The outline of Cave Hill, just north of Belfast, is said to have inspired Gulliver’s Travels: Jonathan Swift imagined it as the profile of a sleeping giant. The hill overlooks the Waterworks nature reserve, whose only visitors during the Troubles (1968-98) were wildfowl. ‘It used to be too dangerous to go there,’ said John Finucane, Sinn Féin MP for Belfast North. ‘You could have been beaten or even killed. But nowadays everyone, Catholic or Protestant, enjoys the Waterworks.’

On 12 February 1989, while the Finucane family were having dinner at their home nearby, loyalist (in favour of union with Great Britain) paramilitaries broke down the front door and shot John’s father, Pat, a lawyer who represented members of the IRA (Irish Republican Army), in front of his wife and three children. John was eight. Three government inquiries in 2003 found there had been collusion between the killers and members of the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) – since replaced by the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland).

In 2012 UK prime minister David Cameron apologised to the Finucane family, and in 2024 the Northern Ireland secretary announced an independent inquiry into the circumstances of the shooting. ‘Collusion was a system to target and murder people like my father,’ said John. Another lawyer, Rosemary Nelson, was killed in 1999. She had represented the residents of Garvaghy Road, in Portadown, who opposed Orange Order marches through their neighbourhood.

John Finucane became a lawyer like his father before going into politics. His constituency includes some of the areas worst affected by the Troubles, notably New Lodge and Ardoyne. Nearly 30 years after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, ‘peace walls’ still separate Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods and divide Alexandra Park in two. Belfast-based writer Glenn Patterson, a Protestant by birth, an antimonarchist and married to a woman from Cork (in the Republic), told me, ‘Most of these (…)

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(1) Morgane Fert Malka, Mes instructions viennent de plus haut: La vérité sur l’explosion de Nord Stream (My instructions come from higher up: the truth about the Nord Stream explosion), Stock, Paris, 2025; see also Fabian Scheidler, ‘Nord Stream: hide-and-seek deep under the Baltic sea’, Le Monde diplomatique English edition, November 2024.

(4) Morgane Fert Malka, ‘Nord Stream saga: inside the Sberbank Switzerland sale’, Intelligence Online, 31 January 2025