Geraldine Finucane - Campaigning widow of Pat Finucane HARDtalk

school. The militant group Boko Haram is being blamed for the attack

as well as a bomb attack in the capital Abuja, which killed 70. Time

for HARDtalk. Welcome to HARDtalk. Healing a society traumatised by

sectarian violence is hard. Anyone doubting that should take a look at

Northern Ireland today. The de facto war between the IRA and the British

state is over but a legacy of richness `` bitterness remains. My

guest today is Geraldine Finucane, whose husband Patrick, a Catholic

lawyer, was murdered 25 years ago. The killing exposed collusion

between the British security services and Protestant

paramilitaries. The Finucane family still wants a full public inquiry,

but for the greater good of Northern Ireland, is it time to move on?

Geraldine Finucane, welcome to HARDtalk. Thank you. It is nice to

be here. We must start with the cataclysmic events that happened in

your family in 1989 when your husband Pat was brutally murdered.

Does it feel, 25 years on, that event has shaped your entire life?

It has not shaped my entire life. My entire life was beginning to be

shaped when I met Pat Finucane, for starters, but certainly, I would not

be here having an interview on HARDtalk, I would not imagine, if

Pat had not been murdered and I have not pursued the questions that I

thought needed to be asked. And you have pursued those questions for 25

years. I wonder if at any point in those 25 years, you thought to

yourself, enough. No, I have never thought enough because I have always

wanted answers and I'm prepared to wait until I get the answers. I

would like to go back to your relationship with Pat Finucane and I

want you to put it in context for me. He was a working`class Catholic

boy from West Belfast. You were a young woman from a middle`class

family in Protestant East Belfast. How did you get together? It was

when we went to university. My friends's boyfriend was a football

player and I had to go with her to watch the football matches because

she would not go on her own. Pat Finucane was playing football and we

hung out with the football team and the rest is history. You make it

sound quite straightforward but it was pretty extraordinary, wasn't it?

Because you must both have been aware that by becoming friendly with

each other and falling in love with each other, you were in some senses

breaking a taboo in Northern Ireland. I did not know that I was.

And we were in Dublin. But you carry Northern Ireland with you. Your

background, your past, your culture. I came from a very Protestant middle

class background and to be honest, when the trouble started in 1969, I

did not understand why there was trouble. I did not realise, when I

was 18 years old, 19 years old, that everybody did not live the way I

lived. If there is a stronger word than naive... I was naive. I did not

understand Northern Ireland. Once you took the decision to be a

partnership and get married and make your life in Northern Ireland, and

Pat of course became a successful lawyer, I wonder how aware you

became of his family's ardent republicanism, nationalism, if I

could put it that way. 's mother and father were not ardent Republicans,

not by any means. But all his siblings were. No, not all his

siblings. Pat came from a very large family and all of them chose

different routes. Some of them, I will admit, did take a Republicans

stand and did fight for what they believed they should have. Somewhere

in the IRA and you knew that. Yes, some not all by any means. One of

his brothers is in a religious order. So, you know, they are very

varied family and to say there were ardent Republicans is not a truthful

representation of that family. This is sensitive because I'm leading up

to 1989 and the most terrible murder of Pat, your husband, but I just

wonder in those years before 1989, through the 1980s, when he was

working, representing as a solicitor IRA activists including Bobby Sands

and other hunger strikers, some of the most senior figures inside the

IRA, you must have been aware that there were people in Northern

Ireland who believed that your husband, far from just being an

independent minded human rights lawyer, was actually part of the

IRA. No, I never thought that for one moment. My husband was an

officer of the court and when he went to college, he did not study

law but in 1969, his family were burned out of their home by

Protestants from the Schenkel Road. They were burned out and the family

was dispersed. As were many other families in Northern Ireland. And

the communities were completely disrupted. I ended up coming

back... We had no intention of coming back to Belfast at that

particular time but we did and I ended up living in a Catholic,

working`class estate, which people had just come to from everywhere

because they had been burned out or forced to move out. The housing

estates in Northern Ireland at that time were mixed but what happened

when the Trouble started in 1969 was some estates, the Protestants put

the Catholics out and made it a totally Protestant estate. The

Catholics put the Protestants out and it became totally Catholics.

There was great movement in the population. I ended up in a

Catholics, working`class estate, and you have no idea how much of a

culture shock that was for me. I had no idea. Coming from a leafy suburb

to a working`class estate was shocking but Pat looked at his

community and saw that there was a need for representation. They were

lost. They were being stopped and searched, they were being interned,

they were not given access to a lawyer for maybe up to 36, 48 hours

if they were arrested. And Pat sort that he could do something for his

community, so that is why he decided to take the law and become a lawyer

because he thought that was the best way forward to help. I suppose the

question is whether he crossed a line. For example, Sean

O'Callaghan, a highly controversial figure, a former IRA commander who

became an informer. He has said that he first met Max one at what he

regarded as an exclusively specifically IRA meeting in Donegal,

when Pat turned up with Gerry Adams, who at the time was a senior figure

in the IRA. And in Sean O'Callaghan's mind, there was no

question of Pat's affiliation. My simple answer to that is I think

Sean O'Callaghan is a liar. Let's get to that date, the 12th of

February, 1989. You were having a lunch with the family at home. Yes.

