On Monday night, Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese refugee hitherto of no importance, managed to rivet Belfast’s global future onto the conflicts of its past when he hacked at the head of Stephen Ogilvie, while a neighbor recorded on her mobile phone. Alodid can scarcely have known that his attack was taking place at The Troubles’ epicenter: in North Belfast’s Byzantine sectarian geography, Kinnaird Avenue sits in a ribbon of firmly Irish Republican territory connecting the Sinn Féin heartlands of the New Lodge and Ardoyne. Barely 400 meters away, guarded by walls and fences disguised as urban parks, sits the “interface” with Ulster Loyalism’s Haram al-Sharif, the Shankill. Duncairn Avenue, where Alodid lived, just round the corner from the attack, runs into the junction of the Antrim Road and the New Lodge Road, the most dangerous spot of all in Northern Ireland’s lengthy civil conflict. In the Seventies, the notorious Shankill Butchers gangs cruised these streets in the middle of the night, looking for Catholics walking home from parties, drunk, so they could kidnap them and take them back to the Shankill to torture them before murdering them.

When the Belfast Telegraph’s Suzanne Breen wrote an article reminding readers of that history, where violent knife attacks were entirely home grown, she was savaged by overseas online Right-wingers for arrant cuckery. But one cannot understand the pattern of this week’s events in Belfast — where, after a brutal assault by a Muslim immigrant in one of the city’s Republican strongholds, Republican neighborhoods remained quiet while Loyalist districts saw violent protests and a seemingly well-orchestrated campaign in which immigrant families were burned out — without understanding the city’s recent past, and how it has led the leaderships of each major community to interpret the growth of the city’s ethnic minority population differently.

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To what extent the leaders of Northern Ireland’s Nationalists can continue to take an almost entirely unfinessed pro-immigration line, and how the region’s small but rapidly growing ethnic minority communities will engage with its Nationalist and Unionist traditions, are two of the biggest imponderables in the region’s politics. Northern Ireland’s ethnic minority populations may be small, but as the demographic balance of the region’s indigenous groups sits on a knife-edge, and The Troubles refuse to recede entirely into the past, their views and contributions may be decisive to the region’s future. Indeed, the story of Kinnaird Avenue, the street where the attack took place, is itself revealing of Belfast’s inability to put The Troubles behind it. The street was only built in the 2010s, long after The Troubles ended in fits and starts in the mid-to-late Nineties, yet it is perceived as Republican territory.

It sits on part of the Girdwood army barracks site, a 20-minute stroll from the voguish downtown warehouse conversions of the Cathedral Quarter. When it was decommissioned in 2005, there was hope that it would provide desegregated housing and shared leisure facilities, acting as a bridge between the Loyalist Greater Shankill and Republican New Lodge areas — the beginning of the end of the Balkanization of North Belfast.

This hope was in vain. In the end, only 60 houses, less than a third of the planned number, were completed in this area of significant need. Scuppering the hope were two demographic issues that remain acute in post-Troubles North Belfast: Unionist decline and the paranoia this engenders, and the desperate housing shortage and overcrowding among Nationalists. Sectarian boundaries were fixed in the early Seventies, and while people from both communities were intimidated from areas where they were in the local minority, Catholics were the bigger losers. Gradually, mixed areas, often the better-off ones, tended to become predominantly Nationalist as Catholics who moved up the social scale in the wake of anti-discrimination laws sought out available local housing.

A second extensive round of mutual intimidation took place in the late Nineties, as Northern Ireland was supposedly welcoming the new peace. I remember vividly canvassing in North Belfast for the Alliance Party in the 1998 Assembly elections which immediately followed the Good Friday Agreement. On perhaps a dozen occasions I went to a house with names on the electoral register to find it had been abandoned in a hurry just weeks or even days previously, with children’s textbooks and toys lying scattered in the hall. Some were Nationalists who had long been living peacefully in Loyalist areas; some were Unionists who had long been living peacefully in Republican areas. Other people decided their presence was no longer welcome and the lives these mostly deeply apolitical people had built for themselves were destroyed. This didn’t happen in middle-class areas, only among the poor. By the 2010s, the North Belfast parliamentary seat was held by the Democratic Unionist Party, but only by a thin majority over Sinn Féin. The DUP reckoned that, given the imbalance in local social housing waiting lists, the lion’s share of the houses would go to Nationalists, so stalled on the development. Sinn Féin took the seat in 2019 anyway.

