So suddenly the news media around the globe have become aware of one the most widely-known secrets in Irish and British politics. As part of the Peace Process of the late 1990s and early 2000s dozens of former Volunteers of the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army sought by the British authorities were recognised as having de facto immunity under UK law. The so-called “on-the runs” (OTRs) were guaranteed non-prosecution in very carefully phrased legal language by the government of Britain, language that allowed the folks in London to keep face by not publicly acknowledging that the past actions of the insurgents were political or military in nature while in private doing exactly that. In politics as in war obfuscation is king.
Family Motto: Faith and Fortitude
Pat graduated in Law from
Trinity College Dublin.
“Dad represented anyone who asked for his help, religion or politics didn’t matter to him. He was just a brilliant legal advocate who succeeded in exposing what the state was doing.That is why he was murdered.”
As an outstanding solicitor, he exposed the physical abuses of suspects being questioned by police in Castlereagh and Gough police stations.
January 1989: Pat Finucane won a landmark case forcing the RUC officers to give evidence at Shoot-To-Kill inquests which had been repeatedly adjourned throughout the 1980s as the policemen involved refused to give evidence. The British government immediately announced it would appeal the ruling to the House of Lords.
12 February 1989: Pat was shot dead in front of his wife and young children as they sat down to Sunday dinner on at their home in Belfast. The gunman, the man who supplied the weapon and at least one other loyalist involved in the plot were security force informers
Northern Ireland’s Finance Minister DUP member Sammy Wilson “What makes the death of Pat Finucane any more tragic or important than the death of RUC officers or UDR soldiers or ordinary shoppers and workmen who were murdered by terrorists over the last 35 years?“
Martin Finucane, (brother) “The murder went to the heart of the security services, the judicial system and indeed government. It is a prominent example, perhaps the most prominent we have yet witnessed, of collusion, the state’s policy of murder by proxy, using Loyalist assassins as the killers. “Pat’s case is the very definition of an everyman crime because his murder was something that could have happened to any of us if the whim or ‘interest’ of the state decreed it,”
Inquiry? 2001: the Irish and British governments asked Justice Peter Cory,
a former Judge of the Canadian Supreme Court to conduct a review of six cases involving allegations of collusion and to make recommendations on the need for inquiries. The two Governments agreed to act as the judge recommended. 2004: Justice Cory stated he “had found sufficient evidence of collusion to warrant a public inquiry and recommended one should be conducted as soon as possible”
No Inquiry
Since 2004, the British Government has repealed all existing laws relating to public inquiries. 2005:Inquiries Act 2005, Sections 19 and 20 give government ministers exclusive power to restrict public access to information and to order that all or part of “public” inquiries should be held in private. The Irish government, Sinn Fein and the SDLP severely criticized this Act Mrs Finucane: “They appear to be saying that, unless we agree that British government ministers should be allowed to control what information the inquiry is permitted to examine in public, there will be no inquiry at all,”
Query : What is the truth?
Answer: What the Government wants us to know — nothing more, nothing less.
October 2011:
prominent British lawyer, and former United Nations Chief War Crimes Prosecutor in Sierra Leone was appointed to head a Review into collusion by the security services and other agencies of the state in the 1989 murder of the high profile Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane. 12 December 2012: The Review shows
Here’s Panorama’s view of what Brian Nelson, Ken Barratt, the FRU, the Stevens Inquiry and RUC Special Branch had to do with the murder of Pat Finucane
Founding father of Unionism, who made no outstanding contribution to British politics
On this Day February 9 1854 Edward Carson, lawyer and Unionist leader, was born in Dublin.He was raised and educated in Dublin, graduating in law from
Trinity College, and died in Kent, England.
As a barrister ( QC 1889) his main claim to fame was defending the Marquess of Queensberry against Oscar Wilde.
Wilde, who had known Carson at Trinity, remarked
“No doubt he will pursue his case with all the added bitterness of an old friend.”
Wilde was bankrupted, prosecuted for gross indecency in a second trial, found guilty and sentenced to 2 years’ hard labour, after which he moved to France, where he died penniless. Let’s consider Wilde’s legacy
and Carson’s. He was the first signatory of the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant against Home Rule in 1912.
Historians have taken a different view of his actions. One denounced
Carson and his associates as “traitors” and recalled that under their leadership “rebellion was openly preached, men were drilled and arms were landed, the assistance of the Kaiser was invoked, the forces of the Crown were defied and their commanders were seduced from their allegiance”
In June 1920 Carson made an inflammatory speech at Finaghy, telling the assembled Orangemen: ‘We in Ulster will tolerate no Sinn Féin’.
Comment: That was prescient, wasn’t it? No man can stop the march of a nation – even if most DUP MLAs won’t so much as pass the time of day with their Sinn Fein counterparts in Stormont
Within two weeks loyalist gangs expelled 10,000 Catholics and several hundred Protestant socialists from the shipyards, engineering firms and mills in Belfast and neighbouring towns. Over the next two years 23,000 people, mainly Catholics, were driven from their homes in the city. The Irish government estimated that 50,000 persons left the North permanently in response to the violence and intimidation of these years.
English Heritage denied Edward Carson the founding father of unionism a commemorative blue plaque, saying “his careerin British politics was not sufficiently outstanding to justify commemoration”.
Comment: Hardly surprising since he fomented rebellion against government policy. Though Oscar got one!
Yet Carson was held in sufficient reverence in his day to merit a British state funeral
Despite the commentary in the newsreel his ultimate political goal ended in failure.
He desired an unpartitioned Ireland to remain within the UK.
A Northern Ireland statelet was a poor second prize.
He chose not to live in the Northern Ireland after it was set up but
his statue still looms over Stormont
People toppled statues of Lenin
and Stalin
They blew up Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin and sang songs about it
Isn’t it time for sun to set on this monument to failure?
An Active Service Unit of the Irish Republican Army sets up a vehicle-checkpoint, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1994 (Image: © Rory Nugent, used with permission) 
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