Richard Ferguson:THE DEATH of the former Northern Ireland liberal unionist politician and leading criminal lawyer Richard Ferguson in London on July 26th ended the starry third act of a career briefly disrupted in mid-life.
In 1984, at the age of 48, he left his wife, four children, and a supergrass trial in Belfast in which he was appearing for the defence and moved to England with a new partner. The Belfast legal world was not impressed, but he went on to great success, starring in several major criminal trials and becoming one of the highest earning legal aid barristers in Britain.
As a young man Dick Ferguson was also briefly a Stormont MP, then seen as a normal parallel career for ambitious young lawyers. As a liberal unionist and strong supporter of prime minister Terence O’Neill, he made “one man one vote” part of his 1968 election campaign. It should be introduced without delay, he said: let us at least get the credit for putting our own house in order, he urged.
Hardening attitudes and growing violence pushed him out of politics. In August 1969 as loyalist mobs were burning Catholic homes in Belfast he left the Orange Order. Citing health reasons, he resigned from Stormont the following February. (The Rev Ian Paisley’s then deputy, the Rev William Beattie, won his seat.) After the family’s Lisburn home was damaged by what police believed to be a loyalist bomb, he played a brief and minor role in the infant Alliance party, of which his father-in-law was president.
But most of his energy went into building up an impressive and varied legal practice. One early colleague assessed his ability as just behind that of mercurial geniuses like Dessie Boal – more restrained, in the milder tradition of Irish advocacy, but still ahead of much of the English bar.
Ferguson prepared better for cases and worked more closely with solicitors, it was said, than many of his peers. Though the scale of his British success surprised some at home, others explained it by his diligence, striking charm, and a rare skill for measuring his audience. When he acted for the Birmingham Six in their unsuccessful appeal in 1987, Belfast lawyers were happy to praise Ferguson’s performance.
As late as last spring, he came back to the North to act for the PSNI in the Robert Hamill inquiry alongside his son Richard, a solicitor. He spoke over several months, said another lawyer, with a great deal of the old spark, though frail, “and you could see others loved having him there, the star, the big London name”.
Those he defended in Britain included Rosemary West, widow of multiple murderer Fred West, the boxer Terry Marsh and Ernest Saunders. His style was not to declaim to the jury, but to seduce them with his Ulster brogue, the London Timesnoted. "One could almost hear the peat crackling in the hearth and smell the Black Bush whiskey as he poured scorn on the Crown's case."
He was born in Belfast, to an extended Fermanagh family of farmers, lawyers and unionist politicians. Cousins included former Ulster Unionist leader Harry West and fellow liberal Raymond Ferguson, a solicitor in Enniskillen.
Dick Ferguson’s father had been one of the oldest in a family of 13, forced to leave the family farm and join the police when his father died young. He became a sergeant in Belfast’s Donegall Pass station.
The only child of ambitious parents, Dick was sent to Methodist College (Methody). He studied at Queen's University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin. In Dublin, a city he found "devoted to the pursuit of pleasure", he also reviewed books for The Irish Times literary editor Terence de Vere White, as he told a Timesjournalist who profiled him after the Rosemary West case.
Ferguson maintained that she had not had a fair trial because of prejudicial press coverage of the murders – committed by her husband, as he told the court. He said it had been easy to develop a rapport with her, “largely because I’m Irish, I have little difficulty in having a rapport with most people. The Irish are not a judgmental nation.”
Starting with insurance cases in his native Fermanagh, Ferguson had developed a reputation for criminal defence before the Troubles and the introduction of single-judge, no-jury Diplock courts. He went on to defend loyalist and republican paramilitaries, police and soldiers.
In March 1984 he was defending four of 16 men on trial on the testimony of Derry supergrass Robert Quigley when he suddenly withdrew. The Bar Council was told this was for medical reasons. (The four were granted a separate trial.)
Supergrass trials, in which paramilitary figures gave evidence against accomplices, many of whom were convicted on this evidence alone, came under heavy criticism as a distortion of the legal process and were controversial in legal circles. The withdrawal of a high-profile barrister drew unwelcome extra attention to an unpopular phenomenon.
Ferguson liked to say in London that he was very ecumenical and nobody in Northern Ireland had been able to pigeonhole him. In later years he suggested that republicans were as likely to have bombed his home as loyalists.
He loved to mountain-climb as a young man, became an enthusiastic fell-walker, and was a passionate supporter of Arsenal.
He continued to work at a considerable pace until earlier this year, but had been ill for several months.
He is survived by his first wife, Janet, their children Katherine, Richard, William and James, and by his wife Roma and their son Patrick.
Richard (Dick) Ferguson: born August 22nd, 1935; died July 26th, 2009