Ms Anne Cadwallader:

I thank the Chairman and committee for having us appear before the committee. Some members may remember me from my previous incarnation as BBC correspondent in Dublin for five years in the 1980s and later as Irish Presspolitical reporter in Leinster House at the end of the 1980s. It is great to be here as a participant and not just as a journalist. I am here specifically to speak about the book we have just published, Lethal Allies. In case anybody thinks, because it is a best seller, that I am about to retire and move to Bermuda, I am not getting any funding from it. Any money we make in profit will be ploughed back into the PFC because, as Ms Margaret Urwin said, our funding runs out in June. After that, who knows what will happen? However, it will keep us going for about a day and a half.
Some of the reviewers of the book have used the term that the Pat Finucane Centre is a campaign group for republican victims. I want to correct that. There is nothing wrong with being a republican - far from it - but we are really defenders of everybody's human rights and we are also involved in an outreach to the Unionist community which, for obvious reasons, we cannot go into in too much detail. We help anyone who comes and asks us for help. We are named after Pat Finucane. The Finucane family is well capable of campaigning on its own behalf. We believe, as he did before he was murdered, that the best way of upholding human rights is through the law, through the imposition of the law with fairness and equality on everyone.
A third of the people killed, whose deaths I detail in Lethal Allies, were killed south of the Border and most of them in Dublin. Let us eschew any partitionist mentality in our brains. The violence affected everyone in the 32 counties of Ireland, North and South, and everybody should be treated equally.
It is interesting to note that most of those murdered in the North were not republicans - in fact, only one was a republican. He was killed just south of the Border, probably by some undercover British execution squad. Most of those killed were civilians, non-combatants, and included civil servants, shopkeepers, farmers, a pharmacist, a metal fabricator, musicians, the Miami Showband, an ambulance driver and so on, while six were members of the SDLP, which was their only involvement, and some were members of the GAA. Others were probably killed merely because they were successful and were part of that new generation of upwardly mobile Catholic well-educated middle class and it was decided they had to be intimidated and some of them had to be killed. That is what happened.
There is much accusatory talk at the moment about people trying to rewrite history. There is nothing wrong with rewriting history if one is rewriting it accurately. The PFC, unashamedly, says we are involved in trying to rewrite history. What we have discovered from our research is that it simply does not fit in with the history, the dominant narrative, as it is called by academics, of the conflict that has so far been told. It is in everybody's interest to reject propaganda and speculation and any inaccuracies from wherever they come and focus on facts. As Dr. Haass put it in his proposals, the time to rise to this challenge is now. We do not have the luxury of putting it off any longer. We must ensure the past does not overwhelm the present and the future.
I wish to speak about Lethal Allies.The book has sold more than 12,000 copies so far. We are travelling to Brussels later this month and to the US in March. Most of the real investigative work was done by my colleagues before I joined the PFC. I put it all together which was a difficult task.
What is different about Lethal Alliesis very simple. It is based on fact. There is nothing in the book that has been challenged since it was written. Nobody has come back to tell us we got something wrong. That is not to say it will not happen in due course but so far, thank God, it has not happened because everything we wrote was checked and rechecked and is factual. It was so important to get facts out, not opinion, not speculation.
The book came about because there was a story to tell - the story about the wasted lives of 120 people. It is a story about the failure of both the British and Irish states to defend the lives of their citizens. The key lesson to be learned from Lethal Alliesis that collusion fuelled the conflict. Did collusion bring the violence to an end a single day earlier than it did? No. Did collusion save a single life? No. As Father Denis Faul put it, collusion taught Nationalists that they could not trust the police, the UDR or the courts. Confidence in the rule of law collapsed.
There may still be people even sitting in this room who believe that collusion is both propaganda and did not happen, that it is made up. It is true the word has been overused like a political sledgehammer. Both sides of the community and those who live in the South have much to gain from understanding its nature. Facing up to the past is going to be like looking at one's own face in the mirror after a hard night, sometimes not the easiest of experiences.

It all started off with my colleague who works with me in Armagh, Mr. Alan Brecknell whose father was shot dead and blown up in an indiscriminate attack on a bar in 1975. His family were told not to come to his funeral because they would be attacked by the IRA, which was far from the truth. When he discovered that was a lie, because his father was killed by loyalists, he started investigating, and enlisted the support of the Pat Finucane Centre, PFC. The PFC spent many years working hard on investigating what went on. That was helped immensely when the then Taoiseach, Mr. Bertie Ahern, whatever his other failings, supported by the Oireachtas, ordered the inquiry under Mr. Justice Henry Barron. His work resulted in vital forensic evidence about the so-far hidden links between perpetrators and ballistic and forensic links coming into the public domain. He had the facts. His final report prompted the joint committee to conclude that it had no doubt that collusion between the British security forces and what it called terrorists was behind many if not all the atrocities considered. The joint committee said the British Cabinet was aware of the level to which the security forces had been infiltrated and its failure to respond had allowed the problem to grow.
