Lawyers in the line of fire

The shocking truth behind the murder in 1989 of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane is slowly becoming known. But the wider question is: how did solicitors come to be targeted in Northern Ireland at all? Jon Robins investigates

Further shocking allegations of state collusion in the death of the Belfast solicitor, Pat Finucane, were revealed in a recent BBC Panorama documentary. However, it still remains something of a mystery as to how solicitors came to be targeted during the Troubles in the first place.

Even one of the men said to have pulled the trigger on the defence lawyer seems unsure. "Solicitors were, kind of, way taboo, you know what I mean? Like we used a lot of Roman Catholic solicitors ourselves," Ken Barrett, an alleged Ulster Defence Association hit man, was caught on hidden camera saying. "They were taboo at the time. You didn't touch."

While even terrorists are capable of grasping the difference between lawyer and client, that professional distinction appears to have been lost on someone within the security forces. "It would have been laughable if it wasn't so tragically serious – you can't get the defendant and so you get the solicitor instead," says Michael Finucane, the murdered solicitor's son. "That was the mentality that the Royal Ulster Constabulary was operating under at the time. The difference between the role of the lawyer and the client was not one that they observed or, if they did, they disregarded it because it didn't suit their purpose."

Earlier in the month, Michael, now a lawyer practising in Dublin, together with his brother and sister, once again called on the Government to establish a public inquiry into their father's death.

Panorama made a compelling argument that the shadowy Force Research Unit directed terrorists towards high-profile individuals with republican connections. Finucane, whose best-known client was the IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands, was shot dead in front of his family in 1989. The programme included footage of Barrett claiming that an RUC agent, Brian Nelson, provided him with a photograph of Finucane and showed him where to go.

The Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir John Stevens has been looking into the case, on and off, for 10 years and is now on to "Stevens 3". A Canadian judge, Peter Cory, was also appointed as part of the all- party Weston Park talks on the peace process last year, to look at six controversial murders, including that of the solicitor Rosemary Nelson.

"Make no mistake," argues Peter Madden, who co-founded Madden & Finucane back in 1979. "This is not the public judicial inquiry that the family has been campaigning for. It is not the public inquiry that the family are entitled to. This is a private, behind closed doors, judicial investigation."

The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, an influential US-based group, has been watching the latest turn of events with increasing incredulity. "We thought in 1993 that there was enough evidence of collusion to justify an inquiry, and that continues to be our position as more and more evidence of collusion has come out, these 13 years," she says. The group argues that the Cory investigation is another stalling tactic.

The Bar Human Rights Committee called for an independent inquiry in 1999 and argued that "failure to do so would render the Government both susceptible to an application for judicial review and in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights." Stephen Solley, QC, the BHRC chairman, was disheartened at the Canadian judge's prediction that his work could take two years. "It's completely extraordinary, given the material now available, that the family should have to wait for that period of time," he says. "What has been so dreadful is that the press, to their credit, have got there first time and time again."

Unsurprisingly, loyalist commentators are mortified at the prospect of another high-profile episode of state-sponsored soul-searching. "The Bloody Sunday inquiry has just been counter-productive and we don't need another one," comments David Burnside, the Ulster Unionist Party MP for South Antrim. "Public inquiries don't make people any better. Bloody Sunday has just wound up the republican population, made the lawyers rich, and the law-abiding people in Northern Ireland are just disgusted with all this money being spent."

As far as Michael Finucane is concerned, an inquiry is "a weapon of last resort". "They are only established in cases of exceptional public importance and that has been made out by all of the evidence many times over, and we've tried it every other way and none has succeeded," he says. "If Tony Blair is serious when he says that he's determined to get to the bottom of this, then prove it."

Michael Finucane takes obvious pride in his father's legacy as a lawyer. "My dad was the first from his street to go to university when free education came in the early Sixties," he says. "It was a big deal for a working-class kid from West Belfast." Finucane junior decided to follow his father after he was "bitten by the bug" following a spell at Madden & Finucane after school.

Some of Pat Finucane's immediate family were members of the IRA, and one, John, was killed on active service. But the lawyers at Madden & Finucane were not "provos in suits", as their detractors put it, and they would represent loyalist demonstrators hit by plastic bullets as well as republicans. The firm also handled personal injury, crime and conveyancing.

"The attraction of the law for people like my dad was looking at Human Rights Law, which was, in a way, bigger than the state itself, and if you didn't have a remedy in domestic law, you could go to the European Court of Human Rights," Michael says. He was one of the first of a generation of lawyers to take cases to Strasbourg. Peter Madden gives his former colleague the credit for "revolutionising" the detention system by taking habeas corpus actions in the courts and forcing the police to produce prisoners in court who had been beaten up.

Panorama claimed that it was a newspaper cutting showing Pat Finucane accompanied by a client, Patrick McGeown, leaving court that was handed by Brian Nelson to Ken Barrett. McGeown had been accused and acquitted of organising the brutal killing of two Army corporals who happened upon an IRA funeral. Peter Madden does not recall the McGeown case as anything special, and adds that "upwards of 30 or 40" other people were charged. The evidence against their client was "pretty thin", mainly comprising aerial shots from a helicopter, not even showing him at the murder scene. The lawyer recalls that at the time there were threats from the RUC being delivered via clients, but the small number of solicitors who represented prisoners held at the Castlereagh detention centre had been subjected to abuse for years. In fact, Michael says that his father had come to regard such harassment as "an occupational hazard".

However, more chilling than the threats were the words of Douglas Hogg, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Home Office, in the House of Commons. The minister had said that there were a number of solicitors in Northern Ireland "unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA". Many lawyers in the province took this to be a reference to Finucane. An incensed Seamus Mallon, now Deputy First Minister, told the House that he had "no doubt that there are lawyers walking the streets or driving the roads of the North of Ireland who have become targets of assassins' bullets as a result of the statement that has been made tonight". Three weeks later, the 38-year-old solicitor was murdered.

Both Michael Finucane and Peter Madden believe that those words put Pat Finucane in the firing line.