The Ulster Unionist Party’s Justice Spokesperson Doug Beattie MC MLA has called on the PSNI to robustly investigate the activities of Paul O’Connor, the Director of the Pat Finucane centre in Londonderry, who has admitted to being a former member of the IRA.
Doug Beattie MC MLA said:
“The Pat Finucane Centre claims to be interested in justice and human rights, so the admission from its Director, Paul O’Connor, that he was a member of the organisation that for decades perpetuated massive human rights abuses, including murder, attempted murder, abduction, torture and exiling people under threat of death needs to be investigated as matter of extreme urgency. There also needs to be a thorough investigation of the circumstances surrounding the death of Jim O’Hagan.
“Anywhere else in Europe, if the Director of an organisation supposedly dedicated to the pursuit of ‘human rights’ and ‘truth recovery’ was found to have been a member of an illegal terrorist group that was guilty of thousands of crimes including the murder of children, there would be an uproar. The fact that there is not, says a lot about the current situation in Northern Ireland, where we have become conditioned to the truth being twisted and subverted, as the local, self- appointed ‘human rights industry’ is given an almost free run in its campaign to rewrite history.
“The Pat Finucane Centre receives a great deal of funding from a variety of sources and I am sure that many of those will be watching anxiously and wondering just exactly who or what they have been financing.”