Patrick Finucane Report

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his remarks about those who served and those who continue to serve, including the Royal Marines. One cannot say exactly how long a public inquiry would take, but as we have learnt from experience, an enormous amount of ground clearing work would need to be done before it could even get going—the process of everyone hiring lawyers and trying to work out who is going to have anonymity and so forth. I came to office having made a promise that we were not going to have further costly open-ended inquiries. I have looked at the evidence in this case, and I have met the family, and I have seen that there is nothing the Government are holding back. I could see a stronger case for an inquiry if there was an open question about whether we were prepared to admit there was a problem with the MOD; we are. Was there a problem with parts of the RUC? There was. Were Ministers misled? I can say yes, they were. There is no argument that we are holding back on, so what matters is getting to the truth with the greatest disclosure, and I do not think that that requires an inquiry.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

The Prime Minister must realise that many of us find it hard to leave these matters simply to the interpretations and inferences Desmond de Silva has drawn from the dreadful evidence his inquiry has produced. We are dealing with a situation where terrorism took on the form of paramilitarism and military intelligence took on the form of para-terrorism. That is what was happening. In Special Branch, the force research unit and the secret services, there was a culture of anything goes but nobody knows—and following Desmond de Silva’s report we are still being asked to accept that nobody knows. Our predecessor Social Democratic and Labour party MPs told the Ministers of the time that that was what was going on. That is why we said we needed a new beginning to policing and we needed Special Branch to go, yet in all that time we were denounced, denigrated and dismissed. The one good thing about the Prime Minister’s statement today is that others in this House can no longer be in denial about what was happening.

There were so many levels and layers of collusion—all the deadly dereliction and the deviance and the dark deployment—but we are being asked to agree that it all adds up to there being no co-ordination. The Prime Minister must know that if we are to get to the bottom of this, we have to get to the top of it, but Desmond de Silva is trying to tell us, “No, there was no top.”

[The Prime Minister]

I have great respect for the hon. Gentleman, the campaign he has fought and the points he has made. He and his predecessors in the SDLP were right about what went wrong, and this report shows that they were right. It shows the extent to which we are prepared to open up and be clear about what happened. As for the organisations he mentions, the FRU has gone, and the RUC Special Branch has gone, so the question now is whether there is anything else to discover that this report has not discovered but a public inquiry would, and I do not believe there is.

In answer to the hon. Gentleman’s specific question about how high this went, Sir Desmond de Silva is absolutely clear that Ministers were misled and briefings were given that should not have been given, but he does not find that there was a ministerial conspiracy or ministerial order for the murder of Pat Finucane. That is very important. We now have a true picture and it is for others, including the police and the prosecuting authorities, to work out whether there is anything more that can be done.