Last week anti-collusion campaign group An Fhirinne picketed Belfast's 'Opera in the Park' event in protest at the presence of a British army band. This proves conclusively that An Fhirinne is not just a Sinn Féin front – because Sinn Féin would never support anything that undermines parity of esteem, or implies a hierarchy of victims, or fails to treat all sides of the conflict equally and so on and so forth.
An Fhirinne now plans to build on the success of its Pavarotti-busting headline grabber with a conference next month entitled 'Youth For Truth', which will explain the issue of collusion to a younger audience. Let us hope it is a very young audience indeed – say, aged two and under – in case anyone asks about the biggest collusion scandal of them all, which strangely An Fhirinne never mentions. In fact with the honourable exception of British-Irish Rights Watch not one of the numerous anti-collusion campaign groups covering Northern Ireland has ever called for an investigation into the single most deadly case not only of collusion but of murder, period, throughout the Troubles. The case in question is that of the British army agent Stakeknife. The death toll is widely believed to number around 40 people – higher than that of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings combined.
The story itself broke only two years ago so it is hardly old news for those still searching for truths from two generations ago. Yet An Fhirinne seems blissfully unaware of the entire issue. It has even managed to run an awareness campaign on the specific subject of Stakeknife's handlers, the Force Research Unit, without once referring to the FRU's most deadly asset.
British-Irish Rights Watch says: "If the allegations about Stakeknife are true, then it would appear that British military intelligence and their masters MI5, had both the republicans and the loyalists seriously infiltrated and compromised."
Well, quite. What British-Irish Rights Watch may not realise is that republicans only view the infiltration of loyalism as collusion. The infiltration of republicanism they view as 'informing' – a distinction drawn on the assumption that the intelligence services share loyalism's goals. Yet all the evidence to emerge so far from the intelligence services themselves suggests that their long-term goals have always overlapped with and evolved alongside those of the Sinn Féin leadership.
As Stakeknife's role in the IRA was the identification of informers his case further blurs the line between collusion and informing. The facts, meanwhile, remain in sharp focus. For decades the state permitted a man to murder with impunity. His victims were committed republicans innocent of the charges against them. Doesn't anyone care about this? Doesn't Gerry care? Or does owning so many houses make it hard to keep track of all the internal housekeeping? You will also search in vain for much mention of Stakeknife from the unionist parties or their complaining proxies.
When Chief Constable Hugh Orde referred to Stakeknife in the Stevens Inquiry he was castigated by republican and unionist alike. Greg Harkin, the award-winning journalist who uncovered Stakeknife's identity, exposed an even stranger uniformity of purpose. Before publication he was subjected to months of legal harassment by the intelligence services. After publication he was subjected to months of sneering abuse by the republican press.
You have to respect the power of a story that can put Dublin's republican-minded Sunday Business Post on the same side as Britain's spook-supporting Defence Advisory Committee. Indeed you have to respect the power of any story from the Troubles that cannot be spun by either tribe to suit one narrow agenda. There are precious few such salutary tales. We all know that both sides got their hands dirty in the dirty war but we are all so skilled at unpicking the threads of each other's arguments that we lose sight of the larger tapestry. Where those green and orange threads will not unravel from each other, as in the case of Stakeknife, any group that claims to seek the truth for future generations should seize upon both ends – and those that will not must justify their selective approach to the past. Does 'An Fhirinne' mean 'the truth' or just that part of the truth which suits its politics?
Campaigning groups have a role to play when they are open about their role but beyond that they sow only further division. Too many organisations in Northern Ireland fail the Stakeknife test.
