17 Facts About Pat Finucane

Patrick Finucane was an Irish lawyer who specialised in criminal defence work.

Pat Finucane was killed by loyalist paramilitaries from the Ulster Defence Association, acting in collusion with British security services.

Pat Finucane's killing was one of the most controversial during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Pat Finucane was shot fourteen times as he sat eating a meal at his Belfast home with his three children and his wife, who was wounded during the attack.

Pat Finucane was born into a prominent republican family on the Falls Road, Belfast.

Pat Finucane's son John is a Sinn Fein politician who was elected as Lord Mayor of Belfast in May 2019 and was elected MP for Belfast North in December 2019.

Pat Finucane was a footballer and played as a striker in the Irish League for Crusaders and Distillery.

Pat Finucane represented other IRA and Irish National Liberation Army hunger strikers who died during the 1981 Maze prison protest, Brian Gillen, and the widow of Gervaise McKerr, one of three men shot dead by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in a shoot-to-kill incident in 1982.

Pat Finucane's killing was widely suspected by human rights groups to have been perpetrated in collusion with officers of the RUC and, in 2003, the British Government Stevens Report stated that the killing was indeed carried out with the collusion of police in Northern Ireland.

Pat Finucane had represented republicans in many high-profile cases, but he had represented loyalists.

Several members of his family had republican links, but the family strongly denied Pat Finucane was a member of the IRA.

Pat Finucane had provided information about Finucane's whereabouts, and claimed that he had alerted his handlers about the planned killing.

Pat Finucane's conviction came after a taped confession to the police, lost since 1991, re-surfaced.

On 11 October 2011, members of the Pat Finucane family met with Prime Minister David Cameron in Downing Street.

However, Pat Finucane's family denounced the De Silva report as a "sham" and a "suppression of the truth" into which they were allowed no input.

In February 2019, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled in agreement with the Pat Finucane family, finding unanimously that the UK had failed to uphold article 2 of the European convention on human rights, which among other things obliges signatories to adequately investigate state-caused deaths.

The Pat Finucane Centre named in his honour, is a human rights advocacy and lobbying entity in Northern Ireland.