Martin Ingram is the pseudonym of the former British undercover soldier who last week forced Martin McGuinness to answer that most devious of proverbial questions: have you stopped beating your wife? Claims by the former British soldier have caused some turbulence, writes Gerry Moriarty Northern Editor
McGuinness felt he had no option but to stand in front of a battery of reporters and photographers at Stormont to deny Ingram's allegations in yesterday week's Sunday World that he was a British spy.
This has all put McGuinness in an invidious position, because be assured Ingram's story has caused some turbulence.
Normal people, if such allegations were made against them without being backed up by hard facts, would sue and make a bucketful of money. But McGuinness with his IRA background is not a normal person.
This was a big topic in polite and impolite society across the North last week. Most said they would be very surprised if there was any truth in the claim.
Yet after the exposure of republicans, Freddie Scappaticci (whom Ingram outed) and Denis Donaldson, as British agents, and all the talk of other republican informers and agents, people also paradoxically said they would not be surprised if they were surprised.
The Sunday newspapers were worrying away at the story again yesterday. Just as in the Sunday World reports last week and yesterday, no hard evidence was produced that substantiates what Ingram is contending. There was some innuendo and a lot of talk of circumstantial detail.
The questions were asked - as Ingram also asked when contacted by The Irish Times - how come Martin McGuinness was never convicted of serious offences in the North?
And touching on the macabre, how come the IRA in Belfast killed more than the IRA in McGuinness's Derry, and how come McGuinness survived the Troubles. How come the IRA in Derry was so infiltrated with spies?
Martin Ingram revels in what he has achieved so far. He has sown a seed of suspicion, while acknowledging he doesn't have any actual evidence to back his claim.
Unionists also delighted in McGuinness's and Sinn Féin's discomfort.
William McCrea of the DUP - whom McGuinness blames for what he says is a "dirty tricks" escapade - must be very pleased because, again without any proof and using parliamentary privilege, he publicly suggested last February that McGuinness was an agent.
The report also will be manna for dissident republicans who hate the peace process route charted by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. It must cause some confusion in the Provisional republican heartland.
It is useful here to examine what Ingram has brought forward to back his claims. It's a short transcript, which some insist is a fake, of a conversation between an apparent RUC Special Branch handler called "G" and an agent called "J118", whom Ingram without evidence, says is McGuinness.
It appears to have taken place around the time the IRA launched its "human-bomb" campaign of 1990, which most horrifically claimed the lives of Patsy Gillespie and five British soldiers at a Border army checkpoint outside Derry.
But that interpretation is not necessarily stood up by the transcript. Ingram's contention is that the purpose of the Special Branch allegedly encouraging the human-bomb campaign was to so tarnish the image of the IRA and Sinn Féin that they would be beyond every moral pale.
But is that credible? It would mean that British intelligence and RUC Special Branch were prepared to sacrifice innocent civilians and British soldiers for propaganda purposes.
Again with the spooks you wouldn't be surprised if you were surprised, but this would go even higher.
Ingram claims McGuinness was a spy going back to the 1970s. Such a purported high-ranking agent who allegedly was directing the IRA's operations would surely have been known to British prime ministers by his real or code name.
Wouldn't that mean that they were complicit in the slaughter of the IRA over three decades? And over that period we are talking about people such as Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson, John Major and Tony Blair.
Downing Street, British intelligence, the Taoiseach, and the most senior of PSNI officers all dismiss Ingram's allegations.
One senior London contact who knows his way around the corridors of politics and intelligence said: "If there was something in this, there would be alarm bells ringing. There aren't any alarm bells ringing."
Ingram, a former member of the British army's covert Force Research Unit, knows that because of his background many will distrust his bona fides.
A number of Sunday papers had his transcript, and his interpretation of it yesterday week, but only the Sunday World chose to name McGuinness - which tells of a general wariness even among some other tabloids about Ingram's reliability.
Ingram, notwithstanding his pseudonym and life in the shadows, is a real, personable and quite interesting person.
From an English working class background, he says he is married to a Donegal woman and they have two girls, both Irish speakers.
He divides his time between the Republic, Britain and the Continent.
When I spoke to him he was somewhere in Europe.
He says he is now a journalist and is also engaged in the "import-export" business, and is reasonably comfortably off.
He has his own website which, in relation to McGuinness, carries the heading, "Pissing on a Myth" - which probably illustrates the depth of his antagonism to McGuinness.
He says whatever about the sceptics he was correct about Scappaticci and will be proved correct about McGuinness.
"Maybe, it'll take a year, or two years, or three years, but I'll be proved right. This is a marathon, not a sprint."
For the Sinn Féin chief negotiator it's a distraction, but a serious one and by its nature difficult to categorically dismiss.
On Friday Gerry Adams said he believed the story was put out by some in British intelligence, possibly the old guard, so that McGuinness would be murdered.
It is indeed a serious business calling someone a tout.
McGuinness is holding to his line that the claims are a "load of hooey" and that he is "a million per cent certain" that nothing would or could be disclosed that would in any way substantiate what Ingram is alleging.
If the evidence isn't there, and it isn't so far - and McGuinness insists it can't emerge - then the story should fade away. Which is where this business of spooks and spies sits at the moment.