MEP should now name the loyalist death squads

THE naming of three people by Democratic Unionist Party MEP Jim Allister in the European Parliament who he claimed, under parliamentary privilege, had information about the murder of Robert McCartney was an abuse of that privilege.

On February 12, 1989, Pat Finucane, a Belfast solicitor, was murdered shortly after Douglas Hogg, the then agriculture minister in the Conservative government in Britain, stated - also under parliamentary privilege - that some solicitors in Northern Ireland were sympathetic to the IRA.

This statement was subsequently regarded as sufficient reason to warrant the murder of Mr Finucane.