Official says NIO should have offered Rosemary Nelson protection ‘in hindsight’
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The Northern Ireland Office (NIO) should have done more to offer protection to murdered solicitor Rosemary Nelson, a top official accepted “in hindsight”, according to newly released documents. Mrs Nelson was killed by a loyalist car bomb outside her home in Lurgan, Co Armagh in March 1999.
The 40-year-old mother of three’s legal practice in Lurgan, Co Armagh, dealt with mainly routine cases, but she rose to prominence after taking on a number of high-profile clients. They included suspected republican terrorists as well as the family of a Catholic man murdered by a loyalist mob, plus a nationalist residents’ group opposing Orange Order parades in the infamous Drumcree stand-off.
By the mid-1990s she had started to allege security force intimidation and reported receiving death threats from loyalists. Her claims that RUC officers were threatening her while interviewing her clients echoed the experience of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, who was shot by loyalists in 1989.
Shortly before her killing the NIO offered protection to two of her clients, Portadown councillors Breandan McCionnaith 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 Mrs Nelson because she had not sought it, she was not a member of the Garvaghy Road residents’ coalition, and she was not a councillor.
The NIO’s top 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.
