The Sunday Tribune, 2 December 2001.
Amid the calls for a public
inquiry into the 1989 assassination of Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane last week
few people noticed that the mechanism chosen to deal with the scandal - the
appointment of a judge to decide whether to hold a public inquiry - is a
device that British prime minister Tony Blair can thank Taoiseach Bertie Ahern
for suggesting and the officials in the Republic’s Department of Justice for
dreaming up.
The same strategem is being used
in the Republic to deal with two festering controversies both of which feature
allegations of dirty tricks by British intelligence south of the Border. One
is the 1974 bombing of Dublin and Monaghan by Loyalists and the other the 1976
murder of Dundalk man, Seamus Ludlow whose killing by Loyalists is alleged to
have been covered up by an unholy alliance of British intelligence and the
Garda Special Branch.
A High Court judge, Mr Justice
Barron has been appointed to investigate both incidents and must report to the
Oireachtas whose members will decide whether a public inquiry should be held.
But the ploy has failed to satisfy all the relatives of the victims, whose
campaign obliged Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to take the action.
Members of Seamus Ludlow’s
family are having nothing to do with the investigation on the grounds of its
inadequacy while relatives of the dead of Dublin and Monaghan are said to be
increasingly frustrated by their’s and in particular by the refusal of the
British authorities to furnish vital documents to Mr Justice Barron.
Mr Justice Barron’s inquiry,
upon which presumably the new Finucane investigation will be modelled, suffers
a number of serious disadvantages according to legal sources. He does not have
the power to sub poena witnesses or documentary evidence; he can only request
them and can do nothing if refused. His hearings are held in private - hotel
rooms are said to be a favourite venue - and none of the relatives are allowed
to have legal counsel present to cross-examine witnesses. The process is both
private and secret - not the way to deal with matters that have caused public
concern say civil liberty lawyers.
Nor is Mr Justice Barron
time-limited in his deliberations. Nobody knows when he will report nor if the
published part of his report will include the vital record of witness
evidence. The recent Abbeylara court decision curtailing a Dail probe into the
controversial Garda killing of John Carty last year also casts doubt on the
powers of the Oireachtas to decide on what action to take when they do receive
his report.
With lawyers and relatives
suspicious that the strategem is merely a way to buy time or even to sideline
the controversies altogether it was this solution which was presented by Blair
and Ahern at this summer’s pro-agreement party summit at Weston Park in
Shropshire, England as a way of handling not just the Finucane affair but five
other simmering scandals as well. These were the murders of Robert Hamill and
Rosemary Nelson in Portadown and the INLA jail killing of LVF leader Billy
Wright which all involve allegations of British security force collusion. And
two sets of IRA killings - Judge Gibson and his wife and two senior RUC
officers - which involve allegations of rogue Garda Special Branch collusion
with the south Armagh-based IRA.
A judge of international standing
will, under the Weston Park agreement, be appointed in April to investigate
these deaths. But who that judge will be, what his or her powers will or will
not be, the format of the investigation, how long it will take to complete
what is bound to be a mammoth task and how much of his/her report will be made
public are still not known. The parties at Weston Park agreed in principle
with the two governments’ proposal but left these vital details for later
negotiation - evidence perhaps of their eagerness to patch up the Good Friday
Agreement.
Should the appointment of an
investigating judge buy several more years of delay before hard decisions have
to be made in these six cases there will be many people and organisations on
both sides of the Border quite content to sit it out. As far as the Finucane
scandal is concerned the list of those breathing heavy sighs of relief that
there will not be a public inquiry in the immediate future is already a long
one.
THE BRITISH ARMY’S FORCE RESEARCH
UNIT (FRU)
The FRU specialised in running
undercover agents in the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries. A public inquiry
would have to investigate the way the FRU ran Brian Nelson, a former soldier
who became the UDA head of intelligence. There have been well-documented
allegations that his FRU handlers gave him intelligence and a photograph of
Pat Finucane before the killing and that they knew of the murder plot but did
nothing to stop it. Allegations that the FRU used the UDA to assassinate other
Republicans and that its members sabotaged the Stevens inquiry into
Army-Loyalist collusion, including setting fire to Stevens’ office, would
also have to be probed.
