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British soldiers confront republican protesters in Belfast in 1971.
British soldiers confront republican protesters in Belfast in 1971. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images
British soldiers confront republican protesters in Belfast in 1971. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

Troubles envoy warns of damage from row about prosecuting UK troops

This article is more than 7 years old

Denis Bradley says full disclosure of secret files will expose ex-informers and policing in Northern Ireland risks being polluted

Instructing the Police Service of Northern Ireland to investigate British soldiers over deaths during the Troubles risks “polluting” policing in the region, a former envoy between the IRA and the UK government has warned.

Denis Bradley, who later co-chaired the Consultative Group on the Past tasked with dealing with the Troubles’ legacy, also predicted that full disclosure of all intelligence files relating to the conflict would expose the identities of thousands of informers both inside the IRA and loyalist terror groups.

Bradley said the squabbling over any retrospective prosecutions of British soldiers, republicans or loyalists found guilty of past crimes was “intensifying the collective” trauma Northern Irish society in general continued to endure.

Denis Bradley co-chaired the Consultative Group on the Past. Photograph: Johnny Green/PA Images

The PSNI on Thursday denied it had plans to launch a fresh inquiry into killings carried out by British troops during the Troubles.

The force issued the statement after a front-page report in the Sun that said officers would reinvestigate all 302 killings carried out by British troops. The newspaper said at least 500 former servicemen, many now in their 60s and 70s, would be “viewed as suspects” during the process.

The PSNI is carrying out criminal inquiries into the actions of a number of British soldiers during the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972 when troops opened fire on an anti-interment rally in Derry, killing 13 civilians.

Arguments over what the British state is prepared to disclose from its intelligence archive have even impacted on Anglo-Irish relations.

For the first time in years Dublin has criticised what it perceives as London’s foot-dragging over disclosures relating to the Troubles.

The Fine Gael-led minority government said on Thursday it “deeply regretted” the lack of visible progress on establishing institutions to deal with the fallout from more than a quarter of a century of violence in Northern Ireland.

Bradley told the Guardian the “mess” over how to deal with the Troubles’ legacy was having a toxic impact on society.

The former priest, who was a vice-chairman of Northern Ireland’s Policing Board and acted as a go-between between IRA leaders and the UK government in the early 1990s, chaired the Consultative Group on the Past with a former head of the Church of Ireland, Archbishop Robin Eames.

On the PSNI’s role in Troubles inquiries, he said: “We are still throwing police in the middle of this mess. I think part of the reason we should have done the task 10 years ago was to get the police out of it. Instead this is contaminating the police and policing.”

“In addition, it’s costing an absolute fortune where we have £50m being spent one case alone, ie Stakeknife,” he said, referring to the investigation into Freddie Scappaticci, who infiltrated the IRA and became head of its spy-catching unit. “There are hundreds of others. Our aim in the group was to take inquiries over the Troubles out of the policing and judicial system but this is polluting both.”

Bradley also expressed concern about the fate of thousands of one-time informers if there was “full disclosure” of all sensitive Troubles-related security files.

“What Robin Eames and I found out in our investigations leading to the Consultative Group on the Past report was that at any given time there were at least 800 informers working within the ranks not only of the loyalist paramilitaries but also the IRA. Others have said that figure was closer to 1,000.

“If there was full disclosure of files you would be going around saying that your sons, daughters, friends were all informers. Full disclosure would mean that and our society needs that no more than a hole in the head. Do we want every name brought out there? I don’t think so. Maybe in a thematic sense there can be full disclosure but leaving individual names out of this, yes. It would be far worse than the actual reality.

“What you should not do is expose Joe Bloggs who might have been buried as a hero but was in fact an informant for the Brits. That is what would happen countless times. Republicans and nationalists used to believe that all the informers were on the loyalist side when in fact as we found out in having limited access to security file was it was nearly as big as on the republican side.”

Bradley added that an already traumatised society such as Northern Ireland was being further traumatised by the political disagreements over how to deal with its violent past.

“I honestly don’t know how the politicians and the two governments in London and Dublin are going to get around this mess but it keeps each other at our throats and maintains a low level of pain. It is intensifying the collective PTSD this society is suffering.”

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