'Lessons to be learned'- Baggott

Following Monday's inquest, which found the force and two councils were partly to blame for the deaths, Mr Baggott said there were lessons to be learned from the tragedy.

"It is wrong to say that nobody cares. Of course people care, police officers are there to protect people and everybody will be feeling hugely saddened that we were unable to do so," he said.

But Mr Baggott, who took over as the new chief constable in Northern Ireland last week, stopped short of apologising for the failure of his former force - despite demands for him to do so by NI Policing Board member Basil McCrea.

Instead, the police chief insisted the findings of the inquest had also raised questions about other State agencies involved.

"It raises some big questions about how you can manage individual family needs amongst a backdrop of a significant call for police resources over a period of time and it raises questions over the way in which the agencies - the health, the caring agencies, social services - actually understand what is happening within a family when the complexity isn't always apparent on the surface," he said.

"So there are lessons to be learned, and it would be wrong of me not to say everyone is deeply saddened - huge sympathy for the family - and there will be lessons learned which will be taken forward."

Mr Baggott was in charge of Leicestershire police from 2002 until this year.

Monday's inquest found that Ms Pilkington killed herself and her daughter in 2007 after repeatedly asking for help with bullying and anti-social behaviour.

Mr McCrea, an Ulster Unionist MLA who sits on the Policing Board - which is effectively Mr Baggott's boss - vowed to question the chief constable about the incident at the board's next meeting.

"I would expect him to make a statement on it," he said.

"I would expect him to offer his own personal apologies given that he was responsible, and I would expect him to tell us what lessons have been learned so that it does not happen in Northern Ireland."

Dissidents

Meanwhile the Chief Constable has declared that he will treat dissident republican groups as criminal gangs.

Warning that the threat from breakaway factions was serious, Matt Baggott said it was a huge mistake to see terrorism as isolated from criminality.

"I think it's very helpful to see it as a criminal enterprise," he said.

Mr Baggott was speaking in Dublin after his first official meeting with his counterpart in the Irish Republic, Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy.

Both insisted that the "truly impressive" co-operation between their police forces would continue to be key in the fight against the likes of the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA.

Mr Murphy dismissed suggestions that gangland criminality in the Republic was straining resources available to fight the terrorist threat.

The Garda Commissioner said key specialist units were keeping a presence along the border, after the recent discovery of a massive bomb, as well as dissident republican road checkpoints in South Armagh.