Pat Finucane

The murder of Pat Finucane was an offence, first of all, against the man himself and his family.
It was an offence against the wider society that expected people to be allowed
to work without being attacked for it and it was an offence against the
entire system of justice which requires that the State protect its people
and not plot against them.

It was an offence too, against those in the security services who
believe in their own profession as it is defined for them by law and
who would not have set him up for murder and are hampered in their
efforts to find credibility by those who did.

But on what grounds do Republicans take umbrage at it?

They said they were at war with the British State and that they were
entitled to kill workers in the pursuit of that war.

So they killed builders, fruit salesmen, police officers, soldiers,
bus drivers and anyone they cared to kill.

If some in the security services responded in kind, on the same
understanding that they were at war and that ruthless, illegal
methods were justified, then in that they were accepting the IRA's
definition of the problem and it's own prescription for solving it,
murder.

Perversely, they were paying some tribute to the IRA by operating on
their own grounds.

Indeed, by what law could an IRA supporter define the killing of Pat
Finucane as murder at all? The law of the State? Sure that law
equally defines all the IRA killings as murder too.

There is no logic in a Republican-based condemnation of the killing
of Pat Finucane.

The only grounds upon which someone who endorsed the murder of the
solicitor John Donaldson as he left Andersonstown Police Station in
October 1979, could condemn the murder of the solicitor Pat Finucane
ten years later, is that it was done by the other side.

So, when Martin McGuinness bemoans the murder of Pat Finucane, he is
a contradiction on stilts.

Yet, Pat Finucane was murdered. His murder was worse than murders by
the IRA in this sense, that he was killed by the clear connivance of
members of the security services who were obliged to protect him.

Those people are unlikely to be prosecuted because, as we have seen
over and over again, the State - and the Army in particular - looks
after its own.

If they are named and charged, there will be outrage from those who
say that they are entitled to the same retrospective amnesty that was
given to IRA members on the run. They will be right in this.

The IRA's definition of the problem in Northern Ireland as a war has
been effectively accepted.

The understanding that all the violence was the product of an ancient
conflict, including the violence of the loathsome Norman Coopey, who
buried 16-year-old James Morgan in an animal pit, is underwritten in
the Good Friday Agreement.

It was in the first paragraph of the Downing Street Declaration.

It was the hooked finger inviting the paramilitaries into the
process, declaring that they were not murderers, which they were, but
warriors, which is what they liked to call themselves.

We have killers in the security services and they will walk. They
will have the IRA to thank for that.

It was the IRA which directed negotiations in the peace process
towards the acceptance of their definition of the trouble as a
conflict, in which all violence was a legacy of history.

It is the IRA which has pressed for that understanding to justify
early release for all political criminals, and amnesties for those
not even charged.

Now, who is entitled to take umbrage at that?

Well, not the whinging unionists who called for years for the
security services to "takes the gloves off" and not the anti-
Agreement purists either, who argue against the flexing of moral
principle, but offer no alternative but the refusal to flex principle.

Opening up the filthy can of worms that is security force collusion
will challenge not only the hypocrisy of those who sought that war
anyway but also of those who had no problem with it at the time.

Malachi O'Doherty

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/story.jsp?story=308579