We must all be delighted that cold-blooded murderer of Pat Finucane has been brought to book, so appositely and neatly before the latest peace-process-reviving conference at Leeds Castle. What an amazing coincidence! says Kevin Myers
Now that Ken Barrett has been very properly convicted of one heinous killing, perhaps that now entitles us to wonder about the possibility of clearing up other killings at around the same time. There is a basis for this expectation. It is called parity of esteem.
Smita Islania, for one, would probably like to know whether she is entitled to some of that parity. Six months after Pat Finucane was murdered, her husband, Maheshkumar Islania, and her six-month-old baby, Nivruti Mahesh Islania, were shot dead by the IRA in Germany. His crime was that he was a corporal in the RAF; little Nivruti's crime was that she was in the same car as her father.
The IRA apologised for the killing of this infant, saying that her killers didn't know she was in the car. Really? Didn't know she was in the car, eh? Well, I suppose that's one of the hazards of being an RAF man's daughter: no one going to check to see if you're in his car before they murder him. (What precisely has the RAF ever done to merit such terminal treatment? Was it that time it napalmed Andersonstown? Or was it the little thermonuclear device on the Lower Falls? Perhaps it was the scores of lives saved by RAF helicopter and Nimrod crews off our coasts down the decades.)
But Maheshkumar's wife Smita was also in the car as the killers chased it, pouring bullets into it; possibly they were confident of their accuracy, or maybe, being the wife of an RAF corporal, she did not merit the respect other people are entitled to. No doubt Commissioner Stevens, now that he has so much investigative time on his hands, might choose to investigate this cruel murder.
Also since the Finucane murder, in another one of those classic IRA-oops moments, terrorists murdered James Babbington, a harmless Catholic man on his way to work. It was a case of a mistaken identity, which can be the very devil when you're in the killing business. You see, you get these people who thoughtlessly resemble other people, or inconsiderately live near them, or selfishly do both, and what's a poor fellow to do but bump the bloke off in the hope he's the right victim, even if sometimes he's not.
And in James Babbington's case he wasn't, prompting the IRA to declare its "deep regret" at having stiffed the wrong man. Well, here's a clear-cut trough for Stevens to stick his sleuthing nose into, because the man has exactly the same credentials as Pat Finucane: each was a middle-class Catholic father with three children, living round the corner from another just off the Antrim Road in North Belfast. There is, of course, the small dissimilarity that one was killed by the UDA and the other by the IRA - but that wouldn't make any difference to enquiries into the Babbington killing, would it? While Stevens is putting his constabulary snout into the trough of 15 years ago, he might consider the little affair at Deal in Kent, where the IRA blew up and killed 11 Royal Marine musicians and injured 30 more. Perhaps military musicians might have been marching through South Armagh and the Creggan, keeping children awake, and that is why the IRA killed them.
But if they were, that's the first I've heard about it, for making musical noises is all they're good at: they have no military function except as stretcher-bearers. However, they make a jolly fine target if killing bandsmen is to your taste, and it certainly was to the IRA's taste, because they did it numerous times. Now that their ceasefire is nice and permanent - as it certainly seems to be - the bombers have probably found employment as music critics. How they must yearn for the good old days, when they could express their disapproval with real feeling! No longer, alas: now they are confined to mere words. As they can bitterly testify, Semtex and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.
Merely because taking up careers as scribes surely wouldn't protect them from prosecution, would it? After all, Ken Barrett had retired from terrorism and was being actively protected by the English police when Stevens began to close the net around him (as we crime-writers put it).
Or is it possible that I have misunderstood things? Is it conceivable that we have two sets of rules - one set of rules for the victims of IRA terrorism (and of course, their grieving families) and another set of rules for loyalist terrorists, especially if there are allegations of collusion with British intelligence? So Smita Islania, 15 years ago you held your dead baby's head, complete with bullet hole, to your heart; now hold on to this thought: to propitiate the killers of your child and your husband, apartheid-law has been formally introduced to Ireland. There are now two kinds of perpetrator, two kinds of victim.
No one voted for this, no one said we would get it; but thanks to Sinn Féin extortion, it's what we've got. And what next? Is the British army's Brigadier Gordon Kerr next to be tossed to the wolves while the governments of Ireland and Britain continue about their craven project of corrupting both law and truth in order to appease the Shinners?