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. As the veteran BBC investigative reporter John Ware wrote at the weekend, even the dogs on Belfast’s streets know the real name of the killer – Freddie Scappaticci.
It is all the more absurd because the man himself is dead. He spent the last decades of his life living anonymously in southern England before his death in 2023.
The two people most responsible for the report, Northern Ireland’s Chief Constable Jon Boutcher and lead author Iain Livingstone, have made their frustration clear over the impasse. “As explained in the final report, the identity of Stakeknife still cannot be confirmed and the full story of his operation still cannot be told, more than 30 years after he stopped providing intelligence,” Mr Boutcher said last week. “This outcome was imposed on Kenova by the government for no good reason.”
That Scappaticci was enabled by the security environment of the time appears beyond doubt. That he was sadistic and a henchman of the IRA leadership in enforcing its discipline over its own community is also factual.
Family members of those killed by him are understandably furious. “The whole point of Kenova from the start was to get the truth,” said one. “How can you say we’re getting the truth if that key detail is missing?”
It is a debacle that, for once, has united all sides in Northern Ireland. While the Democratic Unionist Party leader, Gavin Robinson, named Scappaticci in the UK’s House of Commons, the Cabinet minister Hilary Benn was unable to acknowledge the same. But then the official Northern Ireland Office press release in Mr Benn’s name manages to mangle the reference to the murderer’s codename into “STEAK KNIFE” throughout.
The wider indictment is that the UK government and its security forces always claimed to be able to uphold justice and preserve the rule of law even at the blackest moments in the internecine conflict.
Overshadowed by this row is the underside of the Kenova report that curiously absolved the UK security forces of collusion with pro-British loyalist paramilitaries in planting mass-casualty bombs in Monaghan and Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, in the 1970s. One of those attacks alone killed 34 people. In this aspect, the sunshine has been let in and found nothing to see here (which is another cynical truism in Belfast).
The report found that there was an urban myth that could not be fully hunted down: that the so-called Glenanne gang, a collection of loyalist paramilitaries and security force fellow travellers, was responsible for this attack. Instead, it conceded that although there was persistent or endemic collusion between the security forces and loyalists, there was nothing that represented high-level orchestration. Left unsaid was a compare-and-contrast exercise between these undercover activities and that involving Scappaticci and other republicans.
The complications of Northern Ireland’s Troubles are now set in relief against the peace process that began in the 1990s. One of the architects of that resolution is UK National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell, who is today playing an influential role in the efforts to sustain the Gaza ceasefire. Steve Witkoff, the US envoy, has even tweeted on X to affirm Mr Powell’s importance to the current process.
UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said last week that her country would host a conference early next year to support the establishment of an International Fund for Israeli-Palestine Peace – which would be explicitly modelled on the International Fund for Ireland, set up by London and Dublin in 1986 to jointly promote dialogue and economic prosperity. The meeting is to bring together international peacebuilding expertise and civil society organisations from the Middle East to seek new paths to development and progress.
London is holding two thoughts at once as it seeks to promote the Northern Ireland peace process as a force for good while having its unresolved track record to keep at bay in Belfast. But then reconciliation is an art, not a science. On occasion, it is plain for all who care to see that the curtain cannot be fully parted.
In other words, selling the ideal of reconciliation is not the unalloyed exercise in building a better future that its architects would have you believe.
