After the collapse of the trial of Chris Ward the Police Service of Northern Ireland yet again comes under critical scrutiny for its handling of a big investigation.

Sir Hugh Orde, its Chief Constable, has presided over three of the UK’s most controversial cases – the 1998 Omagh bombing, the Northern Bank robbery and the murder of Robert McCartney – at the end of which he has scored a legal 0-3 with not a single conviction achieved.

A harder question to answer is how much blame should be shouldered by Sir Hugh and how much is the result of the peculiarities created by the peace process and the blurred point at which justice and politics meet in Northern Ireland.

Other investigations that have not yielded charges include the shooting dead of the British agent and senior Sinn Fein member Denis Donaldson and the beating to death of Paul Quinn by attackers that his family swears were IRA men.

Sir Hugh was not in charge when the Real IRA bombed Omagh. But it was his officers who brought Sean Hoey to court. He was acquitted amid scathing criticism of the police from the judge.

Sir Hugh replaced Sir Ronnie Flanagan in 2002 after the Royal Ulster Constabulary was replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland as part of the peace process. He was at the helm for the Northern Bank raid investigation in Belfast in December 2004. Almost three weeks after the raid he told a news conference in Belfast: “In my opinion the Provisional IRA were responsible for this crime.” His delay in publicly attributing blame – in a province where the police were usually more swift to do so – may have been because of the febrile political atmosphere of the time.

Days before the robbery No 10 was briefing reporters that Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists were about to do a power-sharing deal with Sinn Fein.

The Northern Bank raid, followed swiftly by the murder of Robert McCartney by a republican mob in a pub brawl, threatened to unravel all the patient, mind-numbing choreography that led from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to the restoration of Stormont.

Significantly the chief constable, in accusing the IRA of the Northern Bank robbery, said that he had not bowed to any pressure to attribute blame but was doing so now because it made “operational sense”. Right on cue, proving the chief constable’s instincts right, Martin McGuinness, now Deputy First Minister, accused Sir Hugh of making “nothing more than politically biased allegations”.

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