Looking for answers

Pat Finucane was seen as an 'uppity Fenian lawyer'. Then he was murdered. His son tells Jon Robins how, 14 years afterwards and despite a recent report, the truth is still unclear

"One of the first times I saw my Dad on telly, he was being interviewed on the Six O'Clock News acting for the hunger strikers," recalls the son of the murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane. "It was one of the first occasions in Northern Ireland's history where there was a lawyer talking about human rights and saying that these men have inherent dignities that were being denied them." Michael Finucane admits the significance was lost on the 10-year-old boy he was then, but it is not on the 30-year-old lawyer he is now.

As Sir John Stevens delivered his recent damning report into collusion and state-sanctioned murder, Michael Finucane was explaining how his father, seen by the state as "an uppity Fenian lawyer", came, 14 years ago, to be the first solicitor to be cold-bloodedly murdered in the Troubles.

The Finucane verdict on the Stevens report is that it is "flawed" because it tried to identify what went wrong with the system. "Nothing went wrong," the Dublin-based solicitor argues. The policy was to "harness the killing potential" of loyalist hit men, provide them with weapons and the intelligence. "The system worked exactly as intended and, in the British government's eyes, it worked perfectly," he says.

Now is not an easy time for the Finucane family, who refused to have anything to do with all three reports by the commissioner of the Metropolitan police; instead they have, since the 1989 murder, unwaveringly held out for a full public inquiry. It is hard to see whether the Stevens report, damning and unambiguous though it might be, moves the Finucane family and their supporters closer to that goal or further away. However the Irish foreign minister, Brian Cowen, said last week that the former Canadian supreme court judge, Mr Justice Peter Cory's investigation into a number of high profile murders, including that of Pat Finucane, would provide "a context" for investigating allegations about the alleged IRA informer, Stakeknife.

Michael calls the report "a confirmation, not a revelation, of what we already knew". Indeed. More than 12 months ago the BBC's Panorama exposed the work of the shadowy Force Research Unit that directed terrorists towards high-profile republicans. The programme showed footage of Ken Barrett, an Ulster Defence Association killer, claiming that the agent Brian Nelson provided him with a photograph of the solicitor and took him to his house.

A couple of years before the programme, the Finucane family presented its own 70 page report to the Irish government and Mo Mowlam, minister for Northern Ireland. "What we presented then was the collusion machine broken down and explained for the first time," Michael recalls. The British government response was to send the Met boss back to embark upon Stevens three. Did they feel insulted? Yes, he replies.

Haven't they lost an opportunity by not co-operating with Sir John? "No. I honestly don't believe that the establishment of a public inquiry would be hastened by my family's co-operation," he replies. "If anything, a public inquiry would be delayed and postponed, possibly inevitably."

Michael Finucane acknowledges that the report "pulls no punches". But that, as he quickly points out, is not enough. The Stevens team claims to have interviewed 15,000 people, catalogued 4,000 exhibits, taken 5,460 statements and seized 6,000 documents. But what is left is a 19 page summary. None of the other information will be made public (as was the case with the other two reports) unless there is a public inquiry. In advance of the report, campaigning organisations - including Amnesty International, British Irish Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York - joined forces to back "a full, public, international, independent and impartial judicial inquiry".

For the Finucane family, the purpose of an inquiry is not to identify whose finger was on the trigger ("we have a pretty good idea," says Michael) but to reveal how far up the political ladder collusion had crept. "Many people were murdered by these agents of the British state," he argues.

The passing of time makes an effective public inquiry increasingly problematic. The death of Brian Nelson from a brain haemorrhage only last month means that his secrets have gone to the grave with him. "We need to move quickly before anyone else dies or another box of documents mysteriously falls into the shredder," he says.

The chilling words of the then junior Home Office minister Douglas Hogg still reverberate down the years. He told the House of Commons that there were a number of solicitors in Northern Ireland "unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA". An incensed Seamus Mallon, now deputy first minister, immediately responded that no doubt there were "lawyers walking the streets or driving the roads of the north of Ireland who have become targets of assassin's bullets as a result of the statement that has been made tonight". Sir John notes in his report that the former minister has been "compromised" by whoever briefed him.

According to Michael Finucane, Hogg's words were the equivalent of "a verbal hand grenade lobbed into the cauldron of Northern Ireland". Three weeks after the speech the solicitor was shot 14 times in the kitchen of their home in front of the 17-year-old Michael, together with his mother, younger brother and sister.

There is a striking physical likeness shared by father and son. Michael also appears to have inherited his father's enthusiasm for the law but claims to have become a solicitor 'in spite, rather than because of' his father. "I don't really remember that much about what my Dad did and I only come to appreciate the work he was doing many years later," he says.

Pat Finucane was among the first of a generation of working-class Catholics to take advantage of the opportunities of free education introduced in 1968. "With his friend Terry he was the first on his street, and probably in the whole area, to go to college," Michael says. "It was a big deal."

Pat set up Madden and Finucane in Belfast with Peter Madden in 1979. "Both Peter and Pat had experience of the law being wielded against one side of the community," Michael says. "There was internment, martial law, curfews and plastic bullets, and those experiences gave them the attitude that the law was there for all."

Such an egalitarian philosophy did not go down well with everyone and they were quickly written off as "provos in suits". Not surprisingly perhaps, as three of Finucane's brothers had been IRA volunteers and his best-known client was the dying Bobby Sands. But the firm were always just as amenable to Loyalist rioters hit by stray plastic bullets as to the steady stream of Republicans coming through their doors.

Finucane specialised in cases arising out of the emergency powers legislation. He acted for clients caught up in the alleged shoot-to-kill policy, and for Sinn Fein in a test case to challenge the legality of the Home Secretary's decision to ban interviews. At the time he was murdered he had two cases on the way to the European Court of Human Rights.

Michael, who only qualified as a solicitor a couple of years ago, appears to have inherited his father's taste for controversy. Last year he hit the headlines by refusing to be searched by the police when he was representing alleged members of the continuity IRA. In another case, he attacked the inquest into the murder of two women in a community care home more than five years ago.

His pride in his father's achievements in the courts of Northern Ireland is obvious. "He was among the first to use the law to show that even in a situation of conflict, the law still applies. It was because he chose to do all of this that he became the first solicitor to be murdered."