NORTHERN IRELAND: Who shot Pat Finucane?

May 7, 2003
Issue 

BY DENIS OLSEN

Pat Finucane, a high-profile Catholic solicitor who acted for republican paramilitary suspects, was shot dead by the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association in front of his family in 1989.

After 14 years, three inquiries, 10,000 interviews and four tonnes of documents, comprising the biggest criminal inquiry in British history, an interim report on the latest inquiry by Metropolitan Police chief Sir John Stevens has now been published. Stevens' hesitant conclusion? The British state is guilty of murder and terrorism.

Stevens only published a 20-page summary of his 3000-page report. Nevertheless, this summary confirms what Finucane's relatives and human rights campaigners have been arguing for years.

It is the first official admission that the British army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (now renamed the Police Service of Northern Ireland) helped loyalist murder gangs in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

A secret unit of the British army, the Force Research Unit, along with the Special Branch of the RUC supplied names, addresses and photographs of Catholic targets to loyalist paramilitaries. The key person supplying the fatal information was British army agent Brian Nelson. He infiltrated the Ulster Defence Association, the biggest loyalist paramilitary group.

Nelson's information, says Stevens, was responsible for the murder of 30 Catholics. These included many people who had no connection to the IRA, including Pat Finucane. One of his killers, Ken Barrett, confessed to the murder on a TV documentary last year. He said Nelson had handed him information.

Stevens says sections of the British army and the RUC "obstructed" the inquiry at every turn, including concealing crucial information and withholding documents.

Stevens' incident room was set on fire in what he calls "a deliberate act of arson". One of the two guns used to shoot Finucane was stolen from an army barracks. The police returned it to the army which then modified it to destroy the evidence. The Stevens report concludes: "The security forces sanctioned killings. Informants and agents were allowed to operate without effective control and to participate in terrorist crimes."

Since the publication of the summary report, the family of Pat Finucane have reiterated their demand for an independent public inquiry into army-RUC collusion with loyalist death squads and all the killings that resulted from it. The family refused to cooperate with any of Stevens' enquiries, saying that the only way to get to the truth of the collusion question is for a full and public examination of all the evidence.

Pat Finucane's son, Michael, who is a solicitor, said: "The latest Stevens report is an embodiment of broken promises and dishonoured commitments. It carries the hallmark of all of Stevens' work in Northern Ireland: secrecy and repression. This hallmark has, for over 15 years, been synonymous with Stevens' work. The latest report has taken four years to deliver and cost the public £4 million.

"The Stevens' team claims to have interviewed 15,000 people, catalogued 4000 exhibits, taken 5640 statements and seized 6000 documents. None of this is available for public scrutiny.

"This report is widely believed to be some sort of 'systems analysis'; an examination of what went wrong in Northern Ireland and how that can be prevented in the future. On this level also, Stevens' work is flawed. Nothing went wrong. The 'system' worked exactly as intended and, in the British government's eyes, it worked perfectly. The policy in Northern Ireland was — and may yet be — to harness the killing potential of loyalist paramilitaries, to increase that potential through additional resources in the shape of weapons and information and to direct those resources against selected targets so that the government could be rid of its enemies. Simple policy. Simple operation. Simply chilling."

From Green Left Weekly, May 7, 2003.
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