Member's statement: Omagh Bombing Inquiry
Member's statement by Mr Timothy Gaston on .
- MLA
- Mr Timothy Gaston
- Party at the time
- Traditional Unionist Voice
- Date
- 13 October 2026
- Type
- Member's statement
- Business
- Members' Statements
- Heading
- Omagh Bombing Inquiry
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5789458
Read the official Assembly record
Text
Yesterday, I reminded the House of the character reference that comes with the convicted terrorist Breandán Mac Cionnaith, whom nationalism has enthroned as the chief constable of the Garvaghy Road. Breandán Mac Cionnaith is the man who bombed the heart out of Portadown. He is the man who has led Sinn Féin, the dissidents and its new bedfellows in the SDLP by the nose for the past three weeks.
It is not just the events at Drumcree that should remind us of the evil of men such as Mac Cionnaith. Data supplied by the British embassy in Dublin to the Government of the Irish Republic shows that, in 1981, the year of the Mac Cionnaith bombing, 95·7% of the explosives recovered in Northern Ireland came from Irish Industrial Explosives — explosives supposedly used for quarrying south of the border — yet, as with much of the Provo campaign, Dublin turned a blind eye to what was going on.
Seventeen years after Mac Cionnaith bombed Portadown, the Real IRA bombed Omagh. Yesterday, at the Omagh bombing inquiry, we found out that Dublin turned a blind eye to republican terror then too. After years of trying to blame the RUC for the inaction that allowed the bomb to come into the town centre, the truth finally emerged yesterday at the inquiry: the Irish Army received a tip-off the night before but failed to pass it on. It received a call from Bundoran on 14 August warning that a car bomb was headed for Omagh. What did the Irish Army do with that information? Did it pass it to the RUC? No, it did not. It did not even write up a note of it until two days after the bombing, and it then tried to deny any link to it. For years, Dublin has shown a real lack of cooperation. We now have crucial evidence that shows that the Republic did nothing to interrupt the Omagh bomb's travelling from its territory to Northern Ireland. Portadown and Omagh were 17 years apart, but both raise this question for Dublin: why were the warnings not acted on and the explosives not stopped? The Irish Republic was an active participant in ethnic cleansing along the border counties here. It is time that it be held accountable.
381 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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