be honest about what the inquiry is actually examining. Its terms of reference include alleged intelligence-sharing failures between the UK Government and the Irish authorities in the period leading up to the bombing. That is not a peripheral issue. In fact, it goes to the heart of why the co-operation of the State matters so much. There may have been information held on this side of the Border. There may have been decisions made or not made at the highest levels of the State. I certainly am not making any allegations of such but I am saying the question exists, is live and it goes through the thoughts every day of family members who lost their loved ones in Omagh. It is a question that must be answered. That is precisely why the voluntary participation of former office-holders is not an abstract procedural matter. It is potentially central to getting to the truth. This legislation creates a mechanism to allow sworn oral evidence to be taken in this jurisdiction before a High Court judge from members and former members of An Garda Síochána, the Defence Forces, senior officials and former Ministers. I absolutely welcome that. Without their co-operation, the inquiry simply cannot do its job and, without the inquiry doing its job, the families will not get the answers they deserve and for which they have fought for so long. I note the architecture that preceded this Bill. It includes the memorandum of understanding on disclosure of state materials, the data protection regulations that enable transfer of sensitive personal data and the directives to the Garda Commissioner to support co-operation. They were meaningful steps and they deserve acknowledgement. It is important to be honest about what this Bill does and does not do. Two issues sit alongside the legislation and cannot be ignored. The first is the delay in proceedings. The inquiry's evidential hearings examining the days immediately before and after the bombing were due to begin on 9 March but have been pushed back six months to 24 September. The families were informed of the delay on 6 March, three days before hearings were due to begin. Part of the reason for the delay is the sheer volume of state material still being processed. The lead counsel to the inquiry has confirmed the full Irish disclosure will not be complete until June. I want to be fair here. The inquiry's own counsel has praised the efforts of the State and An Garda Síochána in meeting deadlines. That is to the State's credit but the process is still at an early stage. For families who have waited nearly 30 years, early stage simply is not good enough. The second issue is the special advocates dispute, which is a live issue before the courts. Michael Gallagher is judicially reviewing Lord Turnbull's ruling that the inquiry has no power to appoint special advocates. The latter exist to represent the interests of excluded parties at closed hearings held in private because of national security sensitivities. The argument being made on behalf of the Gallagher family is a serious one, namely, that without special advocates, families could be entirely shut out of hearings where, in effect, findings about state failures are made. It simply cannot be right that a father who forced this inquiry into existence through decades of legal struggle could be excluded from the room when the most sensitive evidence about what the states knew is being heard. This Bill does not and cannot address that dispute, which is a matter for the courts. However, the House should put it on the record that the rights of families to meaningful participation in the process should never be negotiable. I ask the Minister to clarify the Government's position in this regard. I move to the voluntariness question. The consent requirement in the Bill runs through the entire mechanism for former office-holders of any kind; not just former Ministers but also former Garda Commissioners, senior Defence Forces officers and departmental officials. Any of them can decline to give evidence. I understand this is constitutionally necessary because we cannot compel sworn testimony before a foreign inquiry. The law has limits in that regard. Will the Government actively encourage relevant former office-holders to participate? Will it make clear that non-participation where someone holds potentially relevant evidence is not an acceptable posture? Creating the mechanism, and leaving its uptake entirely to an individual's conscience, should not be sufficient. If former officeholders have relevant evidence, they should give it, and this Government should say so plainly. This Bill was granted a waiver from pre-legislative scrutiny by the Joint Committee on Justice, Home Affairs and Migration. That was the right call, given the urgency of the legislation, and I do not criticise it for a moment. However, it means that this House bears a responsibility today to ask questions that would ordinarily arise at the pre-legislative scrutiny stage. That is what I will try to do. I encourage the Minister to engage with these questions substantively as the Bill progresses. Complexity cannot become an excuse. Two jurisdictions, sensitive material, legal constraints and constitutional limits are all real but none of that is a reason for delay or half-measures. Every delay is felt by the families. Every bureaucratic obstacle is a reminder that they are still waiting. We are a Republic and claim to value accountability, truth and the rights of citizens. The families of the victims of the Omagh bombing are citizens of this island and they deserve that the State bring the full weight of its co-operation, its institutions and its political will on their behalf. We in the Social Democrats welcome the Bill, but we will judge it not by what it enables but by what it delivers. I want to put three specific questions on the record. Will the Minister commit to a timeline for the completion of full Irish State disclosure to the inquiry? Will the Government publicly encourage former officeholders who hold relevant evidence to participate and not merely make mechanisms available? Will the Government set out its position on the special advocate's judicial review and on the rights of families to meaningful representation at closed hearings? For the families of the victims of the Omagh bombing, this is not about politics, legislation or frameworks, but is simply about the truth. It is about whether this State played any part, through action or inaction, in what happened on that hideous day. It is about whether after nearly 30 years we finally have the courage to find out. The families deserve that. Michael Gallagher deserves that. Aoibheann deserves that as do Eimear and Evelyn, lives that never even got to begin. When we speak about the brutal and horrific tragedy in Omagh, it is incumbent on me also to mention the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. I have met families living in my constituency who experienced the most profound tragedy on the day of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. They lost loved ones and were left disfigured. They also still wait for truth. So many families in so many walks of life in Ireland have asked these simple questions. What happened on that day? Why has nobody been held responsible? The families of the victims of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings are asking for the exact same thing that we are potentially delivering today, which is some degree of co-operation and truth from a jurisdiction that is not their own. For the sake of all those families, it is incumbent on us all that we demonstrate the urgency and resolve to give them the truth, however long they may have waited and had to fight. Everybody deserves to know what happened on days when their loved ones were lost, lives were changed, and cities and communities were torn apart.

Sentiment score: 0.04