Murky… the latest reports on the conflict…

It’s very difficult to know what to make of the following from last week.

According to The Irish News, classified documents stolen during a break in at Castlereagh RUC Station in March 2002 show the Ardoyne IRA leader at the time was a police informant who tipped off his handlers about the planned bombing on the Shankill Road on October 23rd, 1993
The IRA intended assassinating the leaders of the UDA who were meeting in a room above Frizzell’s Fish Shop but the bomb went off prematurely, killing eight civilians along with a member of the UDA as well as one of the two IRA members planting the bomb.
The individual is apparently still alive – though the IT reports that he was ‘stood down’ by the Army Council in 2002 after they discovered ‘ad been working as a double agent for almost a decade’.

As Martin McGuinness notes:

…it would be naive to think that in conflict situations such as The Troubles that state security agencies did not try to recruit informants from all sides of the conflict.

It doesn’t really look good for anyone. British state forces with foreknowledge of a potentially (and ultimately actually) devastating attack that involved huge loss of civilian life. The IRA infiltrated to the degree that said operation was able to be leaked. And the sense that this has been known more widely for some time now. Who leaked it and why now is another intriguing question.

Of course it may not be true – but as The Broken Elbow notes (and in doing so asks some very pertinent questions) here on this particular issue there are patterns of behaviours that were seen in the North.

It certainly points towards the reality – that many are aware of already, but curiously seems largely unrecognised in the public discourse – of state actions and interventions in the conflict that were at the very least deeply troubling.