Pat Finucane: profile - Telegraph Pat Finucane was born into a Catholic family in 1949, the eldest of seven boys and one girl. He attended Trinity College, Dublin in 1973, making him the first in his family and neighbourhood to go to university. It was there that he met his wife Geraldine. She was from a middle-class Protestant family but their romance blossomed in spite of sectarian divisions. Finucane chose a career in law and soon became a leading civil-rights lawyer. Among his clients were Bobby Sands, the hunger striker who died in prison in 1981 and families involved in shoot-to-kill allegations against the police. The year before he was killed, Mr Finucane defended former hunger striker Pat McGeown, who had been charged with helping to organise the 1988 murder of two Army corporals. He succeeded in getting the charges against McGeown dropped but it is claimed a double agent passed a photo of the lawyer captured outside the court to the Ulster Freedom Fighters who carried out his murder. Mr Finucane had three children and was shot in front of them and his wife as he ate a Sunday meal in his Belfast home on February 12 1989. Gunmen shot him 14 times and his wife was injured in the attack. He was 39 when he died. But there were suggestions there was another side to Mr Finucane other than the human rights lawyer beloved of nationalist Ireland. In an article written in this newspaper by former head of the IRA southern Command Sean O'Callaghan in 2003, the senior IRA member described Mr Finucane as "first and foremost an IRA volunteer" who "exploited his position ruthlessly to wage his war on the state." O'Callaghan said Mr Finucane spent much of his career working as a "trusted conduit" between IRA prisoners and the organisation's leadership.