As far as Belfast natives went, the houses that were actually built on the New Lodge side of the site, including Kinnaird Avenue, were occupied by Nationalists, those on the Greater Shankill side by Unionists. Last May, when some Nationalist families moved into newly built houses on the Shankill side of the peace wall, having been duly allocated to them by Northern Ireland’s public housing authority, Loyalists attacked their homes with masonry and almost all fled. In the new Northern Ireland, though, some things have changed: the DUP condemned the attacks as resolutely as their Sinn Féin counterparts in their often-uncomfortable all-party power-sharing government. But Nationalists are still intermittently intimidated out of Loyalist areas, not just in North Belfast but across Northern Ireland — something almost entirely ignored outside the region.

So, it isn’t entirely surprising when Loyalists call for protests against migrants or immigration, that Nationalists, even if they are concerned about the rapid rise in immigration, or even if they are frank racists, are loath to join in. This is even more the case when the protests bear clear hallmarks of being organized by Loyalist paramilitaries. Northern Ireland’s police claim still to be assessing whether they were directly involved in this week’s events, but something of the fear they still engender can be seen in the way the notices calling for the protests, which commanded “all businesses to close” at a given time each day – “no excuses” — were almost universally obeyed, even by schools and museums.

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While some members of armed Loyalist groups duly laid down their arms and returned to normal life as part of the decommissioning process of the mid-2000s, others morphed into a sort of Ulster mafia, heavily involved in organized crime, and aware that as long as they refrain from targeting members of the Nationalist community in overtly political or sectarian attacks, they are likely to be treated with kid gloves by the authorities. Sudden, short-lived, outbreaks of rioting, enough to annoy but not enough to make residents of working-class Loyalist areas turn vociferously against them, have long been a means for them to flex their muscles. This is the third summer in a row when Northern Ireland has witnessed a sudden outbreak of intense racist intimidation, which disappears almost as soon as it arrives, and while Loyalist paramilitaries don’t seem to have started any of these outbreaks, they seem to have developed strategies for capitalizing on them rapidly.

Northern Ireland Nationalists are also acutely aware that the Right-wing British figures expressing concern after a barbaric attack by a Muslim asylum seeker in one of their neighborhoods are usually hostile to them, and rarely express any concern on the many occasions when the people attacking them are white Britons.

It is into this site of chronic long-term sectarian territorial conflict, with an unbroken habit of intimidating local minorities from their homes, that the level of immigration has increased, very obviously and very rapidly, since the mid-2010s, but especially since the pandemic. Similar things are seen all over Western Europe. But this isn’t all over Western Europe — Belfast is Ground Zero for the Troubles, its worst outbreak of violence in the past 80 years, a recent past that continues to define the present.

It isn’t historically unusual for civilizational ideological conflicts to be subsumed into long-standing local disputes in deeply divided societies — see what happened under Nazi occupation in Belgium, Yugoslavia, or the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands. The idea that Nationalists are on the Left and Unionists on the Right is already pretty deeply rooted in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin, so far, seems to be both ideologically committed to a pro-immigration stance and believes it will reap long-term rewards in a region where the balance of power between the two traditional ethno-sectarian blocs, neither of which is in a majority, is increasingly influenced by ethnic minorities and detribalized bourgeois liberals.

Yet survey data shows that Catholics are only marginally more supportive of immigration than Protestants in Northern Ireland. The potential for a backlash, then, within Northern Ireland Nationalism to the pro-migration approach of its leaders is very real. Similarly, if more incidents like this occur in Republican areas, I wouldn’t assume that attitudes to migrants there couldn’t sour rapidly, as they have among the working class in the Republic, and then some sort of anti-immigration force emerge to challenge the status quo in Nationalist politics. This could come in either or both of two forms: an electoral challenge or a challenge on the streets. As far as the latter goes, Aontú, a conservative splinter from Sinn Féin that is only moderately restrictionist on immigration, has never caught wind, especially in the North. But new political parties emerging from nowhere is a hallmark of the 2020s, and Northern Ireland has a big election year in 2027, a rare year when seats on local councils and the region’s Assembly are up for grabs at the same time. The evidence that a few Nationalists were indeed joining in with Loyalist-led protests, and others regarded them with less hostility than in the past, is a sign that some sort of street-based anti-immigrant movement might have legs; although, if it emerged, it would face considerable and perhaps physical opposition from the cluster of groups that are both leftwards of and more militant than Sinn Féin, already extant in Belfast’s Republican strongholds.

