I had an interesting exchange of tweets with Mick Fealty of sluggerotoole yesterday. The topic was state agents and the extent to which they could be given the go-ahead in breaking the law.
Mick seemed keen to use Freddie Scappaticci as the sole example. Was it right that Scappaticci should have been allowed to proceed with his lethal work in order to protect his cover? Mick didn’t make this argument, but I expect he’d point out that by allowing Scappaticci to continue his law-breaking ( aka torturing and/or killing), the state was saving the lives of others. I hope I’m not doing him an injustice (Fealty, Virginia, not Scap – try t o keep up) when I say that his argument that the state must allow its agents freedom to act “up to an ethical point” means the state should balance those killed against those saved from being killing by the information the informer provides.
Sticking to Scappaticci is, however, a bit disingenuous. He is best known for his interrogation and killing of …you guessed it…IRA people who were considered informers. So if you had sympathies with the IRA, you’d feel inclined to support Scappaticci’s search for moles within the IRA. If you had no sympathies with the IRA, you’d probably argue for supporting Scappaticci’s actions ‘up to an ethical point’. You’d be on the side of the informer and understand the state’s desire to protect him.
But put yourself in the shoes of a family member of those killed in Loughinisland. (And yes, Virginia, that Periscope interview with Niall Murphy, the families’ lawyer, is still scheduled for around 1.00 pm today.) Would you still feel that state agents should be given freedom to act ‘up to an ethical point’, so that they could continue to provide information to the ‘security’ forces? In short, would you believe that the sacrifice of your innocent father/brother/son/ husband was a price worth paying for keeping the mole in place and functioning?
Put like that, up close and personal, your consent weakens and your outrage in the face of state killings grows. It’s a bit like Hiroshima/Nagasaki, although on a massively smaller scale. Was the American government right to sacrifice the lives of innocents in those two cities, in order to avoid future bloodshed and loss of American troops? Or does the vaporization of the innocent repel you?
I’m inclined to the latter view. I don’t believe the end justifies the means. I would never agree to have my grandchild/child/wife/sibling sacrificed, no matter what good might come of it. And if I wouldn’t, what right have I to argue that such flexibility be granted in other cases?
Final point: I don’t accept the distinction between informer and state agent. Both are the creature of the state.
Sir Jeffrey (must have got it for acting) said RUC men may have been guilty of “wrongdoing” but not Collusion. Meanwhile the rest of Unionism have been largely quiet. Could this be because all of them thought collusion to be the norm, all the way back to 1922.
I think you may be right. I remember talking to a liberal unionist a while back and he simply laughed at the idea that state forces/state agents wouldn’t be involved in the struggle against the IRA…
What is a liberal unionist Jude, one who accepts a nationalists right to be free of British rule, so long as it is within the UK?
Mmm. Good question. I suppose in my simple-minded way I’d consider a liberal unionist to be one who doesn’t resent me because I have a nationalist/republican perspective and who treats people of every political persuasion in a respectable, polite way. Alex Kane I would consider an example. (Though he’s not the one I spoke of)
The British state could have stopped the conflict from starting by standing up to unionism when they attacked the civil rights movement.
The British army could have stood up to unionist attacks on the nationalist community like they were sent over to do instead of allowing themselves to be piggy in the middle and choosing instead to attack the nationalist community when the right thing to do would have been stop the unionist aggression.
The British army’s use of martial law and murdering nationalist civilians before the PIRA existed ensured the conflict started by unionism took hold.
The British state could have stopped the conflict from developing but instead tried to defeat the PIRA which began a dirty conflict.
It is both naïve and insulting to say the British state ever put a value on life here. The only life they value is those from across the water.
Protecting their name and reputation is more important to them than human life in Ireland.
It’s interesting that those who feel uncomfortable with the fact that collusion existed and see admitting it as strengthening the Republican view of the conflict seem to hold up stakeknife as some sort of make weight to state collusion i.e. the IRA were at it too, all the while missing the point that Stakeknife was another state agent of Britain whose modus operandi was the defeat of the IRA and Republicanism.
One of the most memorable performances, Esteemed Blogmeister, one ever witnessed on the stage of the late, great Theatre Royal in Dublin was a song sung by the Southlanders in the late, great years of the Fabulous Fifties.
