Editorial: Hilary Benn's reasoning for ordering yet another huge inquiry into Pat Finucane case was misleading, and deepens the disgraceful imbalance in how legacy is being examined

Where to begin in assessing what happened yesterday, when the legacy scandal got all the more imbalanced with the announcement of a massive public inquiry likely to cost tens of millions of pounds into the murder of Pat Finucane?

With Hilary Benn’s misleading statement to MPs, that included a history of the Finucane investigations which, disgracefully, implied that the country for which he is a minister had dishonourably agreed to then delayed setting up an inquiry when in fact the Finucanes would not at first accept one under the 2005 inquiries act? (It wasn’t good enough for them, it now is).

With Michelle O’Neill’s demand for full truth about a “shameful killing”? From the woman who defends past IRA murder, about which the Provos lie.

With Doug Beattie’s tweet, saying that he hoped “the Finucane family gets the information they have campaigned many years for”? That sounds laudable but does not touch on his UUP predecessor David Trimble’s point that any probe must examine Pat Finucane too.

Mr Beattie was a brave voice on the imbalances against stage forces in the 2014 Stormont House legacy deal, which his party rejected.

​It is not unreasonable to assume he would be concerned about this utterly lopsided focus on one Troubles murder out of 3,600. Lord Trimble said that any inquiry into Pat Finucane would have to look at claims by Shane Paul O’Doherty and Sean O’Callaghan that he was a republican. Latterly the journalist Ed Moloney wrote that he had “connection to the BB [IRA Belfast Brigade]”.

The murder of Pat Finucane in front of his family was savage and wicked. There is no contradiction in acknowledging that trauma and saying that if many millions are spent on this case then it cannot merely be, as Mr Beattie said, an exercise in the Finucanes getting the information they seek. Such inquiries must follow the evidence.

Mr Benn, in his misleading (in spirit) statement to MPs, did – in his slow account of how an inquiry had not come about – not only failed to mention the refusal of the Finucanes to accept the sort of inquiry they now will, but he did not properly explain how the review they got instead was by a top human rights lawyer, Desmond de Silva. Why did Mr Benn not mention that he found no overarching conspiracy, amid claims by the Finucanes and others of one? Why did he not mention, as his dramatic presentation reached a peak about the Supreme Court ruling, that it explicitly did not order an inquiry.

The last government failed to bring balance to people such as the sister of the lawyer murdered by the IRA Edgar Graham. She did not even get an HET probe. This government is making it worse. Tens of millions more will be spent on a case that has been heavily examined – after hundreds of millions on Bloody Sunday, Ballymurphy and many probes and civil cases into claims of state wrongdoing. IRA murder and mayhem gets almost nothing.