One of the hottest disputes left over from the three-decade battle over Northern Ireland’s place in the UK is the contention that London orchestrated a dirty war targeted mainly at the Irish Republican Army.
History has now come back to the fore with the publication of an official report of Operation Kenova, an independent investigation into allegations involving a double agent. The result is an unholy mess that provides succour to the accusers more than it resolves anything for the authorities.
In particular the authors, senior policemen themselves, flounder over the identity of an IRA killer known as “Stakeknife” with a wholly deserved reputation for torture. Being a senior IRA figure in Belfast and an MI5 double agent supposedly allowed him to operate with impunity, or worse, in carrying out 28 murders and an unknown series of revenge or punishment attacks.
What could be more emblematic of a dirty-war problem than the failure to even put his name in the seven-year report? Even the well-honed Belfast expression “whatever you say, say nothing” does not cover the failure here.
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