February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Her husband, Pat, would be coming home from a long day in his Castle Street legal practice, maybe sitting in front of the roaring log fire and chatting about his day while looking out on their Antrim Road garden, it dotted with toys belonging to their four grandchildren.
Instead, Geraldine is gearing herself up for renewed media interest and a series of events to mark 20 years since his life was cut tragically short. This month marks two decades since the 39-year old defense solicitor was shot 14 times in front of Geraldine and their three children.
The young family was sitting down to Sunday lunch on 12 February 1989 when two UDA men knocked down the front door with sledge hammers and used a revolver and pistol to kill him.
Geraldine was wounded in the foot by a ricocheting bullet. Michael was 17, Catherine 12 and John just eight years old at the time.
What has happened in the 20 long years since has been testament to Geraldine’s quiet determination and steadfast battle to get to the truth about her husband’s killing.
She threw the stone in a pond that has been rippling ever since and, in those two decades, Geraldine and her family have helped expose much of the murky truth behind her husband’s death and have led the way for other families to do the same.
Today we now know that RUC special agent William Stobie supplied the gun that murdered her husband, that RUC agent Ken Barrett was one of the two balaclava-wearing men who burst into their family home, and that Brian Nelson, a British agent operating as the intelligence chief of the UDA, provided the vital intelligence that guided the killers to their target.
What we still don’t know is how far up the chain of command the knowledge of this murderous action went.
As the Finucane family rips away at the shroud of secrecy surrounding Pat’s murder, Geraldine is still hopeful of a full public enquiry that will give them the justice that Pat himself worked for so tirelessly during his all too brief career – a career that showed early promise even as Pat was a young student at Trinity College in the 1960s. It was there that Pat met Geraldine, she being from a middle class Protestant background in East Belfast.
“We met through the soccer club, Pat was captain of the team for two years,” Geraldine recalls.
“There was a quite a big contingent from the North of Ireland when we went. I think there was some sort of drive on from Trinity to get people from up here to go, so that’s how we got to know each other.”
Pat was the first in his large West Belfast family to go to university where he studied English, French and Philosophy.
“It was certainly a big thing for him to go down to Trinity. His best friend, who is now the director of sport in Trinity, was a year older than Pat and he went first and told Pat how great it was.
“It was a big deal for him to go to Trinity as you had to get a dispensation and everything from the bishop because it was seen as a Protestant college. But it certainly was a very, very big thing for Pat, first of all to go even to grammar school. It was quite a hardship for his mum and dad because it was a big family and money was very tight.”
The young couple married in Geraldine’s final year and then moved back to Belfast where Pat took up the law course at Queen’s University. She studied teaching at Stranmillis College.
In 1979, Pat set up his law practice with Peter Madden. It was a busy time for the couple as they looked after the fledging business and brought up their young family.
“It was a difficult time, it’s a difficult time for any family. People tend to do things all at once. Get married, have a family, buy a house, start a business and you look back and start to think was I crazy,” Geraldine said with a laugh.
“But I suppose you have the energy and enthusiasm when you are young and you go ahead and just do it. It’s like lots of families; you keep on going.”
Pat’s legal career was flourishing. He had appeared in a number of high profile cases representing both republican and loyalist clients. He acted for hunger striker Bobby Sands and at one point represented all the IRA and INLA hunger strikers.
He also worked for the widow of Gervaise McKerr, one of three men shot dead by the RUC in a shoot-to-kill incident in 1982. But as Pat’s case load increased, a cloud on the horizon began to loom with a number of threats being made to his clients.
In holding stations they were told by RUC officers that they wouldn’t be having him as a solicitor much longer. Their legal representative was also referred to as a “thug in a suit.”
Was this the point where Pat and Geraldine began to worry about his safety?
Or did the threat only seem real when junior British Home Office minister Douglas Hogg stood up in the British parliament and said that some solicitors in Northern Ireland were “unduly sympathetic to the IRA”?
“No I don’t think things seemed serious until Douglas Hogg said that. Earlier we believed that everything that was said was more of an interrogation technique to frighten the client, as opposed to a direct threat.
“Nothing had happened to lawyers up until that point so why would we think that of an officer of the court, who was going about his professional business? We never thought that was going to happen.
“But when Douglas Hogg made that statement then we thought ‘oh dear, I think this is on a different level.’ No question about that at all. There’s lots of things over the years I would have to try and sit down and figure out, when did that happen, or who said that, but with the Douglas Hogg comment there was absolutely no doubt in my mind. I can remember exactly where I was standing in my kitchen when I heard it, that’s how clear it is.”
Just over three weeks later Pat Finucane was dead.
How soon after his murder did the doubts set in, and did Geraldine begin to think there was more to it?
“Immediately after. We knew right away,” she said.
This story first appeared last week in Belfast Media Group publications. Gemma Burns will be reporting on the Pat Finucane conference at Trinity College for the Irish Echo.