"BRIDIE Brown is the most robust woman I have ever come across."

The solicitor Niall Murphy is a man who has met many robust women. To describe the widow of Sean Brown in those terms is to pay tribute to Bridie’s tenacity, courage and determination in the face of appalling tragedy.

It will be 27 years this May since her husband, who was only 61, was abducted and murdered in Bellaghy, County Derry. It is not yet three years since her son Damian, the family’s campaigning voice for so many years, died after a short illness. Unbearable tragedy in any family, for any wife, for any mother. Yet Bridie Brown led her family in stoic determination out of a closed inquest court to the assembled media to express continued determination in the fight for truth and justice for her husband and their father.

The British government cares nothing for Bridie or her family. They do not care for Damian’s legacy, which is the ECHR Article 2 inquest which the British government was so determined to close down. Yet ironically, the British security apparatus has exposed its true interests in the treatment of this family. By hiding documents from the Police Ombudsman, by delaying disclosure to the Coroner, by redacting files so heavily as to render them meaningless, by treating the inquest court with such contempt that the Coroner was forced to halt proceedings and write to the Secretary of State requesting a public inquiry, they have told us all the true nature of this killing by the illegal and savage LVF. The true nature was that the British state used the Mid-Ulster LVF, just as it had used the Mid-Ulster UVF, as its pet killing machine. 

There are many more families who will face this treatment in the weeks to come as their cases expose British military policy in our country.

The extent of state direction and facilitation of the loyalist groupings is regularly pointed to. We have had investigation report after official report after accidental exposé of the nature of our conflict and the state’s role; from the De Silva report into the killing of Pat Finucane to the Police Ombudsman’s report on Loughinisland to the Northwest to the Ormeau Road. Collusion was happening across the North and citizens were being slaughtered. Yet each, and every time some puppet will say "But we cannot say this was systemic", "This was not British state policy." 

That position is utterly untenable. Anyone who still claims that the British state “only” killed 10 per cent of those killed during the conflict is at this stage displaying cognitive dissonance which insults our collective intelligence. There were three actors to this conflict and two of them were acting in concert. And that is why there is a Legacy Act. 

The British state is not a neutral player trying to deliver to victims. No-one honestly believes that they are, or ever have been. There was a time when they walked into our courts and that narrative was deferred to. Those days are over. In civil courts, inquest courts and in criminal cases, the state’s tactics of denial, delay and cover-up are no longer being tolerated. Coroner Justice Kinney’s open ruling in the Brown case tells us how the courts are no longer a hiding place. And that is why there is a Legacy Act.