The song was their signature tune – ‘The Mole in the Hole’ and the Southlanders were/ are a black group of Caribbean immigrants from South London. Their vocal style, stage movements and glad rags were heavily and happily influenced by the ebullient black groups in New York of that pre-eminently toonful time.
Each verse of the song had four lines and each member of the vermilion-jacketed quartet would take his turn at the microphone to sing his line, thus:
-I’m not a bat or a rat or a cat
Next
-I’m not a gnu or a kangaroo
Next
-I’m not a goose or a moose on the loose
Till it was finally the turn of the group’s bass singer to step up, melodramatically pause and speak the final title-bestowing line, basso-profundo style :
-I am a mole and I live in a hole.
It never failed to bring the house down. Once heard, never forgotten – hence this mention, on reading today’s scalpel-sharp blog. (The bass singer, btw, was one Harry Wilmot, whose son Gary later became an even bigger name in the biz of show).
Sadly, if this line brought the house down, metaphorically speaking, a few short years later it fell to the lot of the wrecking ball to (literally) demolish this emporium of dreams . This crass act of officially approved vandalism was carried out under the grim supervision of the, erm, Development Class, aka, The People in Greed.
One might imagine that the increasing revelations ( a forensic process first set in motion by the courageous likes of Anne Cadwallader and many others) of moles who live in the holes of HM’s secret service could even –gasp !- bring a less than equivalent house (an emporium of screams, in this instance) crashing down.
If one is depending on the Establishment south of the Black Sow’s Dyke to bring in the wrecking ball, it is well that one has time on one’s side. This Establishment , aka the Southlanders of the Free Southern Stateen, is the one which specializes in, alas,: si, si, senor, S.I. That would be:
– Smug Inertia .
One mentions the Black Sow’s Dyke for the female of a mole in not actually a ‘fe-mole’, but rather, a, erm, sow.
The First Official Language of the F.S.S. is, of course, the Leprechaun and as noted linguist, Gregsy Crooked-mouth will readily attest, a mole in the Underground Language is :
-Caochan.
Curiously enough, ‘ag caochadh air’ can translate as either ‘winking at one’ or even (gulp) another c-word;
-Collusion.
In the Southland of the 26 C , where the virtual one-eyed queen still (surprisingly) enjoys 90/90 vision, the Establishment even have the wrecking balls to sing from the same hymn/ her sheet as the group:
As follows:
The Mole in the Hole’ has been sung at EVERY concert by the Southlanders since its release in 1958. Once, when they tried to remove it from their repertoire, club managers and their audiences alike wouldn’t hear of it. According to the group’s spokesman:
‘The Mole has become a protected species. It’s untouchable. We’ve even sung it in Japanese !’
-I’m not a cow or a chow or a sow
I’m not a snake or a hake of a drake
I’m not a flea or a wee chimpanzee
-all together now !-
-I AM A MOLE AND I LIVE IN A HOLE.
Le cheile anois, sa Leipreachainis:
‘Ni bo me, no madra Sineach no crain mhuice
Ni nathair me no colmoir no bardal
Ni dreancaid me no simepansai beag
-sos mealdramatuil –
IS CAOCHAN ME AGUS MAIRIM I bPOLL.
Laws apply to everyone. There’s no such thing as 007 license to kill. If I have info on someone about to be killed and I take no action to prevent it, I could be considered an accomplice and treated as such by the courts.
If I have information on a killing carried out but do not act on it, I could be considered to have perverted the course of justice and be treated accordingly by the courts.
If we go down the road of allowing law makers and law enforcers the ability to break the law at will then such a society is fundamentally morally bankrupt in my view.
Laws apply to everyone, even 007.
“Laws apply to everyone, even 007.”
There were more than a few 007s sent over here Cal, and all of them were immune from the law. Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction.
In November 2013, The BBC’s Panorama exposed The Military Reaction Force with its licence to operate a shoot-to-kill policy in Ireland. In the programme, former members described how the unit operated outside the law. Soldiers from the undercover unit carried out a series of drive-by shootings. A member of the terror group was reported to have said:
“We were not there to act like an Army unit, we were there to act like a terror group…”
In the past few days, attempts have been made to resuscitate the “few bad apples ” theory in political circles accompanied by a deafening silence from some journalists in relation to yet more revelations about state sponsored collusion in Ireland. For some politicians, civil servants and military personnel it was a case of:
See no evil and hear no evil as others perpetrated the evil, however,
“The evil that men do lives after them…”
“Final point: I don’t accept the distinction between informer and state agent. Both are the creature of the state.”
