Not for the first time, the wounded of the Troubles have recently had the most painful emotions of their lives dragged to the surface, not through any bad intent but by endeavours in the name of justice and truth.
The accounts by Allison Morris last week depicted an IRA commander reporting to police handlers over years while responsible for the Shankill bomb among other killings.
Senior judge Reg Weir meanwhile chaired his review of inquests delayed for decades by tearing into police, army and civil servants for causing that delay by failure to produce evidence.
Very different events these but with similar roots, between them they underscore what may be the impossibility of putting all that death and misery to rest.
In court, the rollicking from the bench clearly brought some satisfaction. His Lordship, a spirited performer, may find it more testing to produce assessments that unblock inquests than it was to launch his entirely merited, well-crafted sarcasm.
But a very high proportion of survivors and bereaved feel disrespected on top of their loss and pain. Judges in their archaic costume play the part of secular priests, with some of the gravitas priests as a caste forfeited after the uncovering of church denial and enablement.
The law, for all its imperfections, its favouritism towards the powerful and wealthy, still holds at least an illusion of impartiality.
The polish of authority may feed pomposity but also demands attention. If Lord Justice Weir’s review achieves nothing more he at least gave a voice, practised and targeted, to the frustration of people (including coroners) whose complaints might as well have gone unspoken for all the good it did.
By contrast it is hard to see any benefit to the bereaved in the Ardoyne double agent stories, coming as they do on top of revived speculation about the scope and identity of Stakeknife, striking and unnerving as last week’s reports were. They must have roused awful anger and shock. Beyond saying that a public inquiry looks highly unlikely, it is hard to guess what those emotions will feed, where the trail will lead.
To read that agents of state may have helped a paramilitary gang to kill a daughter, partner, son or father, or deliberately failed to prevent such killing, must rank among the most frightening revelations, the most destabilising experiences of the Troubles.
If you can’t trust the lawfully constituted police, whom can you trust?
It was one of the triggers of three decades of disorder, the realisation that the police force of the time, as well as being unrepresentative, was partisan to the point of aiding and abetting violence by one section of the population against the other. Fear and mistrust of the RUC helped drive hundreds into the IRA and helped to sustain support for them among a much bigger number.
To discover now, to read what seems like yet more evidence that the IRA contained well-placed double agents is a betrayal that fittingly faces in two directions at once. People in the Shankill – in wider unionism – are left to suspect that police did not act on information that might have prevented the biggest atrocity the district ever suffered. So one group feels their supposed guardians not only failed to guard them, but helped to set them up.
On the other side of the peace wall people who saw the IRA as part-protector, part-community police are left with the possibility that their local IRA was partly steered by the police they so distrusted. They are left to think that the Provos, their once-esteemed ‘Ra’, closed ranks around another double agent. As republicans did around Stakeknife - in contrast to all those ‘confessions’ by alleged ‘touts’ fed out to at least some families and partners, the interrogations, torture, the twisted, copycat pomp of ‘courts martial’ and pitiful, hooded bodies dumped by border roads.
To hear the most commanding voice in court mock the serial excuses of official agencies is not going to ‘get justice for’ the dead. But it’s a nice change.
Hearing the Ministry of Defence dressed down by a judge might be as good as it gets: indictment enough, some may say, of official commitment to truth and justice.
As for today’s spokespeople for republicanism, the political descendants of the IRA, it’s probably best they say as little as possible about yet another suggestion that all sides in a dirty war were equally dirty. The guardians of the law were not clean. Nor the glorious soldiers of the imaginary republic.
