Finucane Murder - Time For Action, Not Hollow Words, From Leinster House And Stormont Parties
On Monday last (November 30) the British government confirmed that it would not hold a public inquiry into the murder of Belfast solicitor, Pat Finucane ‘at this time’. The announcement was made by Brandon Lewis, the current British minister with responsibility for occupied Ireland.
Pat Finucane was shot dead in his family home in north Belfast in February 1989 by a unionist death squad working in collusion with the British state. His widow Geraldine and their three children have been campaigning for decades for a public inquiry to establish the extent of British state involvement in his murder.
In 2012, former UN war crimes prosecutor Desmond de Silva found that there had been significant levels of state collusion between unionist death squads and various British forces including M15, the British Army and Britain’s paramilitary police in Ireland, the RUC.
Among the shocking facts which de Silva discovered included:
85% of information that unionist death squads used to target people for murder originated from the British Army and RUC
270 separate instances of British intelligence being supplied to unionist paramilitaries between January 1987 and September 1989 alone
Agents working for MI5, RUC Special Branch and British Military Intelligence participated in criminality, presumably including murder
There was neither proper legal framework or even guidelines in place to control the criminality of what are known as these "participating agents"
This issue was also considered extensively at British cabinet level and ministers were made aware that agents were being run without a legal framework or guidelines. The director general of MI5 raised the issue with the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1988
In 1990 high-ranking British military officers and Minister of Defence officials provided "highly misleading and in parts, factually inaccurate advice " to the then British Defence Secretary Tom King about the British agent Brian Nelson who had been instrumental in targeting Pat Finucane
Pat Finucane’s home following his murder
These findings caused de Silva to conclude that there was a "willful and abject failure by successive Governments" in relation to the activities of Britain’s official and unofficial forces in Ireland.
Despite his own findings, de Silva bizarrely refused to call for a public inquiry into Pat Finucane's murder. In doing so, he let the British Army, MI5 and the RUC, as well as their political masters, off a hook which could have opened the Pandora’s box of British-state-sanctioned murder in Ireland.
The refusal of the British state to launch a public inquiry into Pat Finuacane’s murder does not augur well for all those who lost members of their families through the actions of state-sponsored unionist death squads.
Like the Finucane family, those families, which number in the hundreds, are also attempting to discover the truth of who really controlled and organised the death squads who murdered their loved ones. The refusal to launch a public inquiry into the Finucane murder is effectively a refusal to investigate all collusion murders.
Brian Nelson, just one of an unknown number of British agents that continue to operate with the unionist death squads
The response of the Irish political establishment to the news that Britain has again refused to launch a public inquiry into Pat Finucane’s murder has been unusually strong.
Twenty-Six County Taoiseach and Fianna Fail leader, Micheál Martin said that there had been an effort to “consistently undermine any progress to get to the truth” in relation to the Finucane murder. And further that “some dark secrets have been hidden and it’s time they were revealed”, with a public inquiry into the murder being “inevitable”.
Leo Varadkar, the current Tánaiste and leader of Fine Gael, publicly pledged his support for the Finucane family and their call for a public inquiry in February 2019, at a time when he held the office of Taoiseach.
North of the border, four of the six largest parties in Stormont - Sinn Féin, the SDLP, Alliance and the Greens - recently came together to call for a public inquiry into the Finucane murder.
It may have taken thirty years to get to this point, but we have now reached the extraordinary situation where every major political party on the island of Ireland, with the exception of the unionist parties, are now calling for a public inquiry into the murder of an Irish solicitor by agents that were controlled by the British state.
Logic dictates that those same parties must also support the calls for a wider inquiry into the hundreds of other murders that were carried out by unionist death squads working in collusion with the British state.
Collusion is not an illusion
Despite the best efforts of successive British governments, the truth about collusion cannot be suppressed indefinitely. The murder of hundreds of Irish citizens by gangs that were controlled, armed, funded and directed by the British state was an act of state terrorism without equal in modern European history - a scandal that makes all other scandals of recent decades pale into absolute insignificance.
The political elites in Leinster House and Stormont who are calling for a public inquiry into Pat Finucane’s murder must now match their words with action.
It is within their collective power to highlight the issue of collusion at a national, European and global level - to stand with the hundreds of families that lost loved ones to the death squads - to provide meaningful legal, financial and political support to those individuals and organisations which have worked tirelessly to expose collusion - to bring unprecedented pressure to bear on the British state.
If these parties fail to do so and instead continue to cooperate with the British state in Ireland, with British policing in Ireland and with the British legal system in Ireland their words about Pat Finucane will ring hollow to the many hundreds of families whose fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters were murdered by the Britain’s unofficial death squads.