THE BRITISH government must hold an independent judicial inquiry into the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, despite its refusal to set up any new open-ended investigations following the £200 million (€228 million) Saville inquiry, the House of Commons was told yesterday.
Secretary of State Owen Paterson is to meet Mr Finucane’s family in coming weeks, it is understood. However, minister of state Hugo Swire said the British government had no intention of backing away from its decision.
MPs yesterday debated for almost five hours the contents of Lord Saville’s inquiry report on the events of Bloody Sunday. The debate was marked by repeated complaints from Democratic Unionist MPs about the focus placed on Bloody Sunday, saying the suffering of members of the Protestant community has been forgotten.
Remembering the two RUC officers killed in Derry shortly before Bloody Sunday, DUP MP Nigel Dodds said the service of those officers and the others killed during The Troubles should be remembered, which is “why we – or most of us anyway – wear the Poppy with pride”.
DUP Strangford MP Jim Shannon asked why the British government would not set up an inquiry into the La Mon hotel bombing where people burned alive. “Is there any justice for them? I doubt it.”
Pointing to the Darkley church hall massacre, the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing and others, Mr Shannon said: “The legacy of pain is a legacy that we have. When it comes to tears, pain and hurt we have that also.”
DUP Upper Bann MP Derek Simpson, who lost four members of his extended family to the IRA, said the role played by the Irish Government in its creation had to be investigated: “Successive British governments have said nothing and done even less.”
Even though 1,000 pages of the report cover the events leading up to The Troubles, DUP Derry MP Gregory Campbell claimed that Saville had failed to put the situation in the city, where civilian control had been lost, “in context”.
Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, who served with the British army in Northern Ireland, sharply criticised Lt Col Derek Wilford, who had been in command of the 1st battalion parachute regiment’s support company – the soldiers who opened fire.
“Col Wilford should not have launched an incursion into the Bogside. It would be very simple for me to damn the parachute regiment. Heaven knows that they have enough enemies, but I would say that they are a fine regiment, whose record is unblemished in so many ways.”
He said the support company “took its instructions from one misguided individual who believed that he had some God-given right to try and put straight the situation in Northern Ireland. As a result, the name of the British army . . . was tarnished by a small number of maverick soldiers.” Another former officer, Conservative MP Paul Stuart, who also served in Northern Ireland, said Bloody Sunday had been “a hideous day for the British army’s reputation” caused “by a total failure of leadership”.
Former SDLP leader Mark Durkan said the Bloody Sunday victims and their families had suffered “relentless misrepresentation” in the aftermath of the killings: “Lies were erected on stilts and marched around the world.”
Calls by a number of MPs for the OBE awarded after Bloody Sunday to Col Wilford to be withdrawn were not supported by Mr Swire, who said honours were usually only withdrawn after someone had been convicted.
