Thirty years ago, Stephen Sedley wrote of the events leading up to the assassination by loyalist paramilitaries of Patrick Finucane, a solicitor for a number of IRA hunger strikers.
A month before Finucane was murdered, junior Conservative minister Douglas Hogg – now Viscount Hailsham – claimed in front of a parliamentary committee that solicitors in Northern Ireland were “unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA”.
MP Seamus Mallon responded that he “had no doubt that there are lawyers walking the streets or driving on the roads of the North of Ireland who have become targets for assassins’ bullets as a result of the statement that has been made tonight”. Tragically, for Finucane, he could not have been more right.
