In the 20 years since the Horizon computer system was first installed across the UK, nearly 20 postal workers have been prosecuted in Northern Ireland.
An investigation by the PSNI and a decision by the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) resulted in the conviction of 19 people. It is publicly known that two convictions have so far been overturned.
However, a woman questioned on suspicion of losing more than £60,000 said there were concerns within the police about the investigation.
Sinead Rainey said after she was cleared of wrongdoing: “[The police officer]asked me if I had heard about the British Post Office scandal and that I needed to pursue it further.”
Hundreds of post office operators have been prosecuted and convicted in England and Wales, with the Post Office acting as both investigator and prosecutor. Labor leader Keir Starmer on Monday called for those powers to be stripped from the company, which is wholly owned by the government.
However, the PSNI and Crown Prosecution Service also have such powers in the north, pursuing 23 post office workers between 1999 and 2019. It is currently unknown how many sub-postmasters there were and whether all of them were involved in false accounting or fraud.
Sources close to some of the cases suggest there was an over-reliance on information collected and relayed by Postal Service investigators.
Furthermore, Chief Justice Dame Siobhan Keegan overturned the conviction and said the fact that details of Horizon’s IT problems had not been disclosed left a “sense of uncertainty” about the matter.
She is delivering judgment in the case of Belfast man Alan McLaughlin, 17 years after he was convicted of false accounting offenses while manager of the Brookfield Post Office branch in Tennent Street, in 2022. He was acquitted in .
Lawyer Michael Madden said Mr McLaughlin was charged with 15 fraud-related offenses in 2005 and was awarded £10,000 in damages, but said there were problems with the Horizon system from the start. He said he knew. He even asked a third-party accountant to prepare a report to support his defense.
Patricia Fagan, now 77, from Forkhill, County Armagh, was given a nine-month suspended sentence in 2017 after being found guilty of failing to pay more than £6,000. She was acquitted in February 2023 after prosecutors raised no objections.
The Postal Service continued to pursue people even after it was widely known that there were serious problems with the Horizon system.
In 2019, the same year that a group of 39 sub-postmasters had their convictions overturned, Sinead Rainey, from County Antrim, was questioned by the PSNI over fraud charges relating to losses estimated at more than £60,000. received.
She wasn’t even a sub-postmaster, but she ran the post office on someone else’s behalf. It was inside her store.
Mr Rainey was first questioned by Post Office investigators and forced to scrape together more than £40,000, which he had borrowed mainly from his family.
She was then told there was no case to answer, the investigator added. “She asked me if I had heard about the British Post Office scandal and I needed to pursue it further.”