The missing Irish chapter in intelligence history
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In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement promised the victims of the Troubles in Northern Ireland ‘a right to remember as well as to contribute to a changed society.’ Yet attempts to deal with the legacy of the conflict have been a political football for the best part of three decades since.
The 2014 Stormont House Agreement (SHU) provided for an independent body to complete outstanding investigations into deaths during the Troubles. That approach had broad support in Northern Ireland, a significant achievement in itself, but was abandoned by the British Government under pressure from Army veterans.
The Guardian and The Detail this week provided some insight into the working group which drew up alternative proposals, in what was, by comparison, a purely Whitehall process.
Members of the group, established in 2020, included the former Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) chief constable George Hamilton, and Madeleine Alessandri, who was the UK deputy national security adviser until 2020, before being appointed permanent secretary for the Northern Ireland Office. Another attender, Chloe Squires, was the director of national security at the Home Office at the time of the meeting. The rest of the attenders worked for, or had links to, the state, chiefly its policing and security apparatus.1
The result was the 2023 Legacy Act, which ended all Troubles-related civil claims and inquests, and offered conditional immunity to both former paramilitaries and members of the security forces. The Historical Investigations Unit envisaged under Stormont House was replaced by an Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR). Despite its name, the ICRIR was subject to ministeral control over its powers of disclosure, on national security grounds.
The Legacy Act faced a number of legal challenges, including one from the Irish Government in the European Court of Human Rights. In opposition, Keir Starmer pledged to repeal the legislation, and after his election in 2024, the British and Irish Governments agreed a bilateral way forward.
It hasn’t all been plain sailing, however. A review of the ICRIR published earlier this month found ‘significant problems resulting from a combination of the governing legislation which creates structural weaknesses, problems with the financial management and governance of the organisation and conflict among its senior leaders which is damaging the operation of the organisation and overall morale.’
This credibility issue is reportedly one reason why the government has conceded a free-standing public inquiry into one of the most controversial killings of the Troubles, the 1989 murder of solicitor Pat Finucane.
That single case was a major factor in the Inquiries Act 2005, which saw the Blair Government assume sweeping new national security powers over the conduct of public inquiries.
In 2011, the Finucane family attended a meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron which they expected to lead to an inquiry on negotiated terms. Human rights activist Jane Winter later gave a remarkable account of what followed.
Recalling the Prime Minister’s response, Ms Winter said: “Cameron went completely off script at that point and he said `look, the last administration couldn’t deliver an inquiry in your husband’s case [he was addressing himself to Geraldine Finucane] and neither can we.
“Because there are people all around this place, [10 Downing Street], who won’t let it happen.”2
Instead of the anticipated inquiry, Cameron ordered a review of the case by an eminent barrister, Sir Desmond De Silva QC. When De Silva’s report was published a year later, Cameron conceded that it showed ‘shocking levels of state collusion’ in the killing.
De Silva published a large number of previously secret documents, but he also made use of academic intelligence history in the form of Christopher Andrew’s official history of MI5, which informed his account of the Security Service’s involvement in Northern Ireland.
Official history has inherent limitations, and there are indications that the original manuscript of Andrew’s Defence of the Realm might have been of more assistance to De Silva than the published version.
Professor Richard Aldrich, whose work includes an unofficial history of GCHQ, touched on the difficulties in a 2019 interview with fellow intelligence historian Mark Pythian.
The thing I felt I couldn’t go near or was reluctant to go near when I was writing my book was Northern Ireland. I know the people who worked as the interface between Northern Ireland Special Branch and GCHQ, but I think there would have been immense legal problems and I think it would just have been too difficult. I know that there was a section of Chris Andrew’s history of MI5, that has also not been published because of legal difficulties and objections by the RUC Special Branch. What would I love to read if I could just go into the magical bookshop full of books that don’t exist? I would love to pull down a volume on the interface between GCHQ and the Troubles. (It sits on the mystical bookshelf there - right next to the book on what NSA learned by listening to Yasser Arafat’s phone calls for decades.) There is a great book to be written on the Troubles, but whether we will ever read it, I don’t know. There are clearly constituencies who don’t want that book to be written.3
Revelations about RUC Special Branch could no doubt prove embarrassing in many quarters, given the repercussions already caused by disclosures about its smaller rival, the Army’s Force Research Unit.
Some of the sources available to Professor Andrew may have been used, and even published, by De Silva. One passage in his report is particularly suggestive in this context.
In the mid-1980s, the Security Service received intelligence that an unnamed and potentially very senior RUC officer might be assisting loyalist paramilitaries to procure arms. I should note that this arms procurement appears to have been unsuccessful and was unrelated to the separate partially successful importation of arms by loyalists in late 1987/early 1988...
..The intelligence was insufficiently specific to establish the source of the leak and the investigation appears to have ultimately petered out. However, the subsequent flow and analysis of intelligence did tend to support the theory that a high-level RUC ‘contact’ was assisting loyalists. 4
Nevertheless, the missing section of Defence of the Realm could well be relevant to the Finucane Inquiry. Anything that touches on RUC agent-running and MI5 oversight is potentially significant in a case in which both the getaway driver and the man who provided the gun were Special Branch agents.
There is an equally strong case for the ICRIR to have sight of the unpublished material. After all, it is in principle the body charged with writing that unwritten book on the Troubles.
Cormac Kehoe and Haroon Siddique, UK security services helped devise act that gave amnesty over Troubles killings, The Guardian, 26 May 2026.
Cited in Barry McCaffrey, What Stopped a public inquiry into Finucane murder, The Detail, 12 December 2012.
Phythian, M. (2018). Profiles in intelligence: an interview with Professor Richard J. Aldrich. Intelligence and National Security, 33(7), 939–953. https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2018.1486272
Sir Desmond de Silva, Pat Finucane Review, Volume 1, p.257, December 2012.