Unlike some academics, Thomas Leahy of Cardiff University does not believe British intelligence services defeated the IRA, or that they significantly influenced republican strategy.
Instead, he argues the Troubles ended in stalemate and that the IRA and Sinn Féin moved away from violence, or supporting violence, because of the unwillingness of the Irish public to support it.
So what does he expect from Friday’s report from Operation Kenova, the seven-year police investigation into the activities of the IRA internal enforcer and British spy Freddie Scappaticci known as Stakeknife?
Already, it is known that Kenova will not lead to the prosecutions of anyone involved in the intelligence “dirty war” – either IRA informers who still took part in killings and torture, or those in the British intelligence services, mainly MI5, and British military units such as the Force Research Unit and the Military Reaction Force, which conducted drive-by killings during the 1970s.
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Nevertheless, the inquiry led by Jon Boutcher, who has since become the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), has been worthwhile, Leahy hopes, since it will be “able to break new ground” given the access it has to intelligence material held by MI5 and British Army intelligence.
However, he does not expect it will go “into the specifics” of the role played by Freddie Scappaticci, better known as Agent Stakeknife, in the killing of “Person X, or Person Y”.
Scappaticci is credited with foiling a significant number of IRA operations, particularly in Belfast, though Leahy sounds a note of caution.
“There is a certain period in Belfast where the IRA doesn’t do much in Belfast and what it attempts to do doesn’t work. That doesn’t seem to be a coincidence, so [Scappaticci] did have an influence. And that happened elsewhere, too at times,” says Leahy, author of the 2020 book, The Intelligence War against the IRA, which examined whether informers and British intelligence forced the IRA into the peace process.
“This idea is that he was the omnipotent informer who knew everything, I don’t think that that was true,” he argues.
However, the IRA resumed operations in Belfast in the 1990s with bombings of the Grand Opera House and Donegall Pass after Scappaticci’s role and influence in the IRA’s notorious and brutal Internal Security Unit, or “the nutting squad” had ended in the late 1980s. His time in the IRA came to an end because he was suspected of being an informer by many in the organisation long before he was “outed”.
While Kenova will shed light on the intelligence war, Leahy is not expecting that it will lay the blame at the door of individuals in British agencies, a fact already proven since the Public Prosecutions in Northern Ireland has decided that no prosecutions could be taken: “There is rarely a paper trail in London for any of these things; that is not the way that things happen,” Leahy said.
Penetration of the IRA had far less effect in rural areas such as South Armagh because the IRA there was based on strong local ties. “They were fiefdoms, as Eamon Collins called it,” said Leahy, referring to the late IRA volunteer and one-time member of the paramilitary group’s internal security unit.
The cell structure introduced by the IRA made it more difficult for informers to know more than their immediate hinterland, and such information leaks were easier to trace back because “only two, or three people were involved”.
“Once we get past the mid-1970s, it is clear that what the IRA leadership was saying to their people was not true,” said Leahy.
“The leadership’s outlook was you try to keep the IRA campaign to persist, to survive and you try to get the Sinn Féin vote to increase so that you get the British government into negotiations, and then at that point they hoped that the vote would be substantial enough that they would get concessions”.
Without following prosecutions, Kenova will quickly recede, but Leahy warns that the British government’s legacy legislation, offering conditional amnesties to those involved in Troubles’ violence, offers the potential for political headaches in future. This is not just because of the Irish Government’s decision to challenge the legislation before the European Court of Human Rights, he argues.
If Labour Party wins the next UK general election, it will have to decide what to do next. If the amnesty comes into force in May, as the Conservatives intend, then Labour faces problems.
“It is very difficult to say to people that they have an amnesty and then for that amnesty to disappear because a new government comes in and chucks it out. It could get very complicated legally,” said Leahy.
Legacy was always a political act by the Conservatives, believing it “plays well with veterans”, though Leahy insists that the majority of former military and police officers he has interviewed over the years do not want an amnesty “believing that that puts them on the same plane as the IRA, they want to see offenders punished”.
However, there is little doubt either that a blind eye, if not more was turned by London during The Troubles, where actions were left unpunished, if not deliberately ordered. Files from 2012 showed that “quite senior” intelligence had sought guidance from Margaret Thatcher.
“Essentially, she just said: ‘I don’t want to know. You do your job. I don’t need to know,’” says Leahy.
“The Home Office guidelines for dealing with informers were totally inadequate for infiltrating Greenpeace, let alone dealing with situations like Northern Ireland,” he said.
“This is what happens where there isn’t proper oversight by government”.
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