Patrick Finucane Report

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

We continue to fund the Historical Enquiries team. I think it does good work and it should continue to do that. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point that whatever terrible event we are discussing, people will always bring up other terrible events and quite rightly say, “Well, what about an inquiry into that? What information can we find out about it?” What is different in this case is that it highlights the appalling level of collusion there was and brings to the surface, effectively, not just one appalling murder but a series of appalling steps that were being taken and that need to be addressed.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

As we kick over the charred embers of Ulster’s past, an appalling and awful picture emerges, but today we are seeing only one tiny part of that. The Prime Minister is utterly correct to make it clear that there should not be a public inquiry into this matter, first because it would be wasteful, and secondly because if he grants a public inquiry in this case he knows that a chorus of hundreds of people from before Patrick Finucane was murdered and hundreds of people from after Patrick Finucane was murdered will ask, “Why not my relative? Why not me?” The Prime Minister is right to hold fast to that view and should not be swayed.

I also agree with the points made by the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) and my hon. Friend the Member for South Antrim (Dr McCrea) and ask the Prime Minister to respond to them directly. They made it clear that there is more than a shred of evidence that the Republic of Ireland’s Government armed the Provisional IRA and that there should be an investigation into that and honesty about it so that we can see the whole picture.

My constituents are sick and tired of a one-sided narrative of revisionism that says that the Provisional IRA were actually quite good and the troops and police were quite bad. That, in the current circumstances in Northern Ireland, is bloody stupid—and I mean literally bloody. It will send a signal to my constituents that people have to push, kick, throw and petrol bomb to get what they want, and not abide by the law. We are trying to tell them all to abide by the law.

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for what he said about my decision not to hold a further public inquiry. Let me be clear again that that is not because the Government want somehow to hide or run away from the truth. We could not have marched further, faster or more clearly towards the truth than we have by publishing this document today. As for his point about republican terrorism, let me read to him from paragraph 117 of the report’s executive summary, where de Silva states:

“I have no doubt, however, that PIRA was the single greatest source of violence during this period and that a holistic account of events of the late 1980s in Northern Ireland would reveal the full calculating brutality of that terrorist group.”

That is the point that he makes and he is right to make it.