Published Wednesday, 09 December 2009
Failings in how the authorities managed double rapist McElhill before he torched the family home in Omagh need to be fully examined and lessons learned, according to the area's MP.
On Tuesday, a coroner ruled that the 36-year-old heavy drinking depressive, who was abusing a teenage babysitter in the months before the fire and had a history of suicide attempts, doused the hallway of the Lammy Crescent terraced house with petrol and lit it when his partner Lorraine McGovern, 29, threatened to leave him.
The couple and their five young children all died in the inferno in November 2007.
Last year an independent review of the handling of the family's case by social workers and other statutory agencies flagged up a catalogue of mistakes and oversights.
In the wake of the inquest ruling, Sinn Fein West Tyrone MP Pat Doherty has demanded a rigorous investigation of the circumstances and why warning signs were not acted upon.
"Following the inquest findings I am even more convinced that the case was not handled properly and that there is a clear need for a full public inquiry to determine how these failures occurred and to determine measures to ensure that never again could such a sequence of events be allowed to culminate in such tragic events," he said.
The review carried out by Henry Toner QC revealed that less than a month before the tragedy the family's eldest child - 13-year-old Caroline - called the police to report a raging argument between her parents.
But while officers investigated, no one interviewed the schoolgirl herself. And though the police then passed the file to the local health trust, no social care follow-up visit was undertaken.
Caroline again dialled 999 on the night of the fire, but by then it was too late. When body was found inside the gutted house the phone was still clasped in her hand.
She died along with her siblings, Sean, seven, four-year-old Bellina, one-year-old Clodagh and 10-month-old baby James.
The Toner review also found that only weeks before the fire, the family's case, which had been classed as an "orange" priority after concerns were raised about the risk Mr McElhill posed to his children, was downgraded to "green".
The inquiry noted that not all agencies were aware that Mr McElhill, who fathered Caroline with Ms McGovern when she was just 15, had twice been found guilty of indecently assaulting 17-year-old girls in the 1990s, resulting in his imprisonment in 1998.
Mr Doherty said the review and the subsequent inquest raised serious questions about how the authorities handled such cases.
"I believe that the public are sufficiently disturbed to conclude that the only avenue that can reassure the public that this could not happen again is through a full public inquiry," he said.
A spokeswoman for Health Minister Michael McGimpsey said he would consider the coroner's findings in full.
"The matter of a public inquiry is not just an issue for the Minister of Health alone, but for the statutory agencies involved in child protection and the management of sex offenders," she added.