My hometown’s palimpsest has long contained story after story of people being put out of their homes because of their religion. Increasingly it is collecting stories of people being put out of their homes because of the color of their skin. Being burned out of your home just because of who you are is, sadly, as Belfast as it gets. As racial diversity increases and insecurity grows, this city of the frozen conflict is perhaps the continent’s least predictable and most combustible powder keg.

Not in 1971, when he was photographed in a black beret, marching in a guard of honour at the funeral of a Provisional IRA man. Not in 1972, when he was flown to London with Martin McGuinness and the IRA chief of staff Sean Mac Stíofáin for secret talks with the British government (Mac Stíofáin later categorised the delegation as “All IRA”). Not in 1987, when he was asked about the murder of Charles McIlmurray — a West Belfast taxi driver whose body had been found with a plastic bag over his face, his hands tied behind his back, and a gunshot wound to the head. He responded by saying on camera, almost indignantly: “Mr McIlmurray, like anyone living in West Belfast, knows that the consequence of informing is death.” Not in 1993, when he helped to carry the coffin of Thomas Begley, an IRA man who died when a bomb he was carrying prematurely exploded in a Shankill Road fish shop, killing 9 Protestants, including two children. And never in the Nineties, when both he and McGuinness were central to the drawn-out negotiations that ultimately led to the 1998 Belfast Agreement and the cessation of the IRA’s long campaign.

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By his own account, Adams himself was more of a loyal, if prominent, camp follower of the IRA, a reliable defender and justifier of the “armed struggle”, although not of everything it did. His fealty, however, ran deep: as he told the 2019 Ballymurphy Inquest, “I have never disassociated myself from the IRA, and I never will, until the day I die.” And, as he also informed the court in a Dublin libel action last year, “I have never resiled from my view that the IRA’s campaign, whatever about elements of it, was a legitimate response to military occupation.”

So, if he argues that he wasn’t an IRA member, what does he want or expect the public to believe he was? An intensely supportive yet occasionally questioning political co-traveller, it seems, who never joined the organisation yet nonetheless was involved in much of its most crucial decision-making over a period of more than 30 years.

Others have a very different story to tell. They include diehard but outspoken IRA men and women; British and Irish intelligence and security services and politicians; and journalists steeped in decades of reporting on the Troubles. Over the years, Adams’s continuing assertion that he had never joined the IRA began to rankle with a lot of people, including a number who had formerly been his close associates and freely admitted their own past membership. As time wore on, some former friends in the “republican movement” felt that Adams’s denial had become more than a pragmatic strategy to avoid arrest — the IRA was, and is, a proscribed organisation — and more of a long-term psychological and moral get-out clause. Some, such as his old Long Kesh comrade Brendan “The Dark” Hughes, felt Adams was managing somehow to distance himself from the blood and misery of the IRA’s long campaign, and from any direct responsibility for the suffering of its victims. Nor did Hughes favour the Good Friday Agreement, which he felt rendered the IRA’s campaign, and its heavy toll in human suffering, meaningless by settling for less than its original aim of a united Ireland.

Hughes himself had engineered the appalling “Bloody Friday”, 21 July 1972, when more than 20 IRA bombs went off simultaneously in Belfast, killing nine and injuring over 130 others. But when interviewed in later life by the former IRA man Anthony McIntyre, Hughes said that Adams, in a strategic role, “was the man who made the decisions”. Troubled by the long shadow of the conflict, Hughes died early, at 59. Of Adams’s IRA membership, he had said frustratedly, “Everybody knows it. The British know it. The people on the street know it. The dogs on the street know it. And he’s standing there denying it.”

*****

The dogs on the proverbial Belfast street, famously alert to politics as they are, are not habitually called upon to give evidence in British courtrooms. That task is left to others. Earlier this month, in Court 16 of the Royal Courts of Justice, Gerry Adams — by now the senior statesman of republican politics — sat on a court bench for hours, then days, as he calmly listened to barristers and witnesses debating his CV. Now and then he got