Christmas week and just when so much of the world feels doomed and broken, a ray of light pierces the gloom. At the High Court in Belfast on Tuesday, Justice Michael Humphreys ordered the British government to hold a public inquiry into the murder of Bellaghy GAA club chairman Seán Brown in 1997. The Brown family were in court, just as they have been at every sitting in their battle for truth and justice.
“After 27 years,” said Justice Humphreys, “the United Kingdom has manifestly failed to investigate the murder of Seán Brown in which state agents were allegedly involved. An 87-year-old widow does not know how, why or by whom her husband was killed. Previous investigations have been fundamentally flawed.
“Information has been deliberately withheld. The inquest process has been repeatedly frustrated by the failures of state agencies to comply with their statutory obligations. It simply cannot be the case that the state can cite resources and ignore the duty it owes to the Brown family.”
To put this in context, Justice Humphreys is breaking new legal ground with his ruling. In the long history of British law, there has never been a ruling of mandamus – or, in less stuffy terms, a direction to act – in relation to a public inquiry. If the UK government ignores or refuses the order, they will be in breach of the law of their own land.
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The details of Brown’s murder are exhaustively documented and have been for the best part of three decades. He was locking the gates to the Bellaghy club ground late on the night of May 12th, 1997, when a loyalist gang abducted him, beat him and shot him six times. His body was found 16km away in Randalstown the following morning, next to his burning car.
[ How the 1997 loyalist murder of Bellaghy GAA chairman Seán Brown remains unsolvedOpens in new window ]
From the beginning, the Brown family and the wider GAA community in Derry have been convinced that there was collusion by the British state in his murder. The police ombudsman later found that the police investigation came up short in the areas of forensics, searching for witnesses, identification of vehicles in the area and sharing of special branch intelligence. Nobody has ever been charged for the murder.
Over the years, the Browns have had every type of indignity visited upon them in the course of their interactions with the state. From the very first morning when one of the RUC officers who came to the house asked Seán’s crying teenage daughter Clare what all the tears were about, to the endless delays and obfuscations in producing documents for last year’s inquest, the authorities have never missed an opportunity to put the Browns in their place.
Another family might have given up by now. Time and again, the British state has done the bare minimum to keep them at bay, clearly hoping that the Browns would decide to just get on with their lives. The PSNI Chief Constable has made a public apology for the inadequacies of the initial investigation. The Browns were awarded damages in November 2021 for the failure to hold an inquest. Civil proceedings against the PSNI and the Ministry of Defence were settled in May 2022.
But still, nowhere along the way has anybody given the family a clear picture of what happened, how it happened or who was responsible. And for very good reason. As Justice Humphreys put it on Tuesday: “At the time, the family believed that Seán had been murdered by members of the Loyalist Volunteer Force. They now have reason to believe that he was killed by agents of the state.”
In February of this year, counsel for the coroner’s court reported to the inquest that he had reviewed some of the sensitive material that the British government was refusing to allow into open court.
“The material indicates that in excess of 25 individuals were linked through intelligence to the murder of Seán Brown. The intelligence material indicates that those individuals are said to have been involved at the material time with loyalist paramilitaries … The intelligence material indicates that at the time of the death of Seán Brown, a number of individuals linked through intelligence to the murder were agents of the state.”
Of all the mysteries and secrets that hang like a shroud over Brown’s murder, nobody is in any real doubt as to why the UK government has been so unwilling to concede an inch. We’re still at that point in time where the history of the Troubles isn’t even really history yet and there’s still a lot of dirty war that hasn’t had a light shone on it. If and when this rock gets turned over, the picture will not be pretty.
And maybe the biggest problem for the British state is that Brown’s name can’t be sullied. He was never involved in anything that could be painted in any other light than just being a pillar of the community. He was a 61-year-old man going about his business in a small rural place, keeping a GAA club going in torrid times, a friend of Seamus Heaney. He was nobody’s idea of a legitimate target.
Any involvement of the British state in the slaughter of somebody like that is so obviously unconscionable, it’s no surprise that they have spent 27 years dodging, muddying and running from their responsibilities.
Hopefully now, their cowardice has caught up with them and a public inquiry will lay it all bare. Hopefully too, they will not drag it out and will do 87-year-old Bridie Brown the courtesy of not wasting any more of her precious time.
One way or the other, we don’t have far to look for heroes to see out 2024 with a badly-needed splash of good news.
Happy Christmas to the Brown family of Bellaghy, Co Derry. Nobody deserves a more peaceful one.
