The issues disclosed yesterday in the Police Ombudsman's report into the RUC's handling of the Omagh bombing investigation will have to be taken up by the Northern Ireland Policing Board. This is the body which controls the RUC's successor organisation, the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
It is for this board to draw the final conclusions from the conflicting accounts of the RUC's handling of events leading up to the bombing, and the investigation prompted by the outrage.
The board has thus been given an opportunity to demonstrate - and it must do so openly and in public, in full co-operation with the new police service - that there is indeed a new beginning for policing, with the informed and effectual oversight which can make a difference.
In deciding what needs to be done, they now have the Ombudsman's full report and recommendations to study.
Basically, there are two issues to be reconciled: could the RUC have prevented the attack from the available intelligence?; and was the investigation after the bombing as thorough and competent as it should have been?
In determining how well the RUC Special Branch and the associated intelligence agencies handle any situation, it is all to easy to be wise after the event. Assessing intelligence is literally a life-and-death business in Northern Ireland. A wrong call and a terrible atrocity, like Omagh, can take place, or a highly-placed informer could be exposed and killed. In such circumstances, there is all too often a witch-hunt which appears to implicate the intelligence officers in the crime and obscure the evil and ruthlessness of the terrorists.
For very good reasons, the Special Branch generally does not and cannot respond. This vow of silence is all the more necessary on the overwhelming number of occasions it gets it right. Then the need to protect sources and methods is all the more pressing as terrorists seek to uncover informers, often brutally trying to identify the means of what they see as betrayal.
Against this background, it must never be forgotten that, despite their inevitable human errors, there are hundreds, and probably thousands, of people alive in Britain, Ireland and further afield today, because of the past work of the Special Branch and its undercover allies and sources.
Understandably, these professional pressures and the environment of secrecy have, over 30 years, produced an elitist "force within a force" mentality. Officers have had to be hand-picked for their capability and discretion and, once initiated, they tend to stay for prolonged periods. Thus there is a gulf, and even fear of them, among the operational uniform officers and detectives who are regularly asked to act on cryptic warnings and coded instructions.
The need to remove this gulf has already been recognised in the Patten report, and moves to more fully integrate the Branch and CID have already begun. Both units are now under the command of a single assistant chief constable and there is an accelerating rotation of officers between the two.
In the light of the Omagh report, the board will have to satisfy itself that this process is carried through and ensure there is a proper balance between the maintenance of an accountable intelligence-gathering and analysis capacity and the level of the cordons of secrecy and elitism.
In satisfying itself that the investigative capacity of the CID is efficient and effective, the board faces an equally important task. While independent investigation of complaints against the police was the core value of the creation of the role of Police Ombudsman, it was originally envisaged that the investigative force would include some local police officers, working on short-term, career-enhancing secondments.
However, when she was appointed Ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan decided against this, and so her 40-strong investigative force was recruited from Britain and further afield.
Undoubtedly there are advantages in this in demonstrating the independence of the role, but also difficulties, in that applying "book standards" to the exceptional policing environment in Northern Ireland is not always appropriate.
One of the criticisms in the Stalker report on the controversial "shoot-to-kill" incidents in the 1980s was that the RUC failed to conduct adequate forensic and ballistic examinations at the scenes of the shootings. What that suggestion failed to recognise was the danger in doing so. Police in Manchester could easily seal off a crime scene for days and conduct prolonged fingertip searches, but in places like south Armagh, the scene-of-crime officers and those deployed to protect them were constantly exposed to the risk of sniper or bomb attack. So they were forced to work expeditiously, with far from ideal standards.
The investigative burden imposed on the RUC by 30 years of violence has been enormous. At one time in the early 1970s, 400 detectives had 412 murders under investigation, and in subsequent years it was not uncommon for a sergeant and a couple of constables to be handling a murder investigation which, in Britain, would have been the responsibility of a detective chief superintendent and a 100-strong murder squad. Bringing book standards to bear on the Omagh investigation must therefore be done with caution.
In the RUC's favour, it must be said that a formal review of the original inconclusive investigation was launched last year, and, as a direct result of its findings, a new 20-strong team of detectives, drafted in from all over Northern Ireland, was established to go back over the ground, again in close co-operation with the Garda S∅ochβna. Even the most skilled team of detectives can miss a vital clue or linkage sitting under their noses. A fresh pair of eyes, the theory goes, may not.
As the Policing Board examines the background to the Omagh tragedy, it must not take sides as between the Ombudsman and the Chief Constable, nor must it engage in recrimination. Its primary task on behalf of the community, and especially the families of the bereaved of Omagh and the survivors, is to learn and apply the lessons.
The history of the RUC cannot be rewritten, but the future of the new Police Service can be shaped and moulded, and it must be.
Chris Ryder, a former member of the Police Authority for Northern Ireland, is the author of RUC: A Force Under Fire, (Mandarin, 1989)