Evidential hearings in the independent public inquiry into the 1998 Omagh bombing commenced in Belfast on Monday, with legal counsel setting out details regarding the dissidents believed to have planned the attack.

Paul Greaney KC, lead counsel to the inquiry chaired by Lord Turnbull, told the hearing that late dissident republican Colm Murphy acted as a central organizer in the plot. Greaney stated that evidence suggests Murphy "sat like a spider at the centre of the web" of the conspiracy to detonate a car bomb in the County Tyrone market town.

Addressing the tribunal, Greaney outlined a working hypothesis of how the operation was coordinated, stating that by August 12, 1998, a plan was in place to acquire a specific vehicle—a Vauxhall Cavalier—to transport the device. The Real IRA bomb exploded on August 15, 1998, killing 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, and injuring more than 200 others.

Murphy, a Dundalk-based contractor who died in 2023 at the age of 70, was found liable for the bombing in a landmark civil trial brought by victims' relatives. He was originally convicted of conspiracy in a Dublin court in 2002, but that verdict was overturned on appeal in 2005, and he was cleared following a criminal retrial in 2010.

The statutory inquiry was established by the UK government to examine whether UK state authorities could reasonably have prevented the atrocity, focusing on intelligence handling, security operations, and post-explosion investigations.