Neil McCarthy: Singling out of Finucane case suits a narrative of the Troubles that is dangerously wrong

They face wending out the rest of their lives in a silent agony, always reminded that any attempt to raise their heads above the slime is to be a party pooper. The decent thing is to keep your head down and move on. All for the sake of the blessed Peace Process.

Unionists can’t quite bring themselves to say it, but to them Finucane was a Provo in a suit, and a public enquiry into his murder is therefore immoral. For nationalists, Finucane is whiter than white, a martyr for their community. And so it goes on.

In fact it gets worse. For a significant proportion of nationalists, Michelle O’Neill’s statement that “there was no alternative” to the violence of the IRA appears to have become an established truth.

When Jamie Bryson defends the violence of the UVF as that of patriots against a terrorist enemy, he no doubt speaks for many also. Peter Robinson once claimed to a stunned Peter Taylor on live television that loyalists in Northern Ireland were not terrorists but “counter terrorists”.

Political violence in Northern Ireland has long enjoyed a cloak of respectability which it does not deserve.

Many tend to see the mote in the other’s eyes and not the beam in their own.

The singling out of the Finucane case nevertheless suits a narrative of the Troubles which places the blame for all of the violence upon the British state.

This narrative is simply wrong, and dangerously wrong.

The shame of the IRA and republicanism and Irish nationalism more generally is that an utterly amoral and cynical campaign of terror was launched to achieve a so-called ‘united Ireland’ in 1969 on the back of a so-called campaign to defend Catholics.

British troops were sent to Northern Ireland in 1969 to protect Catholics from rampaging loyalists. They were welcomed with open arms in nationalist areas.

The sole objective of the IRA in that - for them - doctrinally unacceptable situation was to “break the fraternisation which then existed between the catholic people and the British troops… so the IRA encouraged provocations against the troops, and then “defended” the Catholics from the troops who had been provoked”.

Conor Cruise O’Brien uttered those words in October 1971 in a public debate in Dublin with Tomás Mac Giolla, then president of Official Sinn Féin.

O’Brien went on to say that “the combination of killings of soldiers and killings of Protestants have brought about a situation whereby, in Belfast, a Catholic minority is being protected by British troops which detest it, and which it detests, against the elemental wrath of a Protestant majority which would wipe out the Catholics, and the IRA along with them, if the troops were withdrawn. That is the situation which the Catholics of Belfast owe to the IRA and its methods of defence.”

Pat Finucane’s death is emblematic of that ghastly situation brought about by so called radicals and progressives.

Catholic couple Rosemary McCartney and Patrick O’Neill were stopped at a UDA roadblock in July 1972. They were “interrogated”, tortured, blindfolded, bundled into a car and shot dead by the head of the UDA gang, Davy Payne, and then by each of his colleagues in turn. Payne had never killed a woman before apparently. It seems he relished the opportunity.

Kevin Myers recalled this monstrous incident in the Irish Times in 2003, a week after the burial of Davy Payne.

Myers wrote that the UDA roadblock which forced the couple to stop was “operating quite openly, and tolerated by the authorities in a quite scandalous and delinquent dereliction of their moral and legal duty”.

Perhaps there should be a public enquiry into those security policies pursued by the British and Stormont governments in the period 1971 to 1972 which, according to Myers, “allowed Payne to roam free”.

And a public enquiry in the Republic into the founding of the Provisional IRA, the funding of it, the reasons for its founding, and the subsequent policies of non-extradition of IRA terrorists and toleration of IRA training camps in its national territory.

Those two enquiries could represent a proper atonement from the two governments for their own historical failings; and an end to selective enquiries for some at the expense of enquiries into the deaths of the many which will never happen, whatever Hilary Benn says.

The atonement from those who deliberately and shamelessly brought about the vast majority of the pointless deaths and suffering is not going to come in our lifetimes, however, if ever.

Apart from the moral vacuum at the heart of the “paramilitaries”, the prevailing narrative of Britain to blame for everything will actively prevent its happening.

Neil McCarthy is a writer and a teacher based in Dublin and London