Sarah Harte: Let’s hope the family of murdered Pat Finucane finally get justice

The widow of murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, Geraldine Finucane (left), with her son John during a press conference at St Comgall’s — Ionad Eileen Howell centre in Belfast. Picture: Niall Carson/PA

IN THE late 90s, I was in the Law Society of Ireland, doing my law exams to become a solicitor. As it happened Michael Finucane, the son of murdered solicitor Pat Finucane, was in my class. 

As you will doubtless know, last week Northern Ireland secretary Hilary Benn ordered an independent public inquiry into Mr Finucane’s murder, he was shot in 1989 in his north Belfast home. It has been a long, winding journey for the Finucane family to get to this point, but they have never given up.

Michael was a cool cat, clever and witty. My memory is that he seemed older than his years, which makes sense. We fledgling solicitors didn’t really register that about eight years earlier his father had been murdered by loyalist paramilitaries who colluded with the RUC. We were all emerging into the Celtic Tiger job market and starring in a movie in our own heads which is pretty standard at that age.

Michael’s father was shot 14 times in front of his family as they ate their Sunday roast. Pat Finucane represented IRA hunger strikers and had family in the IRA. He did defence work and also represented loyalist paramilitaries.

Now defence work is vital. Defence lawyers don’t simply advocate for their client’s rights but safeguard constitutional rights including the presumption of innocence, ensure that a fair trial occurs, and that fundamental principles of justice are upheld. We all benefit from this. 

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Pat Finucane, who was a skilful and fearless defence lawyer, also brought the British army and the RUC to court and successfully took the British government to the European Court of Human Rights over its human rights abuses in Northern Ireland.

Pat Finucane was a thorn in the British establishment’s side. Did this give them a motive for his murder? 

In January 1989 Douglas Hogg, a junior Home Office minister said during a Commons debate: “I have to state as a fact, but with great regret, that there are in Northern Ireland several solicitors who are unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA.” These comments were considered highly inflammatory, and less than a month later Pat Finucane was assassinated.

90s Dublin

Anyway, one day Michael Finucane and I and the other 98 students were in class in the Law Society, when a sharply suited cock-of-the-walk young garda from the Criminal Assets Bureau came in to lecture us. He strode up and down telling us how the newly established Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) was going “to drive a coach and four through the law of evidence” meaning that the law didn’t mean anything to them. That was his exact phrase.

To give some context, investigative journalist Veronica Guerin had been shot two years earlier. When Ms Guerin was killed, the apparatus of the State moved to introduce legislation including setting up the Criminal Assets Bureau to rein in the out-of-control criminals. Dublin back then, as well as being a lot of fun, was the ‘Wild West’.

When Veronica Guerin was killed, the apparatus of the State moved to introduce legislation including setting up the Criminal Assets Bureau to rein in the out-of-control criminals.

To digress for a moment, living in a flat in Leeson Street with two other girls, (we were bang out of an Edna O’Brien novel) I remember when a man who ran a hotdog stand business and had a restaurant opposite our flat had it burned down, and then got shot. 

It was the early 90s his name was Wolfgang Eulitz and he fell foul of The General who wanted to muscle in on his successful business. Everyone called him Wolfie and after the fire, noses pressed to the window, we watched An Garda Síochána outside on the street.

By sheer coincidence, on a hot June day three years later I was on the Naas Road driving home to Cork when on the other side of the road figures in white suits were buzzing around a car, presumably forensics, because investigative journalist Veronica Guerin had just been murdered although it hadn’t yet broken on the news, so we gawped out of the car wondering what had happened. 

They were the times we lived in. So, there was a legitimate reason for CAB being set up, An Garda Síochána needed additional resources although some of the new laws rightly attracted criticism from human rights organisations for being too draconian and for, in some cases, arguably circumventing the crucial presumption of innocence.

Michael Finucane

However, that day in the Law Society when Michael Finucane and I were the only two students to put our hands up in the class to query the CAB strutting officer about his driving a coach and four through the law of evidence, he dismissed me scornfully, but he turned his ire on Michael and sticking his jaw out, said in a threatening and defamatory manner, “we are watching you, we know you who are”.

Michael stood his ground; presumably, he was used to that treatment. After the lecture, I complained to the law society about the behaviour of the CAB officer, and the person I complained to scrunched his brow and more or less told me to hop it slightly baffled as to why I cared, which tells its own story. To be fair you can’t tar the entire law society with one brush, maybe I complained to the wrong person.

Michael Finucane (second left) with his mother Geraldine, the widow of murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, and his brother John (right) outside the Supreme Court in central London in December 2023 after the family lost a Supreme Court challenge over the decision not to hold a public inquiry into his killing, but won a declaration that an effective investigation into his death has not been carried out.

Funny how the wheel turns though. 

Michael Finucane who has carried on his father’s work as a solicitor by specialising in defence work and human rights is a former chairperson of the Human Rights Committee of the Law Society of Ireland and a former co-chair of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. He is also a consultant with a solicitor training project run by Dublin City University and the Law Society of Ireland.

Many years later in June 2015, I had occasion to be socially in the company of a top CAB officer. We had a long, interesting conversation centred on gangland Dublin and he gave me many interesting and blackly funny insights into various criminals. 

I told him the story of the strutting CAB officer insulting Michael Finucane because it stayed with me. He was seriously annoyed about his colleague’s behaviour and pressed me for identifying details, but it had been too long ago and I was unable to identify the man, I suspect, just as well for him.

The Finucane family

BUT make no mistake back in the 90s in some strata of Irish society there was a whiff of cordite about the Finucane family. The implication was that they were not respectable and that Pat Finucane was linked to the IRA. I remember this clearly in some legal circles.

In 2011 on foot of the inadequate De Silva inquiry (one of many) then UK prime minister David Cameron apologised for “shocking levels of collusion” but found no “over-arching State conspiracy” and once more refused to order a proper public inquiry. Why? Because there is a suggestion that the collusion went up to the British cabinet level.

As Taoiseach Simon Harris said: “It will be important that, as details are confirmed, there is confidence that it can meet the standards and independence thresholds essential to an inquiry of this nature.”

Let’s hope Michael, his dignified, brave mother Geraldine, and the Finucane family finally get justice and learn, for once and for all, what levels and organs of the State had a role in his murder.