More civil actions?
I began the day in the Stormont members dining room, where Sir Patrick Cormack and his Northern Ireland affairs committee were launching what they billed as their "most important" report yet. It covered the fallout from John Ware's Panorama documentary about Omagh, which suggested that intercept material from GCHQ had not been made available quickly enough to those investigating the 1998 bombing. The Committee expressed intense annoyance that their chairman had not been allowed to see Sir Peter Gibson's full report on the matter. They also called for a further investigation into how the intelligence was shared (or not shared) between the old RUC Special Branch and the investigating team.
Presumably because of the general disquiet at Westminster about the length and cost of the Bloody Sunday inquiry Sir Patrick's committee stopped short of accepting the Omagh families' demand for a full public inquiry.
However they did argue that the government should look in the future at funding civil cases taken by victims of terrorism, like the one launched by the Omagh families (which is currently being appealed). Sir Patrick told me this was not a panacea for all such cases, and appearing on Stormont Live the committee member Alasdair McDonnell argued that the criminal law must be the first resort. But if funding was more readily available it's easy to imagine other family groups resorting to the courts, perhaps in relation to events prior to 1998 in which they know that even if the perpetrators were prosecuted they would be subject to the early release scheme contained within the Good Friday Agreement.
I'm 
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