THE decision by the British government not to hold a public inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane can in no way be said to have been a suprise, nevertheless it has come as another savage blow to a family which has for over 30 years fought for truth and justice.
They – and their countless supporters in Ireland and across the world – no longer seek the tawdry truth about who pulled the trigger, they seek the truth about who and what lay behind the “shocking levels of collusion” that former Prime Minister David Cameron admitted lay behind the savage murder of an officer of the court in front of his family.
Any society worth the name should be able to rally around the preposterously simple proposition that a state should not murder any of its own citizens, much less servants of its criminal justice system. What we’ve seen from the British government and its Unionist cheerleaders is a vivid demonstration that normal democratic standards do not apply in this benighted corner of the union. The idea that a Minister could stand up in the House of Commons and say that the state’s murder of a lawyer in London, or Edinburgh or Cardiff is not worthy of a public inquiry is a laughable one – the furore would bring Parliament to a halt.
But a statement in relation to the murder of Pat Finucane in Belfast can be made to a virtually empty chamber in which the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, was not even present. That a Labour leader, a former human rights lawyer and ex-head of the Department of Public Prosecutions, could not rouse himself to be in attendance, or to issue a subsequent word of comment, much less rebuke, is indicative of a problem much wider than the collection of feral Tory fanatics that is this Boris Johnson government.
This close to the decision and with feelings still running extremely high, the less said about the reaction of Unionism to the decision the better. We will not dignify the sickening personal attacks on the Finucane family with a response, rather we would point out to those Unionists who genuinely care for the future of the union that kneejerk sectarian reactions to fundamental issues of the rule of law here and the state’s right to govern deserve a more thoughtful response than the soccer terrace behaviour we’ve seen since Monday.
As for the suggestion by Secretary of State Brandon Lewis that the PSNI should now be allowed to get on with their job of investigating the murder of Pat Finucane, that would be a ludicrous enough idea at any time in the past 31 years given the RUC and PSNI performance in the case. But days after the PSNI paid out hefty compensation for their abominable treatment of two journalists in search of the truth about the 1994 Loughinisland massacre, it is nothing less than a two-fingered salute.
We’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve said it, but we aren’t going to stop: this family, and the tireless community which nurtures and supports them, will keep on keeping on.
