'My being a former police officer has caused perceptual problems that I am biased towards the police," Al Hutchinson, the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman, told a Stormont committee last week as he announced he will step down on June 1, 2012.
There was more to it than that.
Hutchinson, a former assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, is the latest victim of the Troubles that raged across Northern Ireland in the last three decades of the 20th century.
The bitterness over what he called the "narratives carefully constructed over 30 or 40 years" dragged him down.
The immediate cause was a report that Hutchinson commissioned from Dr Michael Maguire, the head of Criminal Justice Inspection Northern Ireland. This followed the damaging leak of a resignation letter from Hutchinson's chief executive Sam Pollock which alleged government interference in the ombudsman's work. Hutchinson hoped to put an end to infighting within his office and to find ways of restoring confidence in it.
If he thought Maguire's report would restore a spirit of teamwork and common purpose to the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI), Hutchinson was mistaken. As soon as Maguire's document was sent to him for fact checking, it was leaked and the contents were damning. It found that there had been a "lowering of independence" in the ombudsman's office since Hutchinson took over from Nuala O'Loan in 2007.
Much of the trouble revolved around PONI reports on three Troubles atrocities that, between them, claimed 30 lives. They were the UVF massacres at Loughinisland and McGurk's bar in Belfast, and the IRA bombing of the village of Claudy. Maguire found that senior PONI officials asked to be dissociated from investigation reports after they were redrafted to reduce criticism of the police, though Maguire found the redrafting was justified in some cases.
The McGurk's report flip-flopped twice. It was a particularly contentious case because the RUC had suggested the bomb that went off in the crowded Catholic bar in 1971 was being made there by the IRA. Hutchinson found that the "myth of an IRA own goal" was perpetrated for years until one of the UVF bombers was caught and convicted by the RUC, who revised its theory in the face of new evidence. This lengthy delay cast a slur over the innocent people killed in the bar, as well as causing distress and anger to relatives and survivors, many of whom were convinced there had been a cover-up, perhaps even collusion, aimed at assisting the UVF killers.
An early draft of the report shown to families by PONI was critical of the police. However, when a report was published in July 2010, many of the criticisms had been removed and the names of the dead were incorrect. The report was rejected by the families and was withdrawn by Hutchinson. The final version was highly critical of the RUC, accusing them of "investigative bias" but stopped short of using the word "collusion" which many survivors wanted to hear.
This time it was the turn of Matt Baggott, the PSNI chief constable, to formally reject the report's findings at a public meeting of the Northern Ireland Policing Board. He believed that the original police investigators had been following the evidence in an unbiased way. Now the families are threatening to sue Baggott, an English officer who never served here during the Troubles. In short, it is a mess.
Without passing judgment on the right and wrongs of individual reports, Maguire said that much of the problems were down to poor leadership, and a lack of confidence in Hutchinson from senior staff. They and the general public had a perception that reports could be "buffeted" into changing direction by pressure from the government, the PSNI or victims.
Members of staff were suspicious.
One said he believed there was an agreement to remove criticism of RUC Special Branch from reports. Maguire found no such agreement. Some employees felt they were not being given the whole picture and that information gathered through intelligence was not properly presented.
They did not believe assurances from Hutchinson, and there were serious divisions among senior management.
That all said, Maguire told the Stormont justice committee that if he had a complaint against the police, he would be happy to bring it to the ombudsman's office under Hutchinson's leadership. His report deals with only two pre-Troubles complaints. One of them, now the subject of civil litigation, goes back to 2003 and the second, arising from the shooting of a robber by an offduty police officer, concerned the interpretation of a rule which Maguire said needed to be clarified.
So if it had not been for the Troubles cases, there would be no crisis in the ombudsman's office. O'Loan managed to use such cases to establish her credibility. She was highly critical of the RUC in her report on the Omagh bombing, and later in her Ballast report into UVF murders in North Belfast. This meant that when she found in the police's favour, for instance after they fired plastic bullets during riots, her independence was not questioned. For Hutchinson, it has gone the other way. Rows over historic cases have poisoned his work and caused splits among his staff. Some of the criticism is unfair. It has been claimed that former police officers dominate his workforce, but he produced figures showing there are proportionately more people from a police background on other oversight bodies such as the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission. Originally, PONI was only supposed to look into cases more than a year old in exceptional circumstances.
However, the establishment of the PSNI's Historical Enquires Team (HET) has scuppered that proviso. HET is working its way through all of the Troubles killings, and where it finds a case involving allegations of police wrongdoing, it must pass that to PONI. So far it has passed 127 cases, going back to the 1970s, and there are at least 40 more in the pipeline.
So Hutchinson has a separate directorate, which will shortly be more than doubling its budget and staff, and hopes to have it operational by the time he retires next June. He is designing it to be "severable" so that it could removed from PONI and transferred to any new body examining the Troubles with a minimum of fuss. He feels that unless this happens, his successor will inevitably find their work poisoned by the toxic residue of the past. "A new person could have a honeymoon period of a year or so before they are tainted," he said.
He is right. Unless a bespoke body is established to handle the legacy of the 20th century divisions, they have the capacity to destroy institutions needed to deal with 21st-century problems.
