WE are going through a difficult stage when a range of groups and individuals seem determined to repeat serious errors of judgment going back to the darkest periods of our history.
Recent assertions from some unionist figures have been depressing rather than surprising, but the Westminster speech earlier this week from David Davis, a former British government minister and chair of the Conservative Party, clearly crossed a line into much more alarming territory.
During a debate on the latest contentious Troubles-related legislation, Mr Davis referred to the planned Legacy Commission, saying that he “would rather see the dispassionate actions of the commission rather than the activities of IRA lawyers in the courts”.
He went on to quote the words of an acquaintance who also talked about “IRA lawyers”, claiming they “are more interested in drama than justice”, in the course of a contribution described by the DUP MP Carla Lockhart as “powerful”.
This appalling intervention from Mr Davis inevitably drew comparisons with claims made by another former Conservative minister, Douglas Hogg, when he stood up in the House of Commons in January 1989 and said that certain lawyers were “unduly sympathetic to the IRA”.
The prominent Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane was shot dead by loyalists, plainly facilitated by elements within state forces, in front of his family at their home in the north of the city less than four weeks later, and Rosemary Nelson, the lawyer who represented the nationalist residents of Garvaghy Road in Portadown, was also assassinated by loyalists in equally shocking circumstances in 1999.
Mr Hogg was specifically criticised by the Stevens Inquiry, established by the British government to investigate cases of collusion, and it is verging on the astonishing that Mr Davis chose to go along the same road.
The North Belfast Sinn Féin MP John Finucane, who was eight when he witnessed his father’s murder, and is now also a solicitor, was fully entitled to described the comments as “contemptible”.
In a letter to Mr Davis, he wrote: “Would you dare speak about English solicitors in this way? Or do you believe Irish lawyers deserve less protection, less respect and fewer rights when they dare to challenge the British state?”
The chair of the Bar Council, Denise Kiley KC, and the president of the Law Society, Mark Borland, who are both based in Belfast, also expressed their deep concerns, and spoke trenchantly of the dangers involved in blurring lines between lawyers and their clients.
Mr Davis has a duty to respond without delay, when it must be hoped that he will take the opportunity not only to withdraw his statement but offer a full apology to the Finucane and Nelson families.
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