They wanted kids who made their own minds up about the world. They decided the children would not be baptised and that religion would play no part in their lives. They had three children - Michael, Catherine and John. Geraldine worked in her family’s law searchers business. Pat founded a law firm that flourishes to this day. When the young couple graduated, they made their lives in Belfast. The Finucane family home in Sevastopol Street was burned out and they resettled in Lenadoon. On August 5, 1969, when Pat was in Trinity, Protestant mobs accompanied by police drove 1,500 Catholic families out of their homes in the Falls, burning down every house in Bombay Street. “A middle-class east Belfast Protestant and a working-class Falls Road Catholic weren’t going to meet at a dance hall in the Cregagh.” “Their two worlds would never have collided otherwise,” John says. In 1969, courtesy of the 1947 Education Act, he went to Trinity College Dublin, where Miss GE Mawhinney was also studying.Ī soccer star, he won the Universities Collingwood Cup, and in the post-match celebrations their eyes met across the crowded bar. Pat was the first person in the street to go to university. His mother, Geraldine Elizabeth Mawhinney, is a Protestant from Strandtown in east Belfast, his father, Pat, a Catholic from Sevastapol Street, off the Falls. The GAA is a huge part of your life?”Ī: “It teaches us to behave. Here, you can’t print this - I’ll get in trouble with the manager.” He arrives to meet me fresh from goalkeeping for his club against Tír na nÓg.Ī: “Boring. When John became lord mayor of Belfast in 2019, his secretary had to check the Antrim GAA fixtures each week to ensure no official engagements clashed with Lámh Dhearg matches. He sits down, two pints are ordered and we are off and running. John Finucane comes into the Chester bar, puts out his hand and says: “Hello, I’m the member of parliament for North Belfast.” (Big laugh). John Finucane's father, the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, above, was shot dead by loyalists in 1989