Nuala O'Loan knows what it is like to be caught up in an explosion. In 1976, when she was three months pregnant, she was caught up in a blast at Jordanstown where she was lecturing. She lost her baby.
A quarter century later as Police Ombudsman she is investigating the RUC's handling of the bloodiest single atrocity in 30 years of violence in the North.
Mrs O'Loan's background reflects the jumble of relationships that act as a backdrop to the Northern situation. She is an English-born Catholic who is married to an SDLP councillor, Declan O'Loan, and who still speaks with a soft but identifiable Hertfordshire accent.
Her father, Herbert, was from Dublin. She goes to Mass at Harryville church in Ballymena, the scene of a protracted loyalist picket.
Her CV is heavily inclined to the academic - she is a solicitor and has lectured in law and was once holder of the Jean Monnet Chair in European Law at the University of Ulster - but she has also worked extensively with people and their problems.
Throughout the 1990s she chaired the Northern Ireland Consumer Committee for Electricity, was convenor of the General Consumer Council's transport and energy group and was also complaints officer for the Northern Health and Social Services Board.
On a more private level she was a voluntary lay visitor to RUC stations where she spoke to those in custody, and she has worked as a voluntary marriage counsellor.
She has five sons aged between 14 and 23 and has authored more than 45 publications on policing and consumer-related issues.
Now, at 49, she is at the centre of a storm arising out of the most high profile investigation she has instigated since her Ombudsman's office opened 13 months ago.
She was appointed by the then security minister, Mr Adam Ingram, a move which was seen by many at the time as both astute and politically correct. However, she still has her detractors.
The DUP criticised her appointment. One councillor, Mr Sam Gaston, said it was impossible for the wife of an SDLP man to be impartial when it came to the police. Mr Ian Paisley jnr called on the then Secretary of State, Mr Peter Mandelson, to reverse the decision to select her.
Mr Sammy Wilson repeated his party's claims of an anti-police bias on Thursday night shortly after the leaked report on Omagh became public. He accuses her of turning the "focus of attention away from the psychotic killers and turning the blame on the police".
Mr Robert McCartney's UK Unionist Party has cited the establishment of her office as one reason for the decline in morale among police officers.
She heads an office which is staffed by 105 and has a budget of £5.7 million. It was set up on recommendations by a senior civil servant, Mr Maurice Hayes, now a member of the Seanad, who was a member of Mr Chris Patten's commission on policing which called for a new policing service for the North.
Her chief investigator in the Omagh case is Cmmdr David Woods of the Metropolitan Police in London. He has a team of more than 40, drawn from South Africa, Hong Kong, Australia and other British police forces.
The Omagh investigation was launched by Mrs O'Loan last August following revelations that a double agent working under the name Kevin Fulton had allegedly relayed intelligence concerning a dissident paramilitary attack shortly before the "Real IRA" blast killed 29 people and two unborn children and injured about 300 others.
The Ombudsman's office has received more than 5,000 complaints against the police, 30 on the first day, but the Omagh investigation was begun on her initiative, something she was empowered to do when the office was set up to underline its complete independence.