Seán Brown – The state cannot hold back the ‘longed-for tidal wave of justice’ forever

Group pictured at the launch of A Bitter Harvest: The Good Life and Unresolved Murder of a Derry GAA Man, at Wolfe Tones Bellaghy GAC on May 17, 2026. Front: Garbhán Downey (Colmcille Press), Bridie Brown and Clare Loughran. Back Paul O'Connor (Pat Finucane Centre) and Siobhán Brown.

New book from Colmcille Press and Pat Finucane Centre investigates murder, collusion and thirty-year cover-up

In the middle of A Bitter Harvest, you’ll find a pair of grainy, family photographs, of the Browns gathering turf out in the middle of Seamus Heaney country, on a summer’s day about 30 years ago. 

In one of them, Seán is standing on top of a trailer-load of sods, with Bridie and Damian, and their friends Francis and Rose Murray, in the bog nearby. All of them tired but satisfied, after a good day’s digging.

A few years after his father’s death, Seán’s son Seán told the author Des Fahy how his father ‘saw himself’ in Seamus Heaney’s poetry – and was ‘intimately familiar’ with the places and people celebrated in his old neighbour’s work.

Indeed, in February 1996, Seán the father would organise, and then deliver, the massive, cross-community homecoming in Bellaghy, after the poet received the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was one of his proudest moments - and indeed one of the poet’s. 

A little over a year later, Seamus Heaney would pen a heartfelt eulogy to Seán in the Irish News, in which he described his murder, at the gates of the clubhouse here, as ‘a crime against the ancient Olympic spirit’.  

‘He was a man of integrity and goodwill,’ the poet wrote, ‘he represented something better than we have grown used to.’  This is a universally-held sentiment. As Laurence Diamond told the Irish Times on the 25th anniversary of his friend’s death, ‘Above all, Seán Brown was a great human being – he is such a loss.’

In Derry city, during the long campaign for an inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday, our campaigners also drew comfort, and inspiration, from the words of Seamus Heaney. 

In times of despair The Cure at Troy reminded families, and supporters, to ‘hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge’ and to ‘believe that a further shore is reachable from here’. 

As advice goes, it was both fitting and uplifting. The inquiry, for all its imperfections, proved to be a catharsis for many. It afforded the people of the city their opportunity – their right – to experience that ‘sea-change’; that ‘self-healing’ and ‘self-revealing’.

In 1972, the day after the Bloody Sunday funerals, the Derry Journal reported how ‘Even the Skies Wept’. Thirty-eight years later, the widow of victim Barney McGuigan, another Bridie, spoke at the conclusion of the Saville Inquiry, remarking that even the sun shone in Derry to welcome the findings. 

Bizarrely, however, for a society that has supposedly progressed out of the dark days of the Troubles and into a ‘new dispensation’, the Browns have now been kept waiting for an inquiry even longer than the Bloody Sunday families were. 

As our other Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats wrote, ‘Peace comes dropping slow’. Too slow. Seán’s son Damian, who led the campaign for more than two decades, tragically did not live to see justice - and Bridie, now eighty-eight, worries that neither will she. 

And this, as Niall Murphy the Brown's lawyer has reminded us, is not a case where there is a mere allegation of wrongdoing by state agents. 

The direct involvement of the state in Seán’s murder - the collusion - is a matter of fact. It has been established by the High Court and confirmed in the public record. As Damian himself predicted, long before the documents were finally released, his father’s death ‘was state-sponsored murder’.

What we are left considering now is how long the state can continue to conceal what it did, and what it knows. Or, more pointedly, how much it did, and how much it knows. 

Tellingly, Seamus Heaney again warned us, in his collection North, about those who deliberately fail to act. Those who stand dumb; those who ‘cast the stones of silence’; 

and those who would ‘connive in civilised outrage’. Or in contemporary parlance, those who issue Immunity Certificates and refuse to allow even the most private of hearings; 

those who run to their own courts and hide from others; those in office who claim they have ‘enormous sympathy’ - just not enough to act. 

Perhaps they need to read Seamus Heaney’s rules for good governance, in The Republic of Conscience, in which he advises: ‘At their inauguration, public leaders must swear to uphold unwritten law – and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office.’

BOOKSTORE

After countless delays and numerous setbacks, the Browns and the Pat Finucane Centre have now decided on a new and different course of action. To try yet another furrow. 

And, while the book they have produced can never fully right the wrong, it will stand as a measure of their love for Seán Brown, as a measure of their own most real outrage. 

And it will stand as a measure of their determination never to give up until they win justice for ‘a great human being’.

The final picture in the photo-gallery was taken by Margaret McLaughlin at the Walk for Truth this time last year. At the head of the march are four generations of the Brown family – and they are followed by thousands and thousands of campaigners who came to Bellaghy to voice support for their crusade. 

This campaign, which in the early years was sustained by just a handful of dedicated family members and loyal friends, is now a movement. 

It is a national and international touchstone. 

The Irish government, the High Court, the Northern Ireland Coroner and the GAA are all demanding a public inquiry. Even the Chief Constable says the Browns have been ‘failed by the Establishment’. 

So, as our mentor-poet instructed us, we must continue to believe in ‘miracles, and cures and healing wells’. 

The state cannot hold back the ‘longed-for tidal wave of justice’ forever. 

The Browns will prevail. 

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine. 

And hope and history will rhyme once more.

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