THE RUC SPECIAL BRANCH
The old RUC Special Branch would
have to explain how much information William Stobie did give to his handlers
and, if it was as complete as he says it was, why they did nothing to warn
Finucane, to intercept and arrest the killers beforehand or catch them
afterwards. In particular why was no attempt made to stop one of the killers
as he was moving the principal murder weapon, a Browning pistol to a new
hiding place days after the killing? Why did they not act on the information
about the gun given by Stobie? Did Special Branch, as Stobie says they did,
become aggressive to him after the Finucane killing when Stobie ended his
relationship with them? Did they plant weapons in his flat so he could be
arrested and charged? Did they doctor UDA weapons, as he says they did, so
that his paramilitary superiors would grow suspicious of him and even harm
him? At a lower level Castlereagh detectives would have to answer allegations
that they suggested to notorious UDA gunmen that they should kill Pat
Finucane.
MI5
The British intelligence agency
MI5 had officers in FRU’s office at Thiepval barracks in Lisburn outside
Belfast and sat in on all the decisions made by FRU. Copies of intelligence
reports and other FRU documents were routinely copied and sent to MI5’s
office near Stormont House. MI5 had full access to FRU files. According to one
former FRU member it is inconceivable that MI5 knew nothing about FRU’s
relationship with Brian Nelson and the inquiry would have to examine this. MI5
also had a seat on the joint RUC-Army-MI5 Tasking and Co-ordinating Group (TCG)
which helped make sure that UDA gunmen had a free run when on a mission to
kill. The inquiry would also have to establish whether MI5 made the Joint
Intelligence Committee at Downing Street aware of this activity and whether
the prime minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher also knew.
THE NORTH’S DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC
PROSECUTIONS (DPP)
The North’s DPP’s office would
have two hard questions to answer at a public tribunal. Why did the DPP not
charge Stobie in 1990 but agree to do so in 1999? Was this because in 1990 the
authorities knew Stobie was, on the whole, telling the truth about his
dealings with Special Branch over Finucane? What role did the then British
Attorney-General, one Sir Patrick Mayhew play in this decision? Did the DPP
succumb to blackmail when at his 1991 trial on arms offences Stobie threatened
to spill the beans about the Finucane killing unless his prosecution was
halted? If not what was there another reason for abandoning his trial? Did the
Attorney-General play any part in this decision?
SINN FÉIN AND THE PROVISIONAL IRA
Although Sinn Féin leaders like
Gerry Adams last week called for a public inquiry into the Finucane murder the
party did not publicly demur from the Weston Park agreement which proposed a
private judicial inquiry instead. Observers of the affair have also noted that
Sinn Féin have left most of the running on the issue to the SDLP, a puzzling
stance given Finucane’s role as a prominent lawyer for IRA members.
Suggestions that Sinn Féin and
the IRA leadership would, like the RUC, the FRU and MI5, rather long finger
the Finucane inquiry have their basis in another murky part of the FRU’s
activities. The FRU ran Brian Nelson but there was an IRA equivalent to him, a
Belfast-based IRA double agent known only as ‘Steaknife’. There have been
allegations from ex-FRU personnel that ‘Steaknife’ pinpointed targets for
UDA assassination and compromised many IRA operations. It has also been
alleged that when the UDA unknowingly targetted ‘Steaknife’ the FRU
steered them to another target, an uninvolved Ballymurphy civilian, Francis
Notarantonio who was shot dead in his home so that the double agent could
live. Irish diplomats have expressed grave fears that if ‘Steaknife’s’
full role was disclosed it might harm the Sinn Féin leadership by suggesting
that the IRA campaign was deliberately sabotaged in order to nurture the
alternative peace process strategy. FRU was acutely conscious of the
importance of the Sinn Féin leadership to the infant peace process in the
1980's. According to the account of the Stevens inquiry compiled by BBC
journalist John Ware only two people were saved from assassination because of
Brian Nelson’s intelligence. One may have been ‘Steaknife’. The other
was Gerry Adams. According to Ware: "Nelson said his handlers told him
the assassination of Adams would have been ‘totally counter-productive . . .
Adams and his supporters [in the Sinn Féin leadership] were committed to
following the political path’ ".