Anthony McIntyre ☠ Writing in the Irish News on 12-January-2026.
Just into the New Year Denis Bradley, writing in this paper, raised a matter which has defied resolution throughout many old years.
Truth, despite acquiring a word association with reconciliation, is a concept which in the North has long been used for something entirely different - recrimination: our truth about you, but not your truth about us.
Denis Bradley, alert to this, in suggesting that compassion should place limitations on clarity, invites his readers to reconsider the value of truth recovery in its most expansive form. His main concern is, briefly, that to come clean to the extent that informers be identified, will have a destructive affect on the families of those who are 'outed.'
One authentic, but not sufficient, reason for wishing to have informers publicly identified is curiosity. The titillation to be derived from the layers of deceit being pulled away from the spook world, causing spinners and spoofers to seek out new shadows, should not be understated either. Many aficionados of horror find rich pickings by flicking the mind's channel to one of the following stations: Internal Security Unit, Force Research Unit, MI5, Special Branch. John Ware's upcoming book on the moral quagmire inhabited by Freddie Scappaticci, Brian Nelson, and a range of state agencies is likely to be replete with the genre of nightmare that prevented Edgar Allan Poe getting a good night's sleep. Yet there is no compelling reason to insist that curiosity should trump compassion. Pursuing informers at this point is often driven by the same type of mindset that presses for prosecution of former combatants, As the former IRA prisoner Tommy McKearney once put it: why continue to take prisoners when the war is over?
While not intrinsically objectionable there is no uncomplicated way to erect the humane 'Bradley barrier.' Would the family of John Bingham be allowed to know the identities of those who killed him but not that of the informer who was also part of the same IRA operation? Perhaps the most that can be done is to erect the safety rail of compassion rather than a barrier in the hope that a society chooses wisely and opts not to go down a path that leads to even more destruction.
One thing the Kenova Report demonstrated starkly is that there are families who have already been destroyed by the informer label. They lost loved ones, and forever walk the earth bearing the mark of Cain for a sin not their own, or a sin perhaps not even committed. Compassion should not be confronted with the harsh command of verboten at the family homes of those whose loved ones were executed on the orders of the IRA Army Council after it was fed information procured and processed by Freddie Scappaticci, and green lighted by his agent handlers in the British security matrix.
The involvement of a British agent in the construction of cases against people accused of informing, leading to their execution, is as corrupting as police malfeasance in the Birmingham Six 'appalling vista.'
Even within its own narrow ethical bandwidth, the deaths of all those executed by the IRA on the watch of Freddie Scappaticci amount to a gross miscarriage of justice, the cases contaminated beyond all reasonable doubt. Each of the dead should be posthumously pardoned by the only body capable of doing so, Sinn Fein. The party still has within its ranks a former element of the Army Council, the institution which signed off on the Scappaticci executions. It alone carries the authority within the communities where the deceased once lived to remove the stain. Seeking to evade the obligation to exonerate by recourse to the mantra of the IRA has gone away, is as shallow as the secret graves the IRA interred some of its victims in.
If Sinn Fein can lay wreaths at monuments for British war dead, it can just as surely lay wreaths at the graves of Vincent Robinson, Anthony McKiernan, Charlie McIlmurray and the many others the IRA and British state, in a macabre joint enterprise, forced to sail into nothingness under the 'tout' flag. The same military whose fallen Sinn Fein now honour on Remembrance Sunday stands accused by the party of being responsible for the killings procured and counselled by Freddie Scappaticci. To whatever extent the British state was responsible - and it is hugely culpable - showing compassion to the families of its victims is hardly a breach of any principle. Hubris should not stand in the way of an action that would be one of humility, not humiliation.
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