Sunday dinner. There could not have been for one second in the mind the

thought that your home would be invaded by gunman but it was and I

just wonder now whether the unimaginable horror of that day is

in any sense sort of dissipated by time, if the recollection of it has

changed after 25 years. The actual horror of the murder? Yes. If you

had been sitting in your kitchen having your dinner with your young

children and somebody had come in and fired a certain amount of

bullets... I mean, there were 14 bullets in Pat. After the RUC

forensic team left my kitchen, I find all the bullets they had used,

which were everywhere in my kitchen, left, right, centre, everywhere. The

horror levels leave `` never leaves you. I don't dwell on it. I don't

try to recollect it. But it does not go away. Do you think that was true

for the children who were with you at the time but who were very young?

Is it as true for them as it is for you, recollect it as an adult? Yes.

They were all at a very impressionable age. My youngest son

was just short of nine years of age and my daughter was 12 and my oldest

son was 17. All of those are very impressionable age is. John was

young enough to remember and the other two were teenagers. Yes, of

course. And my oldest son actually gathered the children into a corner

and probably saved their life. It was an extraordinarily brutal

killing and it resonated not just across Northern Ireland or the UK

did, over many years, prompt a did, over many years, prompt a

series of investigations and reviews of the interest occasions and then

enquiries into the reviews of the investigations. And it is true to

say that you probably know more about what happened, who did it, how

it was plotted, than most people who lost loved ones in Northern

Ireland. Would you accept that? Would you feel that is true? Well, I

don't know who did it. You know that some key individuals involved in the

plot has been convicted. For example, one of those shooters,

gunman, was ultimately sentenced to 22 years. Are you talking about Ryan

Nelson? I'm not talking about Ryan Nelson. We can get to him in a

second. But other individuals, Ken Barrett, was actually convicted of

being one of the gunmen. My main thrust in this campaign has never

been the gunman. In the 1980s, before that and probably since,

gunman has been two a penny in Northern Ireland and it was never

the gunmen that I was interested in. I wanted to know who instructed

them. I wanted to know how far off the chain of command this all went.

The gunman didn't think this up for themselves. I don't give them that

much intelligence. But you mentioned the name Brian Nelson. He has been

connected with this case. He, we now know, was an agent working with one

of the Army's special... The Force research intelligence service. He

has been named. Others, for example, the man working with the

RUC special Branch as an agent, who provided the weapon, he has been

named as well. I just come back to this point that you do, after so

many years and so much pain that you have suffered, you do have, do you

not, a strong sense of the collusion with the security services, the way

in which the paramilitaries some elements within the British state

security were working together? Yes. Some being the world. I only have

some notion of it. There has never been a proper inquiry where

witnesses can be cross`examined, and similar statements can be verified

by cross`examination. None of that has ever happened. David Cameron,

back in 2011, invited you to Downing Street because he believed in

setting up one further review led by leading barrister Sir Desmond De

Silva. He believed he was doing what you wanted, going that extra mile.

No he didn't. No, he didn't. If his aides had talked to him properly, he

would have been under no illusion that another review was what the

family wanted. We were told before we went to Downing Street that we

would be happy with what we heard. And we were certainly not happy with

what we heard. We had been having meetings for up to one year before

that meeting in Downing Street. My legal team and the legal teams on

the Crown side. And it was discussions about the type of

inquiry and we have had a particular difficulty with the enquiries act

because one of the clauses in that legislation states that a relevant

government minister may override the tribunal with a restriction notice,

so the power and the independence of the tribunal is not total and we

felt that did not give us a very fair playing field. Now, at one

stage during the discussions, we were offered a protocol, which was

used in an inquiry into the Baha Moussa case. In Iraq. In the

allegations of torture by British services. Yes. In that protocol,

they were willing to let the tribunal be totally independent and

that was put on the table and we said if that is what you are going

to have is the way you operate, we will go with the inquiry, let's

start tomorrow. That was the last meeting we had. So, you can

understand that when we went to Downing Street and the Prime

Minister said we will not having an inquiry and we would just going to

review the papers, where Sir Desmond De Silva did not have the power to

compel anybody to speak to him, he could not cross`examine anybody...

