Pat Finucane has been remembered for his love of the law and role in “embryonic human rights” during some of the most chaotic years of the Northern Ireland Troubles on the first day of a public inquiry into his 1989 murder.
The prominent Belfast solicitor was killed in front of his wife and three children, aged 17, 12 and eight, in their home in the north of the city by loyalist paramilitary gunmen on February 12th 1989.
His family has campaigned for decades for a public inquiry to investigate the extent of security forces involvement in his killing.
The first day of the Patrick Finucane Inquiry on Wednesday heard that his father had worked two jobs to feed his family, and how he had gone on to become the first of his family to go to university when he studied English, French and philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin.
It was here in the late 1960s that the west Belfast man met his wife Geraldine, who was from the Protestant community in Northern Ireland, and went on to study law.
Danny Friedman KC, counsel for the Finucane family, said Finucane did not join the IRA, nor was he even vaguely sympathetic to it and, as an inquest into his death heard, had been a law-abiding citizen going about his business.
He said Finucane found that he loved law and the opportunity to help others.
He told the first day of the inquiry that Finucane, along with Peter Madden, founded the firm Madden and Finucane in 1979 to “help others who had no other constitutional avenue to help themselves”.
“Pat Finucane and Peter Madden held a mirror to the establishment using the standings of the rule of law and embryonic human rights,” he said.
Friedman pointed out the clients Finucane defended included Bobby Sands who would go on to die during an IRA hunger strike, as well as Patrick McGeown, who was acquitted of the 1988 killings of British Army Corporals Derek Wood and David Howes in west Belfast.
He said this led to the RUC telling the government that Finucane was “one of the lawyers in the pockets of terrorists”, and that he was regarded as a “thorn in the side of the establishment”.
He told the inquiry that Finucane was never told of intelligence he was under threat in 1985 and November 1988, and that MI5 “deliberately spread false information”.
Friedman said that the fact of collusion in Mr Finucane’s murder is “no longer disputed” following multiple investigations.
