In mid-January 1989, Douglas Hogg, a junior minister in the British Home Office, rose to speak in The House of Commons. Under the cloak of parliamentary privilege, Hogg made a peculiar statement which would accrue sinister significance through subsequent events. There are, in Northern Ireland, he said, a number of solicitors who are unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA. Challenged to justify this, Hogg was evasive: I state this on the basis of advice that I have received . . . and I shall not expand on it further.
Seamus Mallon, deputy leader of the SDLP immediately protested that following this statement, people s lives are in grave danger. Less than four weeks later, Pat Finucane, a Belfast human rights lawyer, was enjoying Sunday dinner with his wife and three children. At 7.25pm, a loyalist gunman burst in and shot Finucane 14 times. He died instantly.
Pat Finucane s death, however, was not destined to pass barely noticed into the annals of the northern conflict, as many others have done. The issues surrounding his murder are so controversial that even within the last month they have been raised by the United Nations and the US Congress. The reason is simple: there are continuing suspicions that the British Establishment colluded in Finucane s assassination.
Even if it had not ended violently, Pat Finucane s life was interwoven with the fabric of the Troubles. He was the eldest of a Catholic family of eight who in 1968 lived in Percy Street, not far from the loyalist Shankill Road. When rioting broke out the following year, the family were given a choice: move out or be burned out. They moved. By then Pat was a law student at TCD, where he met Geraldine, his future wife.
Back in West Belfast, however, three of Pat s brothers had joined the IRA. One, John, was killed on active service in 1972; Dermot and Seamus were subsequently imprisoned for their activities. Years later, the UFF would claim that Pat was an intelligence officer in the IRA. They were wrong. Pat Finucane was never a member of either the IRA or Sinn Fein, nor did he ever advocate violence.
Finucane fought his battles in the legal world. In 1979 he formed Madden & Finucane with another solicitor, Peter Madden. The firm s speciality was criminal law, and they quickly earned a reputation as one of the most progressive partnerships around. They fought many cases for clients who were mistreated or falsely imprisoned by the security forces, costing the British government hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation.
Finucane was also involved in a number of high profile cases. In 1981, he represented Bobby Sands during the H-Block hunger strike, and later acted as a defence lawyer for many of those accused of paramilitary activity at the controversial supergrass trials.
These cases, and his family connections, may have fixed Pat Finucane in some minds as a Republican lawyer. In fact, Madden & Finucane also defended loyalists, and made no distinction on the basis of political beliefs when it came to taking on clients. To some people, however, this hardly mattered.
As Kevin Toolis puts it in his 1995 book Rebel Hearts: In loyalist eyes, Patrick Finucane was guilty: guilty of being the brother of two well-known IRA volunteers . . . and guilty of being the brother of a dead IRA volunteer; guilty of defending too many IRA volunteers successfully in the courts; guilty of having too high a profile; and guilty of being a smart Fenian.
It was for these supposed crimes that Pat Finucane was killed on a winter evening in 1989. No-one has ever been charged in connection with his murder. One person, however, has, in effect, admitted his involvement. His name is Brian Nelson. Ominously, during the period when he says he helped murder Pat Finucane, he was in the pay of the British Army.
Even by Northern Ireland s standards, Brian Nelson is an
enigmatic figure. Born and brought up on the Shankill Road, he is reputed to have joined the UDA in 1972. In 1974 he was convicted in relation to the kidnapping of a blind Catholic man, and sentenced to seven years imprisonment. He was released three years later.
In 1987, British Intelligence pursued Nelson to Germany, where he was working, and he returned to Belfast. He then infiltrated into the UDA, where he reached the rank of Chief Intelligence Officer.
For the next two years, Nelson is said to have told his handlers from British Intelligence about UDA plans for assassinations, arms shipments and other activities. Whether or not he told them about his own illegal actions is hotly disputed. In 1992 the then British Defence Secretary Tom King described Nelson as a valuable agent . His comments formed part of a plea of mitigation on his agent s behalf, Brian Nelson having just pleaded guilty to five counts of conspiracy to murder.
Nelson had been arrested in 1990, as a result of the Stevens Inquiry into collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. On 15th June 1991 he was charged with 34 offences, including two counts of murder. His trial, six months later, was bizarre, to say the least.
On the first day it was announced that the charges had been substantially reduced. The two counts of murder had been dropped, as had 13 other charges. The official line was that this decision had been taken after a rigorous examination of the interests of justice. Many suspected that a deal had been done to buy Nelson s silence.
Nelson pleaded guilty to all remaining charges, and only one witness was called.The former agent was sentenced to a compound total of 110 years in prison. The fact that the individual sentences were to run concurrently, however, meant that Nelson actually served only six years. He has been released, and now lives in England.
The full report of the Stevens Inquiry has never been made public. Neither has the 800-page statement which Brian Nelson made to the inquiry team. However, six months after Nelson was sentenced, the BBC s Panorama made a programme about his activities, which was broadcast in June 1992.