The papers had been looked at before. It was a complete and utter

waste of time and money. You walked out. I didn't walk out. What I am

getting too is this, Desmond DeSilva went ahead with this review and he

came out I will quote some from it, he concluded that state agents

played a key role in the murder of your husband. He said authorities

could have invented it, but didn't and concluded that it would not have

happened without state involvement. But, he said, in the end he could

not say that the killing of Pat Finucane was linked to an

overarching state conspiracy. Isn't that the real problem you have? That

you, with the greatest of respect, are convinced there was a

overarching state conspiracy and you don't want to hear any expert who

has reviewed the evidence and concluded otherwise. He hasn't

review the evidence thoroughly. He hasn't had the power. He didn't

speak to many people. He just read something on paper. Now, when Judge

Cory did exactly the same thing, he read statement a and statement be

and that, because he couldn't go any further than that, he was only

designated to review and that he couldn't make a final decision

because they were questions to ask, discrepancies and other such things

``statement A and statement B. How can Desmond DeSilva make such a

decision doing the same thing? I'm not convinced that this is the way

it must be. I don't want an enquiry and if it doesn't come out the way I

think it should, then I'll be unhappy. I just want a fair crack of

the whip. I want my site to put forward, the other side, and an

independent tribunal to reach a conclusion `` side. I want it to be

transparent. This case is not about the murder of Pat Finucane any

longer. This has more impact to Northern Ireland than you could

possibly match in. It affects so many people. `` imagine. People

deserve to find out the truth clearly and transparently and not

for something to go on behind closed doors and then be told that that is

the way it was. Nobody at this stage believes that because it has been

delayed and delayed and delayed and people now say, well, what are you

hiding? Why don't they just do it? There is a wide ranging discussion

in Northern Ireland now about the merits of continuing the quest for

justice, not just in your case, but other cases that come from that

troubled period, weighed against the need to look for the future, not the

past. The need to move on in Northern Ireland. Would you accept

at some point you would have two look forward and not back? You will

have to move on. There is an analogy I use which sums up well, if you

have a wound of any sort, you treat it in a certain way to make it heal.

Deep wounds, which this has turned out to be, because it was about

collusion which affected the whole of Northern Ireland, a deep wound

cannot be stitched over and just left, because it won't heal, it will

fester and eventually it will burst. That is what is happening in

Northern Ireland at the minute, because not only the case of Pat

Finucane and collusion hasn't been dealt with, but another of other

things haven't been dealt with. The trouble in Northern Ireland is

escalating all the time. So, where does that leave you when you hear

what has happened for example to more than 180 Republicans suspected

of involvement in IRA activities, some including murder and other

alleged offences, who have, in effect, been offered amnesty?

Letters from the British government have been received, saying they face

no prosecution and have been now known as on the runs. It is vital it

is that they do not face prosecution as part of the peace process. How

would you feel if you were the relative of someone who lost their

life as the result of the actions of these on the runs? I can't speak for

anybody apart from myself. I understand the pain that other

people have. I have pain myself. Our family have never sought

prosecutions against the people that murdered pat. That has never been

our primary aim. Our primary aim was to find out the truth `` Pat. To

find justice, and have it exposed so that everyone understood what was

going on. That has been our primary aim. I can't say to someone else who

lost a husband or a brother or a son or some relative, I can't say that's

what you should do. That would be very arrogant of me to say that. You

don't accept the notion that at some point amnesty becomes a very

important concept in Northern Ireland. The former Northern Ireland

Secretary of State, Peter Hain, said that we need to look to the future

and if you are going to do that, addressed the issue of amnesties and

apply it evenhandedly across the board. That means even for British

security forces who face their own questions. To go that, if you are

healing something, you know, you have to look at what you are

healing. And, everything needs to be healed in a different fashion. I

think that's what makes Northern Ireland so difficult to heal. It

was, there is so much to cover. From South Africa, we have inherited this

phrase that troops off our tongues, but, maybe at some point, particular

after a generation, reconciliation becomes more important than pursuing

the truth to the very end. Different people in Northern Ireland are at

different stages of the journey. That is why it is very hard to reach

a consensus on how we should all move forward together. Let me end by

bringing us from the very beginning, when we talked about the way your

relationship develop to now, you and he crossed a divide to make your

relationship and your marriage and your children together. When you

look at your children's lives and the communities in Northern Ireland

today, do you think things are very different? Do you think sectarianism

in Northern Ireland is on the wane? I don't think I would go as far as

to say it is on the wane. Sectarian divides are still very prominent in

Northern Ireland. There is a lock of community work going on. There is a

lot of cross community stuff. But, I think it is still a big issue.

Geraldine Finucane, thanks in much for being on HARDtalk. `` thanks

very much. Hello. Many of us have seen lovely

spring sunshine in the last few days, but it has been rather chilly

first thing. A reminder that it is