Kieran Healy

State-sponsored terror

Where did I put my list of countries known to give aid and comfort to terrorists? Sir John Stevens has submitted his report on collusion between security forces and loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland. As the BBC reports, he finds that members of the RUC (the police) and the British Army snuggled up with the UDA and arranged the murder of a number of Catholics. (To pre-empt tedious accusations, I should add that I am of course no friend of the IRA, either.) In particular, the assistance of agents of the British Crown allowed the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane to be shot to death in front of his wife and three children while he ate his Sunday dinner. (Slugger O’Toole will probably be covering this in much better detail, by the way.)

As has happened so often before, the self-image of British democracy and the rule of law runs aground on the shores of its first colony. I’m reminded of Lord Denning’s immortal words about the Birmingham Six. When the Six applied for aid to sue the police for beating their confessions out of them, Denning dismissed their request on the grounds that if the accusation were true they would therefore be innocent, and the British public would face the “appalling vista” of a corrupt Justice system. The fact that the accusations were true, and the Six innocent, was neither here nor there. It was the appearance of the thing.

The Birmingham Six appeal (along with others) ran its course in the 1980s and when it finished there was a certain amount of self-satisfied “the System has worked” backpatting. I wonder if we’ll see more of the same here. I also wonder what enthusiasts of the Anglosphere think about these developments. No system is perfect, etc, worst except for all the others, etc, I imagine. Which is fair enough. But these findings might encourage a bit of humility, too. They give the lie to the idea that the North can simply be understood simply as a civilized democratic state trying to keep two atavistic tribes from killing each other. High-flown rhetoric about British (and American) institutions begins to sound thin in the face of state-sponsored actions such as these.

Well, as an American who lived 20 years in England (half my life), 15 years ago…
The young Brits I knew mostly felt that the Brits in the North were mainly trying to keep the peace, in a place they couldn’t pull out of, with a fair measure of collusion with Protestant thugs thrown in. Not “terrorists” – people like Paisley, and the Ulster Police who were obvious thugs. I think they expected collusion in beatings, intimidation, discrimination, but not in planned murders. And most were disgusted when Thatcher allied with the UDF to form a majority. So I guess specific collusion in murder is news to me.
I still honestly believe that the UK is better at exposing and correcting its evil actions than the US: Sir John Stevens, BBC coverage, the Birmingham Six being acquitted (they were a cause celebre in the UK in the 80s, as you say) – all that I find less likely over here. I have to say, people also hated Noraid, when the thought occurred. “Free Bobby Sands” was pretty common graffiti – wasn’t he the guy? Most people I knew certainly wanted British troops out of Northern Ireland, and I think would have been happy to see it rejoin the Republic. But try selling that to Ulster.
I don’t know what been going on since the peace accords, certainly it was a sordid mess that the UK participated in. You don’t hear much here without looking.

Incidentally, ex IRA killer Sean O’Callaghan (now rather bizarrely a loyalist spin doctor) swears blind in today’s Daily Telegraph that Finucane was an IRA man. This doesn’t mean he deserved to be killed, of course. O’Callaghan does make a fair point, though. The IRA explicitly stated at the time that it was at war and that all security personnel in the police and the army (and civilians working for them) were legitimate targets. Can it have its cake and eat it, demanding freedom to engage the “enemy” on the one hand, but protection from civil law on the other?

Can it have its cake and eat it, demanding freedom to engage the “enemy” on the one hand, but protection from civil law on the other?

It seems to me that this is the question facing the British State, and not the IRA. The IRA are a terrorist organization and so we can’t expect much in the way of fair play from them. The Police and Army are supposed to be arms of a legitimate constitutional monarchy, and properly functioning democracies shouldn’t be colluding with terrorist groups. That’s reinforced by the fact that British government (quite properly) refuses to acknowledge that it’s at war with the IRA —that would grant them a legitimacy they don’t deserve. So even if the IRA believes its one nation’s army fighting another’s, the UK’s position is that it’s a bunch of thugs trying to violently undermine the rule of law and the democratic process. Which is precisely why it shouldn’t be getting into bed with the IRA’s Loyalist counterparts.

The “have your cake and eat it” issue cuts both ways. The IRA is a terrorist group but its mouthpiece Sinn Fein participated in democracy the time. In essence it played both systems, the euphemistic “bombs and the ballot box.” To some extent they still do, hence the repeated failure to decommission.

In terms of the British Army, I agree: such collusion is wrong. However all intelligence services have to collude with terrorists at some level to be effective: the issue is the fine line between protecting one’s informants and stopping terrorist acts. Intelligence handlers routinely have to make calls of allowing x to occur in order to protect a vital source of information. The Army clearly crossed that line, both in terms of knowingly allowing numerous acts of terror to proceed and feeding terrorist targets to terrorists. The machinations of any intelligence agency are fairly unpleasant, though. Wherever they get exposed they uncover actions that seem to violate what we hold dear, in terms of valuing life or breaking the rule of law.

“The Police and Army are supposed to be arms of a legitimate constitutional monarchy.”
In the 80s, young people on the other island saw a sharp disinction between the army caught in the middle (I had a Welsh friend over there) and the unpleasant local boys in the RUC. Northern Ireland is not quite thought of as part of Britain. This news breaks down that distinction.

I remember thinking in the 1980s when these sort of allegations surfaced that they couldn’t be true because surely the army wouldn’t be that STUPID. In a democracy it was bound to come out in the end, and when it did it would be a tremendous boon to the IRA and would make future convictions almost impossible.

But I was wrong – I’d forgotten army and police men are not natural democrats and don’t understand how it works.

Your reference to Lord Denning made me smile. perhaps you could visit my site http;//www.matron-mcgill-decd.com/ …. you will see that Lord Denning was founder of the Leonard Cheshire Homes … an organisation which Regional Crime Squad allegedly found was subject of an unlawful police no go area enforced by abuse of MI5/Special Branch liaison arrangements.

These being the arrangements which the Denning post-Profumo Inquiry was supposed to address ??