‘Thatcher would have known’

Geraldine Finucane, the widow of murdered Belfast defence lawyer Pat Finucane, was interviewed this week by the Guardian in her Belfast home.

It was news to her 44-year-old son. Geraldine Finucane recalled that John had struggled as an eight-year-old with her decision for them to stay put in the family home after the murder of his father in the kitchen.

“You did at the start,” she said to him. “I changed everything in the kitchen so it made it easier to go into that particular room.” “There’s a haze around that,” said John quietly from a comfy chair on the other side of his mother’s lounge overlooking the back garden.

Pat Finucane, 39, was killed at 7.25pm on 12 February 1989, when the front door of the family’s double-fronted redbrick home in north Belfast, in which Geraldine, 74, remains today, was kicked down by two men as the couple and their three children were eating a Sunday roast in the kitchen.

As Pat, still gripping his fork, rose from the table, a total of 14 shots were fired. Six bullets struck his head, one or more of which had been fired at a range of 15ins or less. One ricocheted, hitting Geraldine in the ankle, as the couple’s children, John, eight, Katherine, 12, and Michael, 17, cowered under the table.

The loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) claimed it killed the 39-year-old lawyer because he was an IRA officer, a claim for which no evidence has materialised. Scant effort was put into the police investigation.

John recalls finding a spent bullet cartridge from the attack in one of his socks a few days after the murder. He said: “I remember showing up in the morning and saying, ‘What’s this?’” A hard question for a grieving widow to answer. “I must have ironed [in the kitchen] on the Sunday,” Geraldine said. Further spent cartridges were found under the kitchen cupboards when Geraldine did a spring clean.

Over the past three and a half decades, as a result of campaigning by the Finucane family and others, an extraordinary story has emerged of the British state’s complicity in the murder of a lawyer who had simply proven to be a thorn in the side of the state.

What is already known from government-commissioned reviews is damning enough: Royal Ulster Constabulary officers “likely” encouraged the UDA to target Finucane, whose clients had included Bobby Sands, the IRA man who died on hunger strike. A British government minister as good as named him in the House of Commons four weeks before the murder as being “unduly sympathetic” to the IRA. The UDA intelligence chief who had provided the gunmen with information on Finucane was a British agent – and had informed his handlers of the intended hit.

The UDA quartermaster who had provided the weapon was a British agent. One of the murder weapons was a 9mm Browning pistol that had been stolen from a British army barracks. On three occasions, the British security services knew of plans to kill Finucane, including six weeks before the murder, and did nothing.

When one of the murder weapons was discovered, it ended up being returned to the army for reuse rather than kept as evidence. And when the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, had been personally asked to give legislative cover for British agents in the ranks of terrorist organisations breaking the law, the senior RUC officer asking the question was left to understand that they should simply “carry on with what you’re doing but don’t tell us the details”.

In September, the Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, finally announced that the British government would hold a public inquiry into a case that could expose collusion in the worst crimes by those at the highest levels of the state.

It was extremely welcome news, coming after decades of foot-dragging and worse. Geraldine had to move out of her house for two months in 2000 after a threat was made to her own life but returned to the family home. “Why would I give it up?” she said. She admits to some nervousness still today when out and about, but puts that down to old habits. It is evidently with some trepidation that the Finucanes have put their hopes in Keir Starmer.

Tony Blair’s administration promised a public inquiry in 2004 only for the government to be unable to provide the Finucanes with assurances over full access to papers and witnesses. Then in 2012, the then prime minister, David Cameron, invited Geraldine and the family into Downing Street to tell them that he was going to backtrack and order a barrister-led review of the evidence.

“I was holding the side of the chair, and my knuckles had actually gone white,” Geraldine recalled of her meeting with Cameron. “I mean, I can get annoyed or upset after various meetings, but I’m never angry. I was furious, like absolutely furious. I just intervened, and I said, ‘Excuse me. I said I can’t take any more of this. I’m calling this meeting to an end’. It’s the only time that I have never got up after a meeting and said, ‘Thank you very much for your time’.”

As a result of the review, Cameron apologised for the “shocking levels of collusion” in Finucane’s murder. Still, the family do not believe it was at all clear for what the then prime minister was apologising. Boris Johnson’s government then tried to kill any hope of that question being answered with an announcement in 2020 that an inquiry would not go ahead until separate reviews by the police and the police ombudsman in Northern Ireland were completed.

That decision was quashed by the Northern Ireland high court in December 2022, but Geraldine was not confident of a good outcome when asked to meet the new Northern Ireland secretary following Labour’s election win.

She said: “I had [prepared] all these diplomatic ways to say, ‘I don’t like what you’re giving us’, and he gives you an inquiry. We were all a bit shell-shocked.”

The concern now is that the terms of the inquiry and the selection of the chair are right. The government has yet to provide further details about these crucial elements despite Finucane’s former business partner Peter Madden recently seeking clarity.

Geraldine said: “I want it to be wide-ranging enough. I don’t want it to be curtailed, because the whole case around my husband, as we have discovered over 35 years, wasn’t about one man. It was a strategy that was applied in the whole of the country … I feel more angry today than I did when it happened because we know so much more.”

They are hopeful that the Irish government will keep the pressure on for the terms to be right. On 19 November, Geraldine and her children will address a congressional hearing in the US. There has been cross-party support in the US for the Finucane campaign and Washington is expected to play its role in keeping Westminster honest.

Geraldine had once worried that an inquiry would only be granted when the key figures were dead and paperwork shredded. “But they aren’t all dead,” said Geraldine.

She is looking forward to seeing the retired brigadier Gordon Kerr giving evidence. Kerr was head of the army’s Force Research Unit, the secretive outfit that ran agents in the UDA. He was later promoted to be a senior British military attaché in Beijing. But Geraldine has little doubt that the inquiry will discover a dirty trail all the way to the door of No 10.

“I think Margaret Thatcher was very hands on, and would have known about all the things that were happening,” she said. “I was never particularly interested in the gunman, per se. It was all the people behind the gunman. Gunmen at that time in Belfast were ten a penny. It was who briefed them, who sent them, why they did it, and where it all came from. That’s what I was always interested in. Still am.”

Urgent Appeal