Govt. won’t reveal Carlile report
The British government has ruled out publishing “advice” it received on the murder of Derry man Kieran Doherty.
In his report into the February 2010 shooting of Kieran Doherty, Lord Carlile – the government’s independent advisor on the activities of the security services – said that MI5 had no connection to Mr. Doherty’s death.
Lord Carlile found that there was no “misbehaviour or infraction by anybody connected directly or indirectly with the public service” in connection with the murder.
However, this week at Westminster, Foyle MP Mark Durkan asked if the government had any plans to publish Lord Carlile’s report.
In a written reply, the North’s Secretary of State, Owen Paterson, ruled this out.
“It has been the practice of successive governments not to comment on matters of this nature,” he said. “I do not intend to depart from that practice or to publish Lord Carlile’s advice to me.”
In response, Mark Durkan branded the Secretary of State’s remarks as “a circular exercise in evasion.”
He added: “As Kieran Doherty’s family knows, this proves that neither Lord Carlile’s role nor any other procedure offered the sort of scrutiny or accountability for the security services in Northern Ireland that apply to the Police Service.”
Mr. Durkan said that both he and the Doherty family noted the “variation in language” used in respect of Lord Carlile’s work on the case.
“In his original letter to me, undertaking to look at the issues, he used the word ‘investigate’. In his concluding letter, he referred to his work as an ‘inquiry’.
Meanwhile, the Secretary of State now refers to Lord Carlile’s ‘review’. The Secretary of State also describes Lord Carlile’s submission to him as ‘advice’ but, elsewhere, he and the NIO have called Lord Carlile’s letter to me a ‘report’.
“The fact is that the family of Kieran Doherty do not have anything they can call a report.
The Secretary of State does not have something that he is calling a report and the letter which I received is not, contrary to NIO lines, what even Lord Carlile would call a report.”
