Any inquiry ordered by the British Government may fail to uncover the truth
about the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.
Pressure on Tony Blair to establish an inquiry increased last week after the
former Loyalist paramilitary and special branch informer Ken Barrett pleaded
guilty to the 1989 killing. However, a number of factors, including recent
rulings by senior British judges on intelligence information and human rights law,
may prevent an inquiry probing to the heart of the matters raised by the
murder.
Barrett, 41, confessed to having been one of two Ulster Defence Association
gunmen who smashed into Finucane's north Belfast home on February 12th 1989 and
pumped 14 shots into the 39-year-old in front of his wife and three children.
The court heard that a RUC detective had taped Barrett in 1991 boasting about
his role but that this information had been suppressed by special branch
officers out to protect the killer in his function as a police informer. Barret's
guilty plea meant that no detail emerged in court of the involvement of police
and army personnel in procuring and facilitating the killing.
Blair agreed at the Weston Park talks in August 2001 to accept the decision
on a public inquiry of retired Canadian judge Peter Cory, asked by the British
and Irish governments to look into six killings in which collusion was
alleged. Cory delivered his report in October last year, recommending five inquiries,
including into the Finucane case. The Brirtish government balked at the
Finucane recommendation, suggestingan inquiry might compromise criminal
proceedings. However, following last Monday's development at Belfast Crown Court, there
are no proceedings now pending.
Barrett was arrested in May last year in Sussex, where he had been taken for
his own safety by police under Metropolitan Commissioner Sir John Stevens,
conducting a long-running investigation into collusion allegations. In Sussex,
Barrett again confessed to the Finucane murder, telling a BBC Panorama team that
a RUC officer had told him the solicitor was a senior IRA man who should be
"got rid of."
Barrett told Panorama that the killing had been set up by UDA intelligence
chief Brian Nelson, an agent of both MI5 and the military intelligence
organisation, the Force Research Unit.
Sussex police launched a sting operation to gather evidence usable against
Barrett in court. Conversations with his partner at their Eastbourne home were
recorded via a planted "bug". A phoney job advertisment for the sort of
driving job police knew Barrett wanted was placed in a local newspaper whose
classified ads. he regularly read. Barrett fell for the scam and went to work, as he
believed, as a courier for a drugs gang. The officers, identified only as
"Tom" and "Steve", then told the killer that they had become aware of his
paramilitary past and that this enhanced his value to them. Barrett again boasted in
detail about his part in the murder. This time, the tape didn't disappear.
Barrett was jailed for a minimum of 22 years. He is likely to be released
early next year under the Belfast Agreement. The Finucane family and supporters
now want the promised public inquiry set up without delay to find the truth
about security force collusion.
One reason for British government anxiety may be the likely difficulty in
confining an inquiry to the Finucane murder alone. The FRU is believed to have
been involved in as many as a dozen murders of Catholics in Belfast in the
1980s, including the 1987 killing of Francisco Notorantonio, 66, supposedly
eliminated in order to protect the identity of the high-ranking British plant in the
IRA code-named "Stakeknife."
Nelson, who scouted the Finucane home and identified the solicitor to
Barrett, worked under the direction of FRU officer Maggie Walshaw. Nine years after
the murder, she was commissioned as an officer, and subsequently awarded the
British Empire Medal. The FRU chief in Belfast in the late 1980s was Lt. Col.
Gordon Kerr, now a brigadier and military attache at the British embassy in
Beijing. An inquiry would clearly have to summon Walshaw and Kerr, among others,
to ask whether Finucane was murdered as a matter of policy, and at what level
this policy had been sanctioned.
An inquiry would also have to delve into Special Branch involvement. The
Finucane murder weapons were supplied by UDA quartermaster and SB agent William
Stobie, himself murdered by the UDA in December 2001.
However, recent judicial rulings may exclude the great bulk of evidence along
these lines.
Rulings in the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, either by chairman Lord Saville or
courts overruling Saville, excluded a raft of evidence because it might compromise
"national security" or put the lives of agents at risk by allowing them to
be identified or exposing the agencies' modus operandi. Ruling against calling
evidence from the agent "Infliction"---said to have claimed to have heard
Martin McGuinness admit firing the first shot on Bloody Sunday---Saville declared
that Infliction's right to life was "substantive" and must take precedence
over the "procedural" right of the Bloody Sunday families to the full truth.
Evidence in this category was marginal in relation to Bloody Sunday but would
be the main substance of a Finucane inquiry.
In March this year, in a case arising from alleged "shoot-to-kill" incidents
in Armagh in 1982, five Law Lords ruled unanimously that the State's
obligation under the Human Rights Act to carry out "effective and independent"
investigation of killings involving State agents did not apply to deaths prior to
the incorporation of the Act in October 2000. This would appear to have further,
ominous implications for the ability of a Finucane inquiry to compel crucial
evidence.
It was on the day immediately following this ruling that Northern Secretary
Paul Murphy announced that the Cory Report, delivered to him the previous
October, would be published.
The murdered solicitor's son, Michael, said last week that the family most
wanted to know, "Not who pulled the trigger but who pulled the strings." The
problem for the family, but a source of comfort for the British Government, may
be that no adequate constitutional mechanism exists for achieving this end.
