International Co-operation (Omagh Bombing Inquiry) Bill 2026: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-19 ============================================================ Niall Collins (FF), Limerick County I thank Senator Murphy for his amendments, which seek to substitute section 5(2)of the Bill and, in doing so, to provide that the chairman of the inquiry would, instead of specifying the questions that he wished to have asked of an officeholder or former officeholder, specify “the topics, areas of inquiry, or matters on which the Chairman requests that evidence be taken”. I note that the Senator has not put down a similar amendment to section 6, which deals with requests for assistance from former holders of ministerial office. This would create drafting and technical difficulties with many of his other amendments to later sections of the Bill. Leaving aside that issue, the effect of this amendment would be to fundamentally alter the nature of the bespoke legal mechanism that is provided for in this Bill to assist the Omagh bombing inquiry. It would do so in two respects: first, by weakening the in-built safeguards designed to enable the taking of oral evidence for the purposes of an inquiry established in another jurisdiction; and second, by altering the role of the nominated judge of the High Court who is to act only as the conduit for the oral evidence. When considering this amendment, it is necessary to recall why a bespoke legal mechanism is required to assist the inquiry in the first place and why this legislation is required. As the Minister outlined on Second Stage, there are legal complexities that must be navigated in the relationship between Ireland, as a sovereign State, and an inquiry established under the laws of another sovereign state. While the Government is fully committed to assisting the inquiry we must ensure that we do so in a manner that is consistent with our sovereignty, our laws and our obligations to protect the safety and security of the State and the rights of citizens. Following extensive engagement with the Office of the Attorney General on how these two goals could be navigated, what is provided for in the Bill is a robust legal mechanism akin to that legislated for in 2019 to assist UK Troubles-related inquests. The mechanism enables the taking of the oral testimony in a manner that protects the rights of witnesses while also providing for the possibility of protecting sovereignty, national security and other essential interests of the State and meeting obligations to, inter alia , investigate crime, protect life and comply with data protection obligations. The Bill does this by requiring that the questions to be answered by the witness must be approved in advance by the head of the State body concerned. The proposed amendment, by only requiring the chairman to specify "topics, areas of inquiry, or matters”, is not compatible with an obligation on the head of the State body concerned under section 5(4) to refuse to accede to a request on the basis of any of the grounds listed in that subsection. The head would not have sufficiently detailed information to do so. Were the head to accede to broad topics, witnesses would be put in the invidious position at a later stage of the process of having to decide whether answering a specific question would give rise to a risk of prejudice to the security of the State and so forth. I do not believe this is a workable proposition. There is, as I have said, a second fundamental problem with the proposed amendment, and this becomes clearer when the later proposed amendment to section 9 is considered, that being, amendment No. 21. It appears that it would be for the nominated judge of the High Court to examine the witness on the “topics, areas of inquiry or matters" and decide what questions to pose. This would involve the judge putting him or herself in the place of the chairman to the inquiry but without the factual knowledge of all the material available to the chairman through the disclosure process or the chairman’s lines of investigation. This would be to greatly alter the intended role of the nominated judge, who is to act only as a conduit for the evidence. The nominated judge is not acting judicially or involved in the administration of justice. In addition, assigning the judge a decision-making role would likely raise the issue of whether the judge’s decisions could be challenged or appealed. As the Senator will be aware, Article 34.5.4° of the Constitution gives the Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction from a decision of the High Court. There is no intention to create such an avenue and doing so would certainly risk prolonging the process. I prefer our approach, as set out in Bill. It has been carefully designed to maximise the evidence available to the inquiry in a manner that is consistent with our sovereignty, our laws and our obligations to protect the safety and security of the State and the rights of citizens. We are unable to accept the amendments. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-19/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:57+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-19