The Barr Tribunal report into the shooting a man by Irish police in Co. Longford was issued in PDF format yesterday. It’s a sad story about a mentally ill man who was shot soon after he emerged from his besieged house carrying a shotgun. Obviously, no one should ever walk towards a police cordon carrying a loaded shotgun, but there was no need for this man to die. According to the report, the man had bad relations with police after he was falsely accused of burning a mascot goat without any evidence, but the negotiator who dealt with him during the siege was not aware of these issues. There were many other simple mistakes made, and altogether they contributed to the incident’s unfortunate end.
I’ve made a copy of the 700-page report available (28 Mbyte PDF), as it is obviously of major public interest (if only because it cost EUR 18m to write) and doesn’t seem to be available anywhere else on the Internet.