Might republicans actually be less enthusiastic about a genuine and transparent investigation into all aspects of collusion than they would have us believe? It could well be the case. Despite their public stance, in the comparative privacy of recent discussions with the two governments, Sinn Féin seems to have been happy enough to tiptoe around the subject, writes David Adams
In the run-up to this week's agreement-that-didn't-happen, Sinn Féin elevated to potential deal-breaker its demand for the early release of the men who shot to death Det Garda Jerry McCabe and critically injured his colleague, Ben O'Sullivan, in Adare in 1996. On its own, there's nothing remarkable about that. However, it does lead one to wonder why they did not attach the same import to the British government's continued failure to make good on its Weston Park commitment to hold a proper public inquiry into the conspiracy which led to the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane.
After all, in the public arena Sinn Féin has been unrelenting in its demand for just such an inquiry. Yet, unlike its requirement on the McCabe killers, this markedly more palatable issue was never granted the lofty status of potential deal-breaker. This calls into question Sinn Féin's own depth of commitment to a Finucane inquiry. Suspicions are reinforced when one considers that the nailing-down of clear and acceptable government pledges on public inquiries is now a matter of real urgency.
Sinn Féin and all the other parties are fully aware that, if the British government has its way, a fully-independent public inquiry anywhere in the UK will very soon be no more than a fond memory of how things once seemed to be. Thanks largely to the "war on terror" (or, more likely, the excuse it provides), soon there won't be even a pretence of openness, accountability and transparency on the part of government.
Proposed new legislation, the Inquiries Bill, is being pushed through Westminster and is due its final reading by Christmas. It will, among other things, give a relevant minister the power to determine when an inquiry must sit in private and, more disturbing still, the power to place, on the slightest of pretexts, restrictions on such inquiries. Self-evidently, this will render the term "public inquiry" even more a mere titular appellation than already is the case.
Simply put, very soon British ministers will be able to determine into what areas any inquiry may or may not go, and they will be able to limit the extent of an inquiry's probing even into matters which have been deemed appropriate (not to mention determining how much of the findings it can share with the public).
As well as Finucane and the like, such legislation would allow the British government to draw a veil of secrecy around the alleged abuse and suspicious deaths of young army recruits at Deepcut training barracks and to suppress any awkward details concerning its Iraqi adventure which might still make their way on to the public radar. The prospect of this Bill becoming law should galvanise everyone who cares in the slightest about government accountability, never mind those who, like Sinn Féin, ostensibly at least, have a particular issue of real concern.
On the face of it, an extensive and forensic public examination of the circumstances surrounding Pat Finucane's death should hold no fears for republicans. But then Sir John Stevens's investigation into the activities of UDA double-agent Brian Nelson shouldn't have either. Yet it proved to be the source of a great deal of republican embarrassment. The probing of Brian Nelson's activities led Stevens, via the Nelson-directed killing of pensioner Francisco Notorantonio, directly to the person whose identity Notorantonio had been sacrificed to protect - Freddie Scappaticci, code-named Stakeknife, the most senior British agent yet uncovered within the IRA.
Genuine inquiries, by their very nature, tend to wander where they will and where they must: the possible fall-out from that approach can never be predicted. No one can predict where a full-scale, transparent investigation into all aspects of the killing of Pat Finucane might lead, let alone the possible implications of a similar inquiry into the entire cesspit of collusion. Conceivably, it might become glaringly obvious within a short space of time that many senior and influential paramilitaries on both sides colluded with agents of the British and/or Irish state at various times throughout the conflict.
While the Finucane family, the SDLP and human rights activists have all held to their demand for a firm date and acceptable terms of reference for a public inquiry into all the circumstances surrounding the murder of Pat Finucane, Sinn Féin has, to put it mildly, become far less strident. Rather than open a Pandora's Box, a safer bet for it, perhaps, is to let remain imprinted on the public mind the notion that collusion was, by definition, shadowy figures from British intelligence agencies meeting only with moronic loyalists in the back seats of cars to plan and direct the murder of innocents.