Editorial: Tens of millions more is to be spent investigating the murder of Pat Finucane while the murder of judges will not get proper scrutiny

​Trevor Ringland has been an Ireland rugby international, a reconciliation activist, a lawyer and one of the most moderate unionist voices.

​He has dedicated much of his life to improving cross-border relations on this island and cross-community relations within Northern Ireland.

He urged leaders of the Ulster Unionist Party, for which he was once a candidate, to attend GAA games. He has been a passionate supporter of the Ireland rugby team for whom he once played. He has been a scathing critic of past mis-judgements and mis-deeds by unionist politicians.

It is all the more telling that a man with such liberal political credentials has become such an important critic of the utter, utter scandal of legacy: the one-sided investigations, and the distortion of the past to make the security forces who prevented civil war out to be the bad guys.

The web version of this editorial will link to a devastating essay that Mr Ringland wrote in 2020 after the Supreme Court quashed Gerry Adams’ convictions.

Lord Kerr, who wrote the judgement, he said, should have been recused from the case because he “must have been conscious of the many graves that Wednesday’s decision walked on. The graves of those who, throughout the history of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, strove to uphold the rule of law, whether it was soldiers, police officers or his colleagues in the legal profession. Like the judges William Staunton, Martin McBirney, Rory Conaghan, William Doyle and Maurice Gibson or the barrister and lecturer Edgar Graham.”

We report today on the 50th anniversary of two of those murders.

Mr Ringland called for a team of detectives to be set up to investigate IRA leaders.

Of course no such team was set up, nor will it be. The judges will never get a special investigation. Instead, the murder of Pat Finucane was last week given special treatment: tens of millions more to be spent on a case that has already had tens of millions spent on it.