It is the standard test of a newspaper or magazine article: how good is it when reporting on what you yourself are involved in? And most unusually, that's the position I'm in with the reports from Judge Peter Cory, the Canadian the two governments hauled in to investigate various allegations about collusion between members of the security forces and terrorists on both sides of the Border. Presumably they chose him because Homer Simpson was otherwise engaged.
It was allegations about Garda collusion in the murder of RUC officers Chief Supt Harry Breen and Det Insp Bob Buchanan in this column which prompted John Bruton, then leader of Fine Gael, to raise the matter in the Dáil. I was subsequently interviewed separately by Garda and RUC detectives about my sources. One I admitted to was the recently published book, Bandit Country, by Toby Harnden. The others were confidential and remain so. Detectives in Newry RUC station named two Dundalk gardaí suspected of collusion and asked me whether they were the terrorist agents. I declined to assist them.
Two senior detective gardaí asked me similar questions, with similar replies. I declined to identify my sources, or the IRA agents in Dundalk Garda station. I am a journalist, not an intelligence agent.
Then, by some mysterious process of talent-spotting, Judge Peter Cory was picked up in the Canadian backwoods, and was appointed to investigate various allegations of collusion. But he made no attempt that I know of to contact me. Both the gardaí and the RUC have my address, and my phone numbers, or he could have contacted me at The Irish Times.
Nor did he question Toby Harnden, whose brilliant book about the IRA in South Armagh was an important source for my article on the matter of collusion, though Toby had been interviewed in the US (where he is now working) by the same gardaí and RUC officers who had questioned me. Toby's book is required reading for all British army officers serving in South Armagh. Yet without speaking to us, the judge decided our allegations "are not based on any facts, although written as though they were factual. Rather they are based on suspicions, hypotheses and some vague, unconfirmed conversations with present or former RUC officers. Little appears to have been done by the authors to check or confirm any of the information which was given. There is nothing that came from the book and article which would constitute evidence of collusion."
So how could Judge Cory possibly consider that his report into our allegations of Garda collusion in terrorist murders had any value whatsoever, when he'd made absolutely no attempt whatever to speak to the people who arguably had begun his investigation? Moreover, subsequent to my column, I'd been given fresh information about collusion, which I certainly could and would have discussed with him.
Thus my own experience of the indefatigable methods, the inexhaustible energy, and the scorching spirit of enquiry which animated Judge Peter Cory. I would accordingly have as much faith in the validity of the judge's conclusions as I would in an airliner designed by a bricklayer.
More recently, this worthy unleashed his all-inquiring mind on to allegations of collusion in the North. This time, his sense of intellectual discipline enabled him to extend the term "collusion" to include turning "a blind eye" towards the murder of Rosemary Nelson. It also enabled him to say that "an RUC investigation into the alleged demeaning and threatening remarks [to Rosemary Nelson] might also be indicative of collusion, if it is found that the force failed to take these complaints seriously." Look, I daresay the judge thinks that etymology is a study of insects, but the word "collude" comes from the Latin to "have a secret agreement with". This gives us our present Shorter OED meanings of "conspire, plot, act in secret concert." It does not, in any sense whatever, mean "inaction", "turning a blind eye", "connive", with all its subsidiary meanings, (as the judge seems to think it does), never mind the risible "not taking seriously".
In the case of Rosemary Nelson, "not taking seriously" the threat against her was, according to Cory, the basis for the British state's "collusion" in her murder. Why, then by that logic, she must - ludicrously - have colluded in her own murder, for she plainly didn't check under her car at home, and according to a secretary quoted in the judge's own report, she didn't take the threat seriously in her office.
Moreover, as Liam Clarke pointed out in the Sunday Times, despite the assistance a team of police officers and barristers, the judge was unable to find an address for former Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan, even though the latter had been publicly appointed Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary in Cambridge. So the judge on four separate occasions wrote to Ronnie Flanagan through the office of the latter's successor, Hugh Orde. I somehow get the feeling the judge would have trouble detecting a brass band in a telephone kiosk.
And as a consequence of this farrago, very probably a plethora of new and meaningless enquiries into an indefinite future. Meanwhile, a roar of joy from the massed ranks of barristers who have already been made multi-millionaires by Saville, and who've been worrying about their baby barristers in their cribs, in their baby wigs and baby gowns. Fear not, you silken ladies and gentlemen at the bar; a generation of lawyers as yet unborn will be able to dip their snouts in the Canadian Pacific of Bisto, courtesy of Judge Peter Cory.