Two years ago Tony Blair asked a judge to investigate alleged collusion killings. Now he wishes he hadn't
John Ware, The Guardian, December 9, 2003
Appointing a judge of international standing to decide if six public inquiries on both sides of the Irish border into collusion between terrorists and the security forces were merited seemed like a good idea at the time to the British and Irish prime ministers.
It was August 2001. Weston Park, a grand mansion in Shropshire which once captivated Disraeli, was host to the main participants of the Good Friday agreement. The peace process was at yet another of its many critical junctures. Nationalists were refusing to implement police reforms unless Tony Blair agreed to a public inquiry into the murder of the Belfast solicitor Patrick Finucane, whose assassination by loyalists had been urged - and perhaps assisted - by elements of the police and the intelligence services.
Mr Blair was also digging in his heels, as the one public inquiry he had agreed to - Bloody Sunday - was not exactly shaping up as the uplifting experience he'd hoped for. Fees from the ranks of legal vultures were rocketing. (Latest estimates put the cost at £155m and we may not even get the report until 2005.) The proposal to appoint an international judge to take the decision on Finucane out of Blair's hands came from the Irish taoiseach Bertie Ahern.
To unionists, this was yet another sop to republicans. If this was where parity of esteem was leading, there would have to be parity of victimhood. David Trimble wanted the judge to investigate long-held unionist suspicions of collusion between the Irish police force, the Garda, and the IRA. In the end, Blair and Ahern settled on three nationalist and three unionist cases of suspected collusion between the security forces on both sides of the border and loyalists and IRA terrorists.
This compromise freed Blair from being stuck between a rock and a hard place. His release, however, looks to be temporary. The judge the two governments appointed was Mr Justice Peter Cory, a man whose mild, courteous manner belies the steely spine that earned him a place in Canada's supreme court. Judge Cory has done what Blair must have prayed he would never do. Having read many volumes of very sensitive intelligence, unpublished police reports, including the one into collusion by Metropolitan police commissioner Sir John Stevens, and some papers to which even Sir John did not get access, Cory has recommended a public inquiry into no fewer than five out of the six cases. Four are in Northern Ireland and include the murder of another solicitor, Rosemary Nelson, against whom RUC officers are said to have made death threats.
The judge is said to be a passionate advocate of public inquiries (albeit with strict cost controls) as the only satisfactory remedy when other democratic means have failed to establish the truth. But to the Northern Ireland Office, a nightmare beckons of back-to-back legal marathons, as greedy lawyers feast on the discomfort of the security and intelligence services, blackening their name for the foreseeable future.
Little wonder then that the Northern Ireland Office is said to be considering some softer options. One overall inquiry into collusion rather than four has been mentioned. Milder still is the suggestion that these four tricky cases might be absorbed into some sort of wider truth and reconciliation process. Judge Cory is not happy about this. Failure to hold any of the inquiries he has recommended would be a clear breach of his terms of reference, signed by the then Northern Ireland secretary, John Reid, and the Irish foreign minister, Brian Cowen.
When Judge Cory presented his reports to both governments in October, he remarked that if either party dishonoured its commitment he would behave like his grandson when he does not get his way. "I don't think I would kick and scream and I don't think I would turn blue, but I would make a lot of noise," he said. We wait to see if the judge was only joking, for his terms of reference also commit both governments to publish his lengthy reports. The Irish have no problem with that, but the British do.
Last month, Judge Cory returned from Canada to consider requests for amend- ments. On the British side, this has turned into a gruelling marathon following the intervention of the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith. Publication has slipped twice and no firm date is being offered. The Northern Ireland secretary, Paul Murphy, says only that there are issues of "national security" and the "safety of individuals" which "need to be considered". Cory says he took these into account and wrote his report in such a way that he did not expect to have to make significant amendments.
Despite the many millions of pounds spent by police forces investigating collusion in Northern Ireland over the past 14 years, only the most general conclusions - damning though they have been - have ever been published. An authoritative official account of the gritty details of who was assassinated - and with what murky state assistance - remains hidden from the families of the victims and the public. Judge Cory was invited out of retirement into the kitchen. What passes for open government in Britain still seems incapable of withstanding the heat.
· John Ware is a reporter for BBC Panorama