The programme was largely based on a journal Nelson had written while in prison. In it he claimed that he had been asked by the UDA to gather information about Pat Finucane in preparation for an assassination attempt. Nelson said he told his army handler about this. He also said that he passed a photo of Finucane to a UDA man three days prior to the murder.
If Nelson s testimony as broadcast on Panorama is true, the security forces knew in advance of the plan to murder Pat Finucane, but did nothing to prevent it. One of the groups who investigated the case was the International Human Rights Working Party of the Law Society of England and Wales. Their report contained two particularly damning accusations. They found that: The [British] Government told the UN Special Rapporteur that the DPP . . . directed that there should be no prosecution against any officer in connection with Patrick Finucane s death . Significantly, the Government did not deny that there was collusion by the Government or the security forces in relation to the murder.
The report also stated: We asked the DPP, his deputy and John Stevens about the Panorama allegations. If Panorama was right, Nelson had admitted conspiracy to murder Patrick Finucane. How then could there not be sufficient evidence to prosecute him? They said that they could not comment on individual cases.
The Nelson affair has recently taken another turn. On March 29th The Sunday Telegraph published excerpts from confidential security force documents. The newspaper claimed that these documents showed Brian Nelson to be involved in 15 murders, 15 attempted murders, and 62 conspiracies to murder.
The allegations made against the security forces were even more devastating. The documents apparently demonstrated that military intelligence s intention in having Brian Nelson inform on UDA activity was not to prevent murder; instead it was to ensure that proper targeting of Provisional IRA members [took] place prior to any shooting.
If this was true, The Sunday Telegraph pointed out, it meant that the British Government had operated a policy of assassination by proxy , assisting loyalists to murder people who the security forces wanted eliminated.
On 1st April, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, Para Cumaraswamy, published a report of his findings from a visit to Northern Ireland last October. He called on the British government to begin an independent inquiry to investigate the murder of Patrick Finucane. Within a few hours of the UN report being issued, the British refused to hold any such inquiry. There was, they said, insufficient new evidence to justify such an enterprise.
Geraldine Finucane, Pat s widow, still lives in the comfortable house in North Belfast which she shared with her late husband. She spoke amiably while preparing a packed lunch for her youngest son, John, now in his final year at school. At eight years of age he had stood in the same kitchen, and watched a gunman riddle his father with bullets. To even suspect that the State colluded in such an act must bring unimaginable frustration and anger.
Geraldine Finucane s determination to find out the truth about her husband s murder is formidable. She had hoped that the United Nations report would be a step in the right direction, and was taken aback by the swiftness with which the British government dismissed it.
I was driving down the Antrim Road with the radio on, and Cumaraswamy was being interviewed, saying how he hoped that the British would give a measured response to the report, and look at it seriously, she says. I came back here, and as soon as I came through the door John said to me, Mum, have you heard the news? The British have said no .
Although she makes no attempt to hide her frustration, Geraldine Finucane is unlikely to consider giving up.
I would get very despondent, and so would the rest of my family, if it was just us fighting against the system, she says. But gradually people are coming on board Amnesty, Helsinki Watch and the UN are all watching it, and they re determined to keep the pressure on. I just hope it doesn t take as long as Bloody Sunday.
The events leading up to her husband s death are etched on her mind:
When Douglas Hogg made that statement in the Houses of Parliament that changed everything, she says. It wasn t, as has been suggested, an accidental gaffe . He just stood up and said it. It was so shocking to realise that this was government level. You couldn t even begin to think about what that might mean.
She does not have much patience with the British argument that these events have already been investigated fully by the Stevens Inquiry. Raising her voice for the only time during the interview, she says: Stevens never spoke to me. The police have never spoken to me. After the murder, I made a statement through my solicitor about what I had witnessed. That s it. That s the only contact I have had with the police since Pat s murder. They never asked to speak to me, nor did John Stevens. And then they say there has been a full inquiry?
I have always said I wanted an independent judicial inquiry, because I felt that was the only way I was going to find anything out. The British Government now say they won t have an inquiry because it has been fully investigated. Well, fine. If it has been fully investigated, then publish Stevens. They have never done it.
It s an issue which raises questions which go to the heart of British policy in Northern Ireland.
At Brian Nelson s trial his army handler, Colonel J testified that: there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Brian Nelson was not loyal to the UDA, but loyal to the army.
Brian Nelson s own journal suggests he conspired to murder Pat Finucane. Loyalist sources say that Nelson pointed out Finucane s house to his assassins.
The question, then, is simple: If Brian Nelson assisted in the chain of events which led to Pat Finucane lying dead on his kitchen floor with 14 bullets in his body, was Nelson being loyal to his British Army superiors in doing so?
The final words, for now, go to Geraldine Finucane: People like Brian Nelson and whoever came in here and pulled the trigger . . . OK, they did wrong and they should be punished. But it is really the people behind the likes of Nelson who should be taken to task. Those people are probably sitting behind desks now, and they will never surface. And it was them who played God. They decided that my husband should die. n