LATE at night on May 22 1997, the 61-year-old chairman of Bellaghy GAA club was locking up the clubhouse. It was after 11pm  and Sean Brown’s  son had gone home just five minutes earlier. A group of men emerged from the darkness, seized the 61-year-old, and after a struggle bundled him into the back of his red Sierra car. Then with one of the murderers’ cars in front and another behind, they drove to Randalstown, passing Toomebridge police station. There they shot Brown six times and set fire to his car. No-one has yet been charged with this murder.

Last month, over 25 years after the murder,  Mr Justice Humphreys ruled that an inquiry must be set up. That was because the judge found the UK government was in breach of a human rights duty to probe the full extent of state collusion in the May 1997 killing. This month, British Secretary of State Hilary Benn declared that he would appeal Justice Humphreys’s ruling.

So, having struggled for more than 25 years for truth, his family’s hopes that they’d learn what happened and who was involved  were raised.  But no sooner were they raised than they were dashed by the British Secretary of State.

Sean Brown isn’t the only one to have been murdered during the three decades of conflict. But there is something deeply sad about his 87-year-old widow hoping finally to hear the grim truth about her husband’s death, only to have that  hope quenched before it could brighten her life.

Why did Benn declare he would appeal the public inquiry ruling? That’s easy. In February, it emerged that more than 25 people, including state agents, were linked by intelligence to the murder. A public inquiry might have revealed the actions of  these servants of the crown.

How was it that the cars of the killers, along with Mr Brown’s car, weren’t caught on CCTV? An RTÉ documentary established that the cars driven by the killers were caught on Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology, but the footage is now ‘missing’.

Presumably Hilary Benn wants to avoid revelations that state forces were involved in this killing. His efforts to stop a public enquiry – ordered, remember, by a High Court judge – makes it clear that Britain has dirty secrets that it is anxious should not be revealed.

In 2014, when his father, Tony Benn, died, Hilary Benn paid tribute to his life: “It is from the words and kindnesses of those whose lives he touched that we, those who loved him most, take the greatest strength. After all, any life that inspires and encourages so many others, is a life that was well-lived.”

Talk to anyone in Bellaghy, talk to any of the family of Sean Brown, and they will tell you that his life too was well-lived  – until it was brutally cut short.

Hilary Benn knows what it is to lose a father, as do the Brown family. But Tony Benn died of natural causes at the age of 88; Sean Brown died aged 61, at the hands of thugs employed by the British government, a government which Hilary Benn now serves.

Hilary Benn’s father, Tony Benn, was a lifelong supporter of those who thought Britain should give Ireland back to the Irish: “ I think the British record in Ireland is a hideous record.”

In January 2025 his son seems set to add to that record.