Ruth Dudley Edwards: Pat Finucane's murder was heinous, yet it is wrong to describe him as a human rights lawyer

We have a classic example at present with the ludicrous developments in the decades-long campaign to sanctify the IRA’s Pat Finucane, which has been brilliantly covered in detail (almost exclusively) in this newspaper.

British and Irish Governments seem unable to see that Pat Finucane was a bad man with three beloved brothers who did terrible things in the IRA: John, who was killed in a car crash, Dermot, who stabbed three guards in the Maze escape, and Seamus, who was arrested alongside Bobby Sands after an IRA gunfight.

And the governments cannot see that while his murder was heinous, it was only one of very many. His family deserve what they are entitled to by law and no more.

As he would have wished, his murder is being used to demonise the state he hated.

Ignorance and gullibility play their part in this distortion of history and reality, along with a dislike of confrontation, which is why politicians in general so often cave in to what I believe to have been political threats and hectoring and bullying.

How, for instance, could the good people who produced the new Queen’s University report on paramilitarism say so little about the Provisional IRA who still dictate republican strategy?

The supine behaviour of the British establishment has much to do with the complexities of a shared and contentious history, the tendency of Celtic nationalists to take the Irish side, the brilliance of the narratives spun by Irish nationalists, the uselessness of most unionists in making their case at home and abroad, the pragmatic need to keep sweet the Irish government and Irish America, which always take the nationalist side, and, of course, the tendency of gullible English politicians who know next to nothing about Ireland to succumb to liberal guilt about real and imagined historical wrongs done to the nearest neighbour.

I published my very first political article in 1994 when the Irish Republic lifted its broadcasting ban on the IRA. I had seen Brian Farrell, Radio Telefis Eireann’s most senior and respected interviewer and a tremendously well-informed Professor of Politics to boot, fail completely to demolish the dishonest allegations and arguments of a well-prepped, cleverly packaged Gerry Adams.

“Farrell was too civilised to be able to deal with an opponent who is single-minded, unscrupulous and brilliant at rising from the terrorist gutter to seize the high moral ground,” I wrote gloomily. I rightly expected nothing better from English interviewers when the UK ban was lifted later in the year.

Decent people found it very difficult to deal with congenital, unscrupulous liars. I was not surprised when the IRA insistence that there should be no hierarchy of victims became what we have now: a hierarchy of victims topped by the IRA’s chosen heroes.

“Patrick Finucane was a human rights lawyer” was the misleading first line of a statement issued last week by Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. No, Minister. He wasn’t.

He was a defence lawyer, most of whose time was spent acting for fellow-members of the IRA. And he worked tirelessly for the organisation by providing its leadership with useful information. When he went into a prison to see an IRA colleague, his priority was to discover if the prisoner had incriminated himself or anyone else, had given information on arms dumps or future IRA operations, or had been turned.

As various articles over the past week have spelled out, there is no justification for special treatment of Finucane, whose murder has already had many millions of taxpayers’ money lavished on it.

As Lord Austin, who knows about terrorism, said in the Lords last week, “It seems to me that the only beneficiaries now are the lawyers. These inquiries always take longer and cost more than the Government think they will. So at what point will we draw a line under all of this and use this money instead for economic development in Northern Ireland, for investment in schools, jobs, reconciliation and peacebuilding, and bringing young people from both communities together, so that the people of Northern Ireland can look forward to an even brighter future?”

We shouldn’t hold our breath. Prime Minister Starmer is a lawyer through and through, and as we are finding out, his moral compass seems a bit dodgy.