The Mr. Justice Barron inquiry stepped up the process a gear or two and then the Historical Enquiries Team, HET stepped it up another gear or two when it began work. A critical fact for us was that the HET officers had access to what in our sphere of influence was considered the Holy Grail, the RUC secure depository of files in Carrickfergus. They were security vetted so they could get the files. At the start, many officers were sceptical about collusion as they regarded it as propaganda, but when they saw the files, they began to talk not about alleged collusion but about collusion. I am tempted to describe what they found as a goldmine, but that would be gilding the lily. One senior officer described to me that they had discovered a cesspool, as it was referred to. Individuals were making a significant difference. Meanwhile the PFC and Justice for the Forgotten were also continuing the work of investigating the national archives in London, finding much of interest, including the fact the British knew as early as 1973 that the UDR was hopelessly infiltrated by loyalist paramilitaries but did nothing about it. We also found that weapons were disappearing routinely from UDR armouries right, left and centre, month after month and were being used to kill people. As the HET's reports began to emerge, families began to understand what had been kept from them for more than three decades.
I will give an example. Members will be aware of Mr. Eugene Reavey and what his family went through. The three brothers of Eugene Reavey were killed almost exactly 38 years ago on 4 January 1976. One gun that was used to kill them was a Sterling sub-machine gun. Five months after the murder of the Reavey brothers, the same gun was used in a gun and bomb attack on the Rock Bar in south Armagh, in which each and every single assailant was a serving RUC officer. It had been stolen from Glenanne UDR base and it was used to murder eight other people, including SDLP branch chairman, Mr. Denis Mullen, an elderly farming couple, Alan Brecknell's father, Trevor, and two others in the same incident, including a 14 year old boy. A tenth man was shot dead, after which the gun was recovered. The gun had killed 11 people in 11 months, leaving 19 children fatherless, orphaning five children, yet the HET could find no evidence on an investigation into the disappearance of this gun. A second gun, a Luger used to kill the Reavey brothers had also been used to kill Seán Farmer and Colm McCartney, a cousin of Seamus Heaney, as they returned home from an All Ireland semi-final at Croke Park. It was also used in the attack on the Rock Bar. The guns were being shared and swapped and taken from the UDR and were used by both serving RUC officers and loyalist paramilitaries. It did not matter. They got the guns and used them to kill people. This was never investigated.
Another example is when four serving police officers were involved in an attack on the bar called the Step Inn. It was known about in advance and it could have been stopped by the stroke of a policeman's pen. It went ahead and two people were killed, the mother of three young boys and a young plumber who played GAA. The RUC special branch knew all about it and knew about the involvement of four police officers in that attack, yet did nothing to prevent it. When it happened, they did nothing to investigate it. Those families have only recently discovered the facts and are on the brink of taking legal action, which they are very reluctant to take for obvious reasons. However, how else can they make accountable those who failed to uphold their rights?
There are questions about the role of Mr. Robin Jackson, possibly the most prolific killer during the entire period of the Troubles. He probably killed between 50 and 100 people. It has been established beyond any shadow of doubt that he was an RUC agent. He was allowed to continue. He died of natural causes. There are many people in the North who lost their relatives as a result of his work.
The families we speak for, and all other bereaved families, have an inalienable right to the truth. They are the real losers in the conflict. The wider society in Britain and Ireland also needs to discover the truth about collusion. In a normal crime context, the police gather evidence - forensic, admissions, eye-witness evidence. If that crime is collusion, who is there to seek evidence? Those directly involved hardly qualify.
In an article in the current edition of History Ireland, Professor James Hughes of the London School of Economics writes that the British Army's abuses of human rights in the North were not "merely low-level tactical excesses by undisciplined and racist troops but ... institutional, systematic, and approved or covered-up at the highest levels". Professor Hughes and others, point to more current disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. The British Government currently faces a complaint on behalf of 400 Iraqi families at the International Criminal Court alleging they represent thousands of people tortured, shot, hooded, sexually assaulted and subjected to mock executions. In recent days, the British Prime Minister, Mr. David Cameron, has ordered an investigation into claims that the SAS was involved in the storming of the Golden Temple at Amritsar in which between 400 and 1,000 people were killed.
We owe it, not just to our children but also to grandchildren, to continue this work, because the work we have done shows we can establish the facts about the violent past, and when the past is honestly faced up to and examined, it has a reconciling quality. We owe it to people living far away in current theatres of war, and those yet to come, that we must learn from the past. Otherwise all we can say is that we do not learn from the past, which would be a tragedy. That is a tragedy we are trying to prevent.