The current self-righteous storm in England over the nefarious activities of police agents in radical organisations is slightly hilarious in the context of what went on in the North of Ireland over the last four decades. Moreover, it got me thinking about how the North has become a sort of west European Bermuda Triangle, sandwiched between two jurisdictions that view its denizens in the same way as the wider science community views quantum physicians: strange people who inhabit a bizarre place where the normal rules don’t apply.
Yesterday, the Guardian newspaper revealed allegations that police officers embedded in fringe protest groups were involved in falsifying evidence in court in order to protect their identities. The allegations relate to the Reclaim the Streets campaigns from 1995-2000, which, let’s face it, were fairly innocuous affairs: groups of dishevelled looking crusties on bikes taking to the streets in symbolic reclamations of public space. Don’t get me wrong: fair play to them and all that, but they’re hardly the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The fact that taxpayers’ money is spent on monitoring the activities of such peaceful, progressive, non-threatening organisations should be the bigger scandal; left alone, they’d probably end up falling out with each other anyway, rather in the manner of the Judean People’s Front (or is that the People’s Front of Judea?).
But these allegations come on top of other revelations, earlier this year, about another police agent, Mark Kennedy, whom the Guardian had found to be involved in all manner of questionable behaviour in similar groups, such as allegedly having sexual relationships with environmental activists he was monitoring. Some of the women making these claims are expected to bring civil cases against the police and understandably felt violated on discovering Kennedy’s true identity. However, such activity is hardly a big surprise: the idea that British agents leading a double-life would end up having sex with, or marrying, or having children with people in the community they were monitoring would barely raise an eyebrow in the Wee Six.
And that nonchalance when it comes to considering reckless behaviour by supposed security services illustrates the most salient point in all of this: however worrying, what happened in undercover policing in the last two decades in England seems utterly bland when juxtaposed with the activities of the RUC in the North, and juxtaposed it was this week, as the Guardian revelations coincided fittingly with Monday night’s BBC Spotlight revelations about unusual goings-on in the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland’s office. Spotlight suggested a number of things which, due to their as-yet unproven nature, may be unwise to speculate on in blogosphere, but one item in particular bears scrutiny.
In 1988, Derry man Eugene Dalton was one of three people killed in an IRA bomb in the Creggan area. Well, I say IRA bomb because they made it, and planted it, and tried to ensure it killed as many RUC members as possible, but paradoxically, it now seems that the IRA may not have been responsible for the atrocity itself.
According to the programme, the IRA had tried a number of tactics to lure RUC personnel into a vacant flat, whose owner they had kidnapped. Firstly, they parked a car outside the flat; it was known to have been used in another IRA operation, and those involved thought it would trigger a red light for the RUC. When that didn’t work, the same IRA unit staged a robbery of a business in Derry. At the scene they left ID belonging to the flat owner. This, they thought, would surely lead the RUC to their bomb, but still there was no sign of anyone coming near the flat.
Spotlight revealed the suspected reason why this happened: unbeknownst to the IRA, a mole at the heart of their operation had advised his/her handlers of the bomb. They, in turn, had allegedly issued an “out-of-bounds” order to RUC and British Army personnel, strictly advising that the vicinity of the bomb was out of bounds. When Eugene Dalton and a number of neighbours became concerned about the flat-owner’s whereabouts, they immediately went to his door to see if there was something wrong and were the first to come on the bomb. They died instantly; the bomb was triggered by the opening of the flat’s door.
While Spotlight didn’t make the obvious conclusions explicit, it seems inconceivable that the flat was not under surveillance by someone at this stage, if the allegations are true; surely, one might reason, the whole rationale for issuing an exclusion zone order was to see if the bombers returned to defuse the bomb for fear it might go off and kill someone. If the flat was under surveillance, or even if it wasn’t and RUC Special Branch knew it presented a potential loss of life to local residents, there can be only be a small number of reasons why it was left for Dalton and his unfortunate neighbours to find. Spotlight broached a “suspected attempt to protect a mole”.
If one soldier plants a bomb meant for an opposing soldier (and you can refuse to acknowledge that IRA volunteers, or RUC members, were soldiers, but bear with me), and the second soldier finds that bomb but stands back and allows an innocent to set it off, well, that’s pretty bad. But if that second soldier also lays claim to being a policeman, well, it’s pretty absurd. Whatever happened or didn’t happen, serious questions arise for what the RUC was or was not doing. Either way, the bombing became a propaganda victory for crown forces: the IRA, it seemed, had wantonly risked civilian lives in an area where it enjoyed considerable support. This is the kind of thing Kevin Myers columns are made of.
Back to Merrie England, and the not-so-merry presidential election in the Republic. In one jurisdiction, media correspondents complain bitterly about the idea of a cop working undercover and getting involved in a few sit-in protests and illicit losing-the-run-of-yourself-and-thinking-you’re-James-Bond style liaisons; yet the same people often glaze over, nonplussed, when confronted with evidence that they subsidised and enabled torturing, colluding, murdering paramilitary bigots just across the water.
In the other jurisdiction (the Republic), politicians seize on a celebrated handful of very harrowing atrocities carried out by people on one side of the conflict, but compulsively refuse to recognise the role of the other side in such horrendous abuses as Spotlight has revealed. Just tonight Gerry Adams was forced to release what is by now a ritualised and tiresome condemnation of the (utterly wrong) killing of Gerry McCabe, because media elites (who are prepared to ignore stories such as the one we’ve just explored) seem to have tunnel vision when it comes to the Northern conflict. Only a handful of lives lost in that conflict merit scrutiny it seems.
In the South, the subtext of what revisionist media reactionaries have to say about the North reads: “keep your Troubles up there”. In England, there is no subtext, or text: Northern Ireland might as well not exist. Like the Higgs boson particle, the idea of justice in the North is still hypothetical for both neighbouring jurisdictions. It can’t be seen by the naked eye and might only be made apparent when sent hurtling through some sort of extremely expensive contraption, called a tribunal.
Either way, there’s a reason unionists in the North get on better with republicans than unionists in the South seem capable of doing. The simple fact is that the former realise, privately and grudgingly, that there is something in what republicans have to say about the rottenness at the heart of the Orange state. Even if they’re loath to admit it, they can’t ignore it: crown forces conspired over many decades to kill people they ostensibly claimed to be protecting. Unionists in the south, however (and I’m talking here also about those people who say things like ‘I want a united Ireland’, but we know very well don’t), are quite happy to put the blinkers on and pretend such things simply didn’t happen. Search the main daily newspapers this week and you’re unlikely to find a story on how crown personnel operating less than 20 miles over the border may have facilitated the deaths of innocent civilians in order to protect an agent. You’re more likely to find a picture of Dana looking like Bambi beside a dodgy looking spare tyre (and no, I don’t mean Gay Mitchell). Where, oh where, is the objectivity or integrity that might treat of these issues with the level of gravity and concern they clearly require?
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