Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

Needless to say, I appreciate that support throughout. The situation is unsatisfactory. I will not put any gloss on it. We are at a stalemate on the issue. I feel bad about it for a number of reasons, mainly for the Finucane family. What I probably feel most upset about is we followed an honourable path and went into a fair process of picking a number of cases, of getting an eminent judge, and convincing everybody to follow that process, which was not easy at the time.

It took a long time to get an eminent world-known judge, and I have never heard anybody dispute the fact that Judge Cory was so. When he was on the Canadian court, he was well known internationally. He made a clear report of what the process was, not only then but a number of times since.

The British Government will not honour the agreement. It has offered a different type of inquiry. Not to put a tooth in it because I have spent so many hours talking to different people about the discussion, the reason is it will not subject the military authorities to an open forum on this. That is the issue. It is not really about anything else. That is the difficulty.

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