Editorial: The PSNI officers in the Ormeau incident have at last been cleared - now we need an investigation into their treatment

​Two officers have finally been exonerated for their handling of a covid breach on the Ormeau Road in 2021.

The Belfast High Court had already – in a withering ruling – deemed unlawful a decision to suspend one of the officers and reposition the other in response to pressure from Sinn Fein.

And this move against the officers happened, it should be pointed out, when Simon Byrne, the then chief constable, watched footage of the operational incident – wholly inappropriately – alongside policing board bosses, and then betrayed his two officers for their (it later turned out) diplomatic approach to the illegal gathering. The officers had not known the sensitivities of it being a memorial to a loyalist terrorist massacre. That made the situation delicate, but did not in itself justify breaching the coronavirus rules on gatherings, which other victims of terrorism had observed by scaling down or calling off anniversary memorials.

Mr Byrne had, in yet another PSNI capitulation to republican pressure (bear in mind that this is a police force that fined elderly people who got confused by the myriad of covid rules and drove outside accepted limits to walk in the countryside), immediately found against his officers. But worse than that, cowardly police chiefs pressed ahead with disciplinary action against the officers, and found against one of them.

This has now been overturned. But it cannot be the end of the matter.

The government should long ago have found a way to step in and to investigate the role of the police ombudsman and others in this latest scandal, which was carried out to appease what has long been considered by the security and intelligence agencies (and everyone else) to be the political wing of the IRA.

The first thing that needs to happen is the release of the police officers’ bodycam footage.