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Judges uphold ruling holding Michael McKevitt and fellow Real IRA member responsible for 1998 atrocity The Real IRA’s founder, Michael McKevitt, has lost his appeal against a historic civil case ruling that held him responsible for the Omagh bomb atrocity in 1998. The court of appeal in Northern Ireland upheld the 2009 ruling against McKevitt and fellow Real IRA figure Liam Campbell on Thursday. But in a mixed day for the Omagh victims’ families, the judge in the Belfast court directed a civil retrial of the claims against Colm Murphy, and Seamus Daly’s appeal has been allowed. The court will hear arguments for a retrial. In 2009, a judge found the men liable for the single biggest massacre of the Ulster Troubles, awarding £1.6m damages to some of the families’ victims. That decision opened the way for the victims of other terrorist atrocities in Ireland and overseas to consider taking civil legal action against armed groups responsible for their injuries or relatives’ deaths. Twenty-nine people and a pair of unborn twins were killed when the Real IRA car bomb exploded in the County Tyrone town in August 1998. Lawyers for the families had also appealed against the compensation awarded. They said it should have been more because of the scale of the outrage. The 12 relatives who took the 2009 case were told by the court that the £1.6m figure awarded to them would not be increased. No one has ever been convicted in a criminal court of causing the deaths of the Omagh victims. The only man to face criminal charges over the Omagh killings, Sean Hoey from Jonesborough in south Armagh, was acquitted in 2007. None of the men being sued has the capacity to make any kind of large-scale payment. From the start the families made clear the civil action was a vehicle for putting as much information as possible into the public domain about the bombing and the men they claim were involved. In his 2009 ruling, Mr Justice Morgan also found the dissident republican organisation the Real IRA liable for the bomb. He said it was clear that the bombers’ primary objective was to ensure that the bomb exploded without detection, and the safety of those members of the public in Omagh town centre was at best a secondary consideration. He said he was “satisfied that those involved in the planning, preparation, planting and detonation of the bomb recognised the likelihood of serious injury or death from its detonation but decided to take that risk”. McKevitt founded the Real IRA in November 1997 following a split within the Provisional IRA (PIRA) over the terms of Sinn Féin’s entry into party talks that led to the Good Friday agreement in 1998. He was at one time the PIRA’s quarter-master general – effectively the man in charge of their secret arsenal of weapons. McKevitt is also the brother-in-law of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. His wife, Bernadette, Sands’s sister, has denounced the Sinn Féin peace strategy and claimed it was a betrayal of what her brother died for in the Maze prison in 1981. Real IRA Omagh bombing Northern Ireland UK security and terrorism IRA Henry McDonald guardian.co.uk