Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 faces difficult questions at an inquiry into the 1989 murder of solicitor Pat Finucane, now under way in Belfast.

Loyalist paramilitaries shot Finucane – a 39-year-old defence lawyer – in front of his wife and three young children at his home.

At least two paid agents of the state were involved in his murder, and a third perpetrator was recruited by police special branch despite their role.

Finucane’s widow, Geraldine, and her family campaigned tirelessly for a public inquiry.

David Cameron, when he was prime minister in 2012, apologised for the “frankly shocking levels of state collusion” in Finucane’s murder, but refused to launch a full inquiry into the case.

His family had to wait until Labour returned to power in 2024 and made good on a long-held promise to hold an inquiry, before having to wait another two years for the hearings to finally start last month.

Geraldine Finucane, who was herself wounded in the attack (attending her husband’s funeral on crutches) and members of her family were in attendance and are legally represented.

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Battle for the truth

So what can we expect the inquiry to unearth?

What is already established is that, a year before the murder, MI5 received intelligence about a loyalist threat to three Belfast solicitors, including one described as the “shoot-to-kill solicitor”.

The inquiry will, somewhat naively, “consider whether or not MI5 understood” that this was a reference to Finucane.

To many, it is obvious that it did. At the time, he was representing Eleanor McKerr at an inquest into the death of her husband, Gervaise McKerr.

He had been shot dead by an SAS-trained police unit in one of three linked ‘ shoot-to-kill incidents ’ in County Armagh.

Manchester’s deputy chief constable, John Stalker, was called in to investigate the killings.

But he was removed from the job, probably because – as I found in my book Decades of Deceit – MI5 conspired with higher echelons in government to smear Stalker.

This may well have been because Stalker’s investigation posed a threat to the British state’s counter-insurgency strategy against the IRA.

In 1981, a senior MI5 officer, Sir Patrick Walker, had drawn up a report for the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) special branch.

It transformed policing in Northern Ireland, downgrading the detection of crime and instead giving primacy to intelligence gathering.

It was implemented without any legal framework or public accountability on how paid agents and informers were run by their state handlers and were permitted to commit murder in Northern Ireland with impunity.

The Finucane inquiry will consider what it has euphemistically called “the influence” of Walker’s secretive report .

If it is to have any public credibility, the tribunal must also review and publish the Morton Report , drawn up by another MI5 officer in the 1970s.

Morton covered largely the same area, and successive British governments have assiduously protected his report from publication.

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Blocked

In addition, the inquiry must contextualise Finucane’s murder; provide statistics on the total number of agents recruited and how many of them were known to have been involved in murder.

From open source documents, I estimate in Decades of Deceit that as few as four agents were involved in a staggering 160 murders, opening the prospect that dozens more suffered the same fate.

The inquiry will also consider whether an MI5 propaganda campaign legitimised Finucane as a target and the “awareness and involvement” of a Loyalist Ulster Defence Association agent linked to his murder.

Already the inquiry is facing challenges itself.

It was revealed last month that access to millions of intelligence documents is blocked as British government funding for a secure computer system is still to be agreed, more than two years after the investigation was first announced.

Moreover, recruitment for a key post is being handled (and the post-holder will be employed) by the Ministry of Justice – rather than the inquiry itself.

This key post, dealing with management of classified intelligence material, remains vacant, more than six months after being first advertised.

The inquiry team consists of five barristers all of whom acted in previous inquiries and inquests, including the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster , Infected Blood, the Manchester Arena Bombing , the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, and the Afghanistan inquiry into alleged murders by the SAS.

The inquiry will next sit in November when the core participants, including the British Ministry of Defence, MI5 and the police, will outline their positions in opening statements.

Members of the Finucane family will give evidence in February 2027.

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