Northern Ireland Office ‘should have protected’ murdered solicitor
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Newly released documents show senior official accepted that Rosemary Nelson should have been offered help. The murdered solicitor Rosemary Nelson should have been offered protection by the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), a senior official accepted, according to newly released documents.
Nelson was killed by a loyalist car bomb outside her home in Lurgan, County Armagh in March 1999. The 40-year-old rose to prominence after taking on a number of high-profile clients, including suspected republican terrorists as well as the family of a Catholic man murdered by a loyalist mob, and a nationalist residents’ group opposing Orange Order parades in the infamous Drumcree standoff.
By the mid-1990s Nelson, who had three children, alleged security force intimidation and reported receiving death threats from loyalists. Her claims that Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers were threatening her while interviewing her clients echoed the experience of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, who was shot by loyalists in 1989.
Shortly before her killing, the NIO offered protection to two of her clients, the Portadown councillors Breandán Mac Cionnaith and Joe Duffy, who were campaigning against Orange Order demands to march on Garvaghy Road. However, the NIO decided not to offer the same to Nelson.
The NIO’s most senior official, Joe Pilling, later accepted in conversation with Irish diplomats that “with the benefit of hindsight the NIO ought perhaps to have actively sought her out on this”, according to newly unsealed reports of the conversation from the Irish National Archives.