Presumably all agents were informers but I don’t think the converse is true.
If had information about a criminal and passed it on to the police that would make me an informer but I wouldn’t be an agent unless I went further and became a de facto employee with handlers etc.
‘I wouldn’t be an agent unless I went further and became a de facto employee with handlers etc.’ – sounds like the informer is an embryonic/apprentice agent, then…
“But put yourself in the shoes of a family member of those killed in Loughinisland. (And yes, Virginia, that Periscope interview with Niall Murphy, the families’ lawyer, is still scheduled for around 1.00 pm today.) Would you still feel that state agents should be given freedom to act ‘up to an ethical point’, so that they could continue to provide information to the ‘security’ forces? In short, would you believe that the sacrifice of your innocent father/brother/son/ husband was a price worth paying for keeping the mole in place and functioning?”
It’s an ethical dilemma but one that is fairly quickly resolved on the side of not allowing informers to commit serious crimes (using the argument that acting against them would render them useless and thus prevent prevention of future crimes or apprehension of higher-ups). As you point out: just look at it from the victim’s point of view.
Mick fealty like every other unionist has yet to accept that there was widespread collusion amongst British forces and loyalist murder gangs. They’re continuing denial of this basic truth is not only pathetic, it is hurtful to victims families. Martin mcguinness and other senior republicans have acknowledged the hurt and pain the IRA caused. It would be nice for those unionist leaders who lionise the RUC/UDR to recognise that they worked hand in hand with the likes of sectarian physcopaths such as Billy Wright in murdering numerous civilians from the nationalist community
Hey Jude,
yer on the airwaves, have you ever thought of utilising Frank Kitson in this debate?
The standard unionist/apologist stance is to discuss the instance of collusion in isolation. Implicitly enforcing all the assumptions that you are dealing with a regular police force, where an act of this would be an aberration. In that context you get all the usual plausible deniability, wheres-your-incontrovertible-proof pablum thrown as chaff to delay, deny, obscure.
Thing is what happened in the Dirty War, happened in Kenya and many other former British colonies that had to fight to gain their freedom. Frank Kitson wrote a book, then applied it in Ireland. Cadwallader’s Lethal Allies provides the irrefutable proof of that strategy.
Did it in Kenya (we now have literally miles of documents they neglected to destroy on Kenya).
Wrote a book about it.
Author does it in Ireland.
Game. Set. Match.
I think anyone with more than 2 brain cells can see all this stuff about “informers saving lives” is just Unionists/British State trying to justify the unjustifiable. The reality is the British State treated the North like it treated any of its other colonies around the World and it didn’t give two hoots if it broke its own laws or not, the grave yards are full of innocent Men, Women and Children, mostly Catholic, that are the victims of their attempt to “save lives”. The British State had no interest in saving the lives of anyone except its own soldiers, especially if they were English, and to keep this state in power along with their Unionist puppets.
If your going to argue that informers that committed atrocities like Loughlinisland saved lives in the long run (which is basically what the British State and their sympathizers are trying to say) then by that same logic, how many lives did the IRA save by committing Kingsmills? We know the UVF were on a sectarian rampage for months before Kingsmills and it stopped after it was committed. How many lives was saved when the IRA killed Loyalist paramilitaries? Crip McWilliams was a very close friend of my father and he killed Loyalist Leader Billy Wright who was actively planning murders of innocent people in his prison cell, so how many lives did Crip save? Many RUC men who were killed by Republicans were also in the UVF/UDA, I wonder how many lives were saved there…..see? two can play this game.
The British State will say whatever it can to try to justify the unjustifiable. The reality is, as we all know, is that the British Govt was involved in mass murder for decades here. They didn’t want peace, their own files state that.
There was a war waged against the Catholic community here by the British State and the forces of Unionism. Even the FRU and MRF members said being Catholic was enough to be “guilty” in their eyes, they even laughed about it on TV……
Ryan your condemnations and outrage would be taken more seriously if you didn’t support murders by nationalist death squads. It’s difficult to take such a hypocritical stance seriously.
“It’s difficult to take such a hypocritical stance seriously”
A Unionist lecturing on hypocrisy……you couldn’t make this up……welcome to Norneverland….
Can you give me a list of RUC men that were in the UVF/UDA? Any convictions, any one that spent time (rightly if it was thr case) behind bars?