THE claim that an RUC informant planned the Shankill bomb has apparently been made by the IRA.
It is hard to see what the republican movement gains from this admission.
As recently as four months ago, Gerry Adams was insisting the IRA no longer exists.
Republicans benefit from a perception that they kept no records and hence are not amenable to truth recovery.
Yet now the IRA is setting out a detailed tale of paperwork and logistics dating back 23 years.
Allowing an informant to commit murder is collusion at its most “extreme”, to quote Lord Stevens, who compiled three reports on the issue.
Although the republican movement needs to manage perceptions of being infiltrated right to the top, it would suit its long-term agenda to conflate all IRA murders of civilians with collusion, until Britain was responsible for everything and the IRA was a victim of itself.
But why rush into this now, weeks before a decisive southern election, with an example as appalling as the Shankill bomb and with information the IRA has apparently known since 2002?
Most Sinn Fein supporters already see Britain as responsible for everything, while the new voters the party wants in the republic are put off by any mention of the Troubles.
Something is clearly up and what it looks like is a warning shot, possibly over dealing with the past, or at least over some matter from the past that has arisen.
"Don’t think we won’t embarrass ourselves to embarrass you'' is one signal the IRA might be sending.
Sinn Fein has an active strategy of unnerving the unionist population - former party chair Mitchel McLaughlin admitted as much to the BBC in 2006.
However, it is implausible that this would take urgent priority over the southern electoral strategy.
In any case, unionist narrative certainties are not so much undermined by this week’s revelations as cast back 30 years, when the response of all ‘decent people’ to an atrocity like the Shankill bomb was to wonder why the terrorists were not simply arrested.
It is not as if the identities of our paramilitary godfathers and their foot-soldiers were unknown.
Charlie Butler, who lost three family members in the Shankill bomb, says the names of those who planned and planted the device were common knowledge within hours.
In general, throughout the Troubles, people were mystified by the apparent uselessness of the state’s evident resources.
Super-grass trials had brought home to even the most determinedly oblivious that informants existed and the criminal justice system could get results by cashing them in. Everyone believed - correctly, as it turned out - that surveillance and bugging were carried out on an industrial scale.
Public support for paramilitaries seemed limited, beyond certain areas.
So why were the legendary ‘few hundred people ruining it for the rest of us’ not taken out of circulation?
The question that follows from that is the same question raised this week - what was the purpose of running informers, if it was not to prevent mass murder?
For republicans and many unionists, the explanation then and now is British scheming either for or against a united Ireland.
There may well be such an agenda in Whitehall or the intelligence services but Lord Stevens and everyone else who has authoritatively examined collusion has never found evidence of an overall policy being conveyed down to the handlers who would have had to enact it.
Instead, they have found constant requests upwards for policy direction, which were rebuffed by officials desperate to keep their hands clean.
The 2012 De Silva report into the murder of Pat Finucane found that in regards to agent handling, RUC Special Branch had “no workable guidelines”, MI5 had “no effective external guidance”, the army’s guidelines were “contradictory” and there was a “wilful and abject failure” by government to provide a “clear policy and legal framework.”
These findings are replicated in reports by Stevens, Judge Peter Cory and former Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan.
Responding to O’Loan’s criticism last year that the RUC broke the rules, chief constable George Hamilton observed this was technically impossible as “there were no rules”.
Without rules, agents were run as their individual handlers saw fit and the agenda of someone who has spent years cultivating a source will rarely be to cash that source in.
None of this exonerates the security forces - far from it. It raises the grotesque prospect that hundreds of people were allowed to be murdered for no better reason than bureaucratic inertia.
newton@irishnews.com
