Inquiry not finished until guilty charged

The partial publication of the Stevens Report into the collusion

The revelations in the abbreviated published version overwhelmingly endorse the demand of the Finucane family for a full, independent judicial inquiry.

Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, found that a branch of British army intelligence and some police officers in Northern Ireland actively and deliberately helped the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) paramilitary group to murder Catholics in the late 1980s.

Mr Finucane’s murder, and that of student Brian Lambert, could have been prevented, and the RUC investigation of the former should have resulted in the early arrest and detection of his killers.

Apart from collusion in those specific murders, members of the RUC, its Special Branch and the army perpetrated a terrible wrong on the people of the North by being directly responsible for prolonging the Troubles.

Other than the nefarious activities they were involved in, they left a legacy which still impacts in Northern Ireland to this day, particularly in the difficulties experienced in relation to policing.

Even though the Stevens investigation has been ongoing since 1989, it is still not over, and it cannot be closed until those responsible, and still living, are brought to justice.

One such is Gordon Kerr, one-time head of the army intelligence Force Research Unit (FRU), which recruited the notorious Brian Nelson who infiltrated and essentially ran the UDA. Crucially, he was responsible for the FRU at the time that Pat Finucane was murdered.

Kerr is currently serving as a British army brigadier, but last February prosecution papers were prepared relating to him and are one of 20 files that have been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The Finucane family has been vindicated in their unremitting belief that security forces were involved in his murder and have dismissed the report as a “whitewash”.

His widow, Geraldine, is supported by Amnesty International and British-Irish Rights Watch in her call for a full judicial inquiry, and it cannot, and should not, be ignored. Certainly, a 15-page summary of a 3,000-page report is a grossly inadequate public response to an odious era of institutionalised murder in the North.

The Irish Government has an obligation to support the Finucane family in their efforts to have the full truth emerge, because the Stevens Report serves only to confirm what they were convinced of for decades.

Appalling though the murder of Pat Finucane was, having been gunned down in front of his horrified family, there are countless other innocent people without links to paramilitaries who were killed on the whim of those treacherous RUC members and army intelligence personnel and their terrorist colluders.

The present chief constable, Hugh Orde, who received the report yesterday, was at pains to distance the new Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) from the shadow of the RUC. It was, he said, a very different organisation and he is probably the most accountable police officer in the country, if not in Europe.

That is the way it should be.