British collusion killed our relatives, say Catholics

More than 100 people assembled in a Belfast hotel room yesterday to assert their belief that the British authorities killed their relatives, caused them to be killed, or were indifferent to their deaths.

The gathering follows two BBC Panorama programmes which put forward evidence that police and army personnel colluded with loyalist terrorists in a series of killings.

The issue of collusion has now moved to centre-stage politically, with reports awaited from Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and a Canadian judge on the cases of the murdered solicitor Pat Finucane and others.

But those who organised yesterday's event in the Belfast Europa hotel, while calling for an independent international inquiry, made it clear they needed no more evidence to make up their minds.

They displayed the names of hundreds of dead Catholics, labelling each one a victim of state collusion, asserting that all of them had been killed not by loyalist bigotry but by a hidden British hand.

"Collusion is all-pervasive and institutionalised," said the meeting's chairman, Mark Thompson of the Relatives for Justice organisation. "It is not the act of renegades or a few bad apples – it has been an integral element in the armoury of the British Army, financed and endorsed by successive British governments."

While a clear majority in Northern Ireland regards such a characterisation as propagandist, fanciful and exaggerated, the problem for the authorities is that in the nationalist ghettos the existence of widespread collusion is now seen as an established fact. There have been so many leaks, reports and discoveries of underhand deeds that government and security force denials carry virtually no weight with a substantial section of the population.

The authorities point to the fact that thousands of loyalists were locked up during the Troubles. But the stage has been reached, in the ghettos at least, where collusion is almost assumed unless the authorities can prove different. And of course they never can.

The other problem for the government is that Panorama and others have produced such strong evidence of security force misbehaviour in a number of cases that those who believe in collusion can very easily argue from the specific to the general.

One such case is that of Gerard Slane, who was killed by loyalists in 1988. His son Sean, who was eight at the time, was with him when he died. Sean Slane recalled on Panorama: "I just lay down beside him, asking him to wake up, just crying, asking him to wake up – 'Daddy, wake up, wake up'.

"I really did think that it was a dream, that it wasn't real. Thirteen years later I'm still sitting here, hoping for him to wake me up."

Gerard Slane's widow, Teresa, was in much distress at yesterday's conference that she could barely get out what she wanted to say. It broke her heart, she said, to watch her son speaking for the first time about his father's death.

"It's been really, really hard. We can't go on like this any more. We need to find the truth. We have to find the truth," Mrs Slane said before breaking down in tears.

Panorama reported that military intelligence knew that loyalists had singled out Mr Slane, but did not give a clear warning to police. A Metropolitan Police investigator said: "They knew that [army agent Brian] Nelson had been targeting Slane. They also knew that he'd been to his intelligence dump and he'd got a photograph of Slane which he'd handed to one of the most prolific killers in the organisation. That at least should have set the alarm bells ringing and they should have been passed to the RUC."

It is evidence such as this that gives the authorities so much explaining to do, and gives the critics so much ammunition. The platform message yesterday was that the 1,000 or so deaths caused by loyalist paramilitary groups must all have involved collusion, no matter how unlikely the circumstances.

Those in the hall, who have been heavily politicised by the Troubles in general and by their own life experiences in particular, are very open to such arguments. Although most of the rest of Northern Ireland is not so convinced, even many of the sceptics have been made uneasy by recent revelations.