Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

Poor Souls

In February 1989, six months after the assassination of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, two hooded loyalists, who were also serving members of the British Army, smashed the front window in the home of a Catholic man, Loughlin Maginn in Rathfriland, and shot dead the 28-year-old father of four in front of his family.

The UFF claimed responsibility and boasted that Maginn was a member of the IRA, an allegation denied by his family who said the killing was sectarian. In order to bolster its claim the UFF, believing that it was engaging in a great propaganda stunt, showed a BBC reporter pictures of alleged IRA suspects acquired from security sources, including one taken of Loughlin Maginn in RUC custody.

But the move backfired on the UFF: the cat was out of the bag.

Incredibly, as the furore of allegations of state collusion with loyalist paramilitaries increased, the UFF, stupidly, even plastered RUC photo montages of republican suspects on walls on the Shankill Road. It turned out that the UFF had thousands of RUC and British army intelligence files in its possession, most of which had been handed over by RUC or UDR sympathisers, or British military intelligence, through agents it ran within the paramilitaries.

In September 1989, John Stevens, an English Deputy Chief Constable, was appointed to carry out an inquiry into these breaches of security. Stevens uncovered what nationalists and republicans knew for many years: that the RUC Special Branch and British Intelligence were colluding with loyalists, and used loyalists to kill certain people the state wanted out of the way.

Stevens uncovered that the UFF’s director of intelligence, Brian Nelson, was an agent for the Force Research Unit (FRU), an intelligence group within the British army. It later emerged that British intelligence also allowed loyalists to import weapons from South Africa - weapons which subsequently led to the deaths of hundreds of nationalist civilians, and responsibility for which must ultimately rest with the British government. One internal FRU file noted that since Nelson took up his position, “the targeting has developed and is now more professional”.

Stevens was called in again, in April 1993, to investigate further matters relating to his previous inquiry and to “tie up some loose ends”. At no time, in either inquiry, was he asked to investigate the murder of Pat Finucane, despite Brian Nelson’s involvement in the planning of his death, and information about an impending attack from another informer, William Stobie (who was, himself, assassinated by the UFF last December).

Nelson had been involved in fifteen murders, fifteen attempted murders and sixty-two conspiracies to murder during the period he worked for FRU. Nelson struck a deal with the Director of Public Prosecution, cleared by the then Attorney General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, which meant that there was no hearing. He pleaded guilty to lesser charges, was described as a man of great courage by his handler, ‘Colonel J’ (Brigadier Gordon Kerr, who is now the British military attaché in Beijing), and was sentenced to eight years.

In 1999, after a UN report called for a public inquiry into collusion, Stevens, now the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was called in to conduct a third inquiry, finally, into the murder of Pat Finucane.

Among the devastating leaks from his report, due to be completed in the next few weeks, are his findings that the relationship between loyalist paramilitaries and state forces bordered on “institutionalised collusion”. He recommends that charges be brought against several police and army officers; and that there be a reform of procedures, possibly including a downgrading of the Special Branch. His report does not estimate the number of shootings that resulted from collaboration.

A BBC ‘Panorama’ programme, to be broadcast next Wednesday, is expected to contain further details surrounding the Stevens Inquiry, including interviews with former members of the Force Research Unit.

‘Devastating’ though his report may be, nationalists are bound to remain cynical about his conclusion that the state itself did not officially sanction the assassinations. Downing Street, the British army and the former RUC hierarchy will be able to quote that Stevens found no official policy of collusion and that officers made mistakes because there was “a culture of incompetence that left junior ranks effectively making up the rules as they went along.”

That is: the poor souls didn’t know that supplying information to a proscribed organisation and covering up their involvement in murder was wrong. That destroying the tape evidence of a confession by Ken Barrett, the man who pulled the trigger in the Finucane case, was wrong. That confirming the number plate of (Lord Mayor) Alex Maskey’s car to loyalist assassins was wrong. And a host of other wrongs expected to be made right by a wringing of hands and a promise that it will not happen again.

Few nationalists expect that any possible prosecutions will lead to prison sentences (the guilty know too much about and would threaten to implicate their superiors). Nationalists will continue to call for an independent public inquiry, despite the Finucane case, and other instances of collusion, being re-examined by Peter Cory, an international judge.

Nationalists have already seen the British government agreeing to an inquiry into Bloody Sunday, only for the Ministry of Defence to withhold full cooperation. Similarly, many people are wondering, if it has got nothing to hide, why does the British government continue to thwart the inquiry into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings?

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