AN official inquiry has found that claims by a disgraced garda sergeant that senior officers had ignored vital intelligence before the Omagh bomb atrocity has concluded the allegations are without foundation.
The inquiry into the allegations made by Detective Sergeant John White was headed by former senior civil servant Dermot Nally. It was established in 2002 and reported a year later but has not been published for legal and security reasons. The three-man study group in the so called 'Nally Report' found that the claims made by Det Sgt John White were motivated solely by concerns about his own career.
An edited version of the Nally report has now been published by Tanaiste and Justice Minister Michael McDowell on his department's site and made available in the Oireachtas library.
The inquiry, headed by the former secretary to the Government, Dermot Nally, found there was no foundation for the allegations made by Det Sgt White to the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O'Loan, or more recently to the senior investigating officer of the PSNI Omagh bomb investigation team.
It found that those claims were "a direct consequence of and motivated solely by concerns arising from the difficulties in which he found himself with his superiors in the Garda Siochana and with the criminal law". Det Sgt White was strongly criticised by the Morris Tribunal examining corruption and malpractice in the force in Donegal.
Last July, he was acquitted by a jury of a charge of planting a shotgun at a Travellers' camp at Burnfoot and he was also found not guilty last year of charges of perverting the course of justice and making false statements. The Real IRA bomb attack on Omagh on August 15, 1998, killed 29 people and injured around 300.
Det Sgt White subsequently claimed to Mrs O'Loan and later to the PSNI investigating officer that intelligence he had supplied to the garda's crime and security branch that the Real IRA had "obtained" a car on the eve of the blast had not been passed on to the then RUC.
INCREDIBLE
The Nally group, which also included a member of the Independent Monitoring Commission on paramilitarism, Joe Brosnan, and former Director of Public Prosecutions, Eamon Barnes, said it had given every opportunity to Det Sgt White to clarify his assertions that his allegations were based on a sense of personal guilt and responsibility for the Omagh atrocity. But it concluded that those assertions were "inherently incredible".
It became clear to the group that Det Sgt White had not passed on any of his claims before he became aware he was under investigation over Donegal.
Minister McDowell explained the reason an edited version of the report was published.
"To remove those elements unrelated to Detective Sergeant White's allegations concerning matters associated, in some fashion, with the Omagh bombing, as well as to remove elements which might jeopardise covert Garda operational procedures and/or national security and to protect the identities of members of the Garda Siochana and civilians who feature only tangentially in the narrative and against whom no allegations were made," Minister McDowell said.
