As the UK government’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Hilary Benn, announced in the House of Commons a full public inquiry into the 1989 murder of Pat Finucane, he tried to pre-empt the obvious question he knew would come from the opposition benches where Tories and unionists sat.
Why not just leave the case to the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR), the UK government’s newly-established Troubles truth and investigation body, in which Benn said he had “every confidence”?
He tried to get ahead of the issue by saying there were “unique circumstances” in the murder of Finucane, a Belfast solicitor who was shot by the UDA in collusion with British state forces. For 35 years, his family had run into British government brick walls in their dogged pursuit of the truth.
Meanwhile, Benn told the House of Commons, the last Labour government under Tony Blair had promised on two occasions more than 20 years ago to establish an inquiry and that “solemn commitment” from the British state had remained unfulfilled.
“It is for this reason that I have decided to establish an independent inquiry,” he said.
ICRIR was established by the previous Tory UK government under the Legacy Act regime that was rejected by many victims’ families and also the Government in the Republic. Benn acknowledged the need to strengthen the ICRIR’s “independence”. But fundamentally, he still believed it can work. The commission is already staffed and set up, ready to go. Other families will be expected to avail of its services, while the full public inquiry that the Finucane family has long campaigned for in their case will take months to get off the ground.
Alex Burghart, the Conservative Party’s shadow secretary of state, asked Benn what “a public inquiry can do that ICRIR can’t”. He said the government “must not risk turning public inquiries into routine”.
His Conservative colleague Julian Smith, who held Benn’s job between 2019 and 2020, pointed out that other families must “wait in the queue” at the commission.
Gavin Robinson, the leader of the DUP, said he didn’t want to “besmirch the grief” of the Finucane family, but there were 1,200 other families who had lost loved ones in the Troubles, he said, and they had “neither truth nor justice”.
“How can [Benn] look victims in the eye and say there is not a hierarchy?” asked Robinson. His DUP colleague Sammy Wilson insisted there would be “hurt and anger” among other families.
[ British government orders inquiry into murder of Pat Finucane by UDAOpens in new window ]
Then hardline TUV unionist Jim Allister rose to his feet to deliver his scathing assessment of Benn’s decision. “Has there ever been a family given more preferential treatment than the Finucane family,” said Allister. There were murmurs of disagreement from across the house.
It was left to the SDLP MPs Colum Eastwood and Claire Hanna, who hailed the “tenacity of the Finucane family”, to highlight that the murdered man’s relatives had waited far too long for this moment. Eastwood congratulated Benn on “finally doing the right thing” while Hanna urged him to remove all “blockages” that victims’ families seeking the truth encountered from the British state.
Benn, who had made his decision after much back-and-forth with the Irish Government, told the Commons it is very hard for anybody else to “understand fully the trauma” of victims’ families.
“Nothing any of us can do will bring them back. But what we can do is seek transparency for them. We must work for a better future,” he said.
Benn said he would quickly appoint a judge and get the inquiry under way “as soon as possible”. For the Finucane family, it cannot come soon enough.
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