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Chapter 1: What happened to Pat Finucane in 1989?
This is a Belltel and Crime World podcast. The murder of Pat Finucane was one of the most notorious of the troubles.
Pat Finucane was shot dead in front of his family. It was later established two state agents were part of the UDA murder plot and that MI5 was aware he was under threat.
UDA gunmen shot dead the 39-year-old solicitor at his family home in North Belfast in 1989.
His family sat down one Sunday to a dinner they have never forgotten for the simple reason that a loyalist gunman broke in and put 12 bullets into his head whilst his wife and children watched.
A series of investigations revealed collusion with the state.
Some of the Ulster Defence Association paramilitaries who were involved had security force links. Ken Barrett, who admitted the killing, became a special branch informant soon after. William Stobie supplied the guns. He was a special branch informant at the time. And Brian Nelson, who supplied the targeting information, was an army intelligence agent.
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Chapter 2: How was state collusion revealed in Finucane's murder?
The first hearing of a public inquiry into the killing is to take place next month, with Sir Gary Hickenbottom as chairman of the inquiry.
The plain fact is that two decades on, the commitment made by the government, first in the agreement with the Irish government, and then to this House to establish an inquiry into the death of Mr Finucane remains unfulfilled. It is for this exceptional reason that I have decided to establish an independent inquiry into the death of Patrick Finucane under the 2005 Inquiries Act.
The inquiry will seek to determine the circumstances of Mr Finucane's murder. the identities of all of those involved and how they were involved, and if the murder could have been prevented. Pat Finucane's family, including his son, Sinn Féin MP John Finucane, have long fought for an inquiry into the case to be opened.
I believe that my family deserve this after so many years. Pat Finucane deserves this after so many years. Society as a whole deserves this after so many years. And after 35 years of cover-ups, it is time for truth.
I'm joined by our security correspondent, Alison Morris. Alison Morris, you're very welcome to the Belltel. Pat Finucane, this is a murder which continues to deeply haunt many people here. It happened in February 1989. I can never remember certainly in my journalistic career or indeed my adult life that this wasn't a massive story.
It obviously begins, or does it begin with the murder of Pat Finucane or does it go further back than that?
Yeah, I think it does go further back than that. And you have to remember that Pat Finucane was one of the very, very first trailblazing, first generation legal professionals from a working class nationalist, light Republican background. Up until then, the legal profession had mainly, and I mean mainly, I mean predominantly, been dominated by a certain class of person, let's face it.
It was a very middle and upper class profession. It was, if you go back into the history of the partition of this island, it was a mainly unionist dominated profession. And we now live in a very different world where we're used to working class kids going into the law and other professions such as that. But back then that was not a common thing.
I remember a very long time ago, back in my weekly newspaper days, interviewing Pat Finucane's then quite elderly mother. And she spoke about her. He had to get a letter, I think it was from the bishop, to give him permission to go to Trinity because Trinity was a unionist university.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of the upcoming public inquiry?
They went further. to are the British state deliberately targeting legal professionals who are thorn in the side of the state?
Chapter 4: What role did Pat Finucane play in the legal landscape of Northern Ireland?
And that was where the allegations have not went away. And that's why I suppose this case has went on and stayed in the public conscience for over 30 years.
Pat Finucane was murdered on the 12th of February 1989 after UDA gunmen broke into his house with a sledgehammer as the family were eating dinner. He was killed in front of his wife and three children. That shocked a lot of people.
Yeah, and the circumstances of it, I suppose, because the Pat Finucane campaign for justice has became such a big thing and it's brought in lots of other cases as well associated with that particular, I suppose, unit of the EDA. And we know that from the De Silva report that obviously touched on other people who were killed at that time as well.
Sometimes we forget the fact that there was a family... Sitting eating their Sunday dinner, as you would, around the table, including three very young children, two of which went on to be solicitors themselves, who were just children at that time, John and Martin Finucane.
And the gunmen burst in, they shot their father in front of them, and also Pat Finucane's wife, Geraldine, was injured in that attack as well. And she was shot too, as part of that attack, and that is something... We know that there are thousands of families who suffered similar pain and went through similar traumatic experiences over the years.
But unless I suppose you're one of that group of people who experienced that, you could never really know what kind of loss and trauma that would leave.
He was shot 14 times, twice in the body and then the other 12 rounds into his face at close range. Frenzied attack, if you want to put it like that.
I suppose maybe an execution is probably the better word for it. They were leaving no doubt that he was going to be killed and the fact that his wife was injured meant that there was a willingness there, an acceptance there, that if somebody else who was in that room was injured or killed, that was acceptable collateral damage by the people who were responsible for killing Paffanagan.
The UFF, the Ulster Freedom Fighters, they admitted responsibility the day after the murder. In a statement claiming the killing, they said they killed Pat Finucane, the IRA officer. Now, his family have always denied that allegation. And that is part of the story, of course.
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Chapter 5: How did the Finucane family fight for justice?
There was those comments in the Commons and him alone with that other handful of solicitors operating at that time would have been aware that there was a threat to them. But did they really think at that time that the state would execute or kill a solicitor? I don't know. I mean, you're trying to think back to a time that has long since gone.
And he clearly felt safe to be at home with his family that Sunday or they wouldn't have been there or they would have had more security and the house wasn't fortified. And people knew where he lived. And that information had been widely known and widely spread among those who were responsible for his killing.
Over 700 people were murdered in North Belfast over the course of the Troubles. I suppose the reason why the Pat Finucane case attracts so much discourse, and of course his family continued to fight for justice for him, but this suspicion of collusion, what was the extent of this collusion? Do we know? Is that what the inquiry's for?
To what extent is this inquiry into things of which we already know? And the other question I suppose I'll ask it now because I have it further down is, What does the word inquiry mean here? Because when we were writing the script, we noticed that we had sprinkled everything with inquiry. What's the technical reason for it here?
Yeah, so look, we have a number of things. We know this has been investigated a number of times. It's been investigated by Students 1, it's been investigated by Students 2. It was one of the cases that Judge Peter Corey recommended inquiry. In fact, it's the only one up until this date that didn't have an inquiry.
We know that Rosemary Nelson, Billy Wright, Robert Hamill, the other cases that were listed as part of Judge Corey's work, all have already had their sort of public inquiries. Instead, what happened was that in 2011, the Finucane family really genuinely thought that they were going to have a public inquiry. And in fact, at the time, I remember that sources were saying that members of...
Former Chief Constables, members of the RUC, were being brought in and being briefed and said, if Newkins are going to get an inquiry, this is coming up. And the next thing they arrived in London, they went to 10 Dowden Street. And I believe they went in there thinking that at that stage David Cameron was going to grant them an inquiry. And instead, they were told that there wouldn't be one.
Instead, there would be a review and that would be led by Sir Desmond de Silva, who is now the late Chief Constable. Desmond de Silva, a very honourable man, who did a review that was groundbreaking in terms of the amount of information. And it did look at the wider picture, but it was never given the scope of the terms of reference that Inquiry would have.
His findings that were produced in 2012, and I still have a copy of the de Silva review in my files, and it is a remarkable document, it really is. But it led to the Prime Minister, David Cameron, at the time, standing up in Westminster at the dispatch box and making an apology.
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