Let Truth Out in N. Ireland

Human rights lawyer Patrick Finucane was having Sunday dinner in his family’s Belfast home when gunmen from the Ulster Defense Assn. burst in and killed him in front of his wife and three children. That was 14 years ago and no one has been convicted of the crime.

People in Northern Ireland’s Catholic neighborhoods have asserted all along that Finucane’s murder, like many other killings of Catholics in the late 1980s and the 1990s, resulted from a conspiracy between Protestant paramilitary groups, British army intelligence and the Northern Ireland police.

Last week, London’s Metropolitan Police commissioner, John Stevens, formally announced evidence to support that smoldering accusation. The criminal collusion prolonged the conflict in Northern Ireland, the report says, and stopping it sooner could have saved many of the 3,000 lives lost, including Finucane’s.

So far, the government has made public only a synopsis of Stevens’ 3,000-page report, but it points clearly to a conspiracy between the British security forces and Protestant paramilitaries.

Stevens acknowledges that his report was long in the making. He says it was “willfully obstructed” from day one by police and military intelligence officers intent on covering up critical evidence. That, apparently, is business as usual. Consider, after all, that a jury acquitted the one policeman who stood trial in the murder of Finucane -- agent William Stobie -- because a key witness refused to give evidence. When Stobie was freed, loyalist gunmen promptly murdered him.

Reputable international organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch suggest that the orchestrated bloodshed was not the work of a “few rotten apples.” The conspiracy between Protestant assassination squads and government security agents was probably widespread, they say. To finally clear the air, the rights organizations are calling for a full, international public inquiry.

Stevens’ report should shame the British justice system into immediately prosecuting officers involved in the conspiracies of violence against Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland. But that’s not enough.

The British government must let an international fact-finding commission dig deeper. The whole truth about this sordid historical moment must be unearthed, regardless of who stands to be embarrassed. The families of the victims deserve to know who murdered their loved ones.