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Updated: June 17, 2025
BELFAST — The public inquiry into the 1998 Omagh bombing resumed evidentiary hearings on Tuesday, June 17, 2025, with lawyers testing the theory that two dissident republican terrorist groups planned and executed the attack together as a "joint enterprise." The blast killed 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, in the worst single atrocity of the Northern Ireland Troubles.
Paul Greaney KC, the inquiry's lead counsel, told the panel that a team of "experienced terrorists" was behind the plot to bomb the County Tyrone town on August 15, 1998. He said a working hypothesis to be developed in "Chapter Three" of the inquiry's report is that the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, at an organizational level, planned and carried out the bombing together.
The hearings — delayed for six months — focus on the period immediately before and after the attack: how the plan was assembled, how the bomb car was stolen and fitted with fake license plates, and who was in the vehicles that drove into Omagh that Saturday afternoon.
Chaired by Lord Turnbull, the inquiry was established by the previous UK government to determine whether British authorities could have prevented the massacre. It is not a criminal trial, but its findings carry legal, political and historical weight.
Greaney's opening statement drew on claims of responsibility made in the days after the bombing, when anonymous callers contacted RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, and the Irish News. Those claims, he said, were consistent with other evidence pointing to the Real IRA. "But, for the inquiry," he added, "that is the start, not the end."
The joint-enterprise theory leans heavily on intelligence gathered by David Rupert, an American informant who penetrated the Real IRA for the FBI and Britain's MI5. After the attack, Rupert reported that the bombing had been a "joint operation" also involving the Continuity IRA. Greaney said the information traced back to Michael McKevitt, the Real IRA leader later found civilly liable for the bombing and imprisoned for directing terrorism.
Rupert, an American trucking businessman recruited as an agent, became so trusted inside the organization that he later testified in criminal and civil proceedings arising from the bombing — a rare example of FBI-MI5 cooperation.
The operational timeline began days before the attack. By August 12, 1998, at the latest, the plotters had a plan to steal a car to carry the bomb — and they had identified a specific model: a Vauxhall Cavalier.
In the early hours of August 13, a Cavalier was stolen from Carrickmacross in County Monaghan, just across the border in the Republic of Ireland, "effectively to order," Greaney said. Witness evidence suggests three other Cavaliers on the same street or nearby were tampered with the same night, an apparent attempt to hedge the operation or create confusion.
The stolen car was taken to Dundalk, a border town Greaney described as "the home town and base of operations" for many of the suspects the inquiry has identified as key. There it was handed to Seamus Daly — also found civilly liable for the bombing — "ready to be loaded with a bomb."
Fake license plates were fitted quickly. Greaney described the tactic as a hallmark of dissident republican attacks in the late 1990s: clone the registration of a legitimate car of the same make, model and appearance, fit it to the stolen vehicle, and reduce the chance that police checks would reveal the vehicle's stolen status. "Those transporting bombs would wish to attract as little attention as possible," he said. "This tactic … was part of the terrorist tradecraft."
Greaney said there were "sound reasons" to believe Daly was in a scout car that led the bomb-laden Cavalier into Omagh on August 15, while Séamus McKenna — now dead — was in the car carrying the device. The two-vehicle approach had a practical purpose, he said: the scout car gave the team the means to "get away quickly" after parking the bomb.
Cellphone records will be central to the hearings. Greaney said the inquiry will examine how the suspects communicated by mobile phone in the days around the attack — evidence likely to test whether the two factions coordinated the plan.
He also placed the late Colm Murphy at the center of the plot. Murphy, who died in 2023, was found liable for the bombing in civil proceedings; his criminal conviction for conspiracy to cause the explosion was overturned on appeal in 2005. "As we shall see," Greaney told the inquiry, "the evidence suggests that Colm Murphy sat like a spider at the center of the web of the plan to detonate a bomb in Omagh."
The plotters, he said, were veterans of a campaign of violence begun months earlier. "They were experienced terrorists, and they were motivated by a desire not to be caught."
The Omagh bombing was the darkest moment of a fragile peace. It came four months after the Good Friday Agreement, the US-brokered accord that ended most of the Troubles and created Northern Ireland's power-sharing government. Dissident republicans opposed to the deal hoped the bombing would wreck it; instead, the horror in Omagh turned public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic firmly against them.
For American readers, the case carries familiar threads. The FBI's use of Rupert to penetrate the Real IRA produced evidence used far beyond Omagh, and federal prosecutors in Florida pursued the group's alleged supporters. In 2004, a federal jury acquitted five men of conspiring to raise money for the Real IRA — a reminder of the burden of proving terrorist financing links from outside.
The inquiry is also testing cross-border cooperation. Most of the operational evidence lies in the Republic of Ireland, and the hearings are expected to hear a pre-recorded witness statement from a senior Garda officer about the theft of the Vauxhall Cavalier. Irish police engagement with the inquiry, after years of frustration among bereaved families, is itself a measure of the process's reach.
Relatives who spent more than two decades demanding the inquiry said the new hearings matter. Michael Gallagher, whose son Aiden was killed, said before the hearing that the case needs to go deep into the days before the bombing. "This was a cross-border crime and most of the evidential opportunities lie within the Republic," he said. "We just hope in the end we will get truth and dignity out of this process."
Claire Hayes, whose brother Alan Radford died in the blast, called the latest chapter "a long time coming" and "a pivotal point" in the inquiry process. With the bombing now 28 years past, she said, the Republic's authorities should hand over everything they know. "I want them to pass on all the knowledge they have," she said.
Lord Turnbull's report, when it is finally issued, will not and cannot undo the losses of August 15, 1998. But for the first time, an authoritative, official account may explain how two terrorist groups came together to murder 29 people in a County Tyrone town square — and why no institution moved to stop them.
