Sean Brown’s family has been cruelly failed once again. The state has so fatally compromised the release of information it holds into the LVF murder of the father-of-six in May 1997 that the coroner has been forced to abandon his investigation.
So heavy were the redactions to the PSNI and MI5 material that Mr Justice Patrick Kinney said that were proceedings to continue, it would “inevitably result in an inquest that would be incomplete, inadequate and misleading”.
It is a measure of the coroner’s own frustrations with how the state has conducted itself that he is calling on the government to establish a public inquiry into the Bellaghy Wolfe Tones official’s killing.
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That is the very least the Brown family deserve. They have been blocked at every turn; as if being victims of the loyalist paramilitaries who abducted and killed Mr Brown wasn’t enough, they are also victims of a state which has spent more than a quarter of a century devising obstacles to ensure the truth they crave remains out of reach.
There are folders stuffed with information about the murder which could go a long way to answering the Brown family’s questions; but as long as their contents remain blacked-out page after blacked-out page, they are little more than a state-sanctioned taunt.
As family barrister Des Fahy KC says: “The truth of what happened to Sean Brown is not some intangible thing far off in the distance, it’s here and available if only the state parties would allow it to be reviewed.”
There are folders stuffed with information about the murder which could go a long way to answering the Brown family’s questions; but as long as their contents remain blacked-out page after blacked-out page, they are little more than a state-sanctioned taunt
It all begs questions about what the state has to hide. Collusion has been persistently alleged in Mr Brown’s murder. Disclosures dragged into the daylight by the inquest process include how surveillance on notorious LVF member Mark ‘Swinger’ Fulton was stopped the night before the murder before being picked up again the following morning, and how 25 people, some of whom were state agents, had been linked by intelligence to the murder.
Mr Brown was, as Mr Justice Kinney emphasised, an entirely innocent man who was the heart of his family and his community.
His case is a tragedy for all of us. It exemplifies all that’s rotten with a system which far too often obscures rather than illuminates the past. The government’s legacy act - which would have halted the Brown inquest in May, had it been able to limp on - has already been ruled as incompatible with international human rights legislation. There is no confidence that the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery will be able to emulate even the limited disclosures secured through the courts. The anguish of our troubled past continues to echo into the present and an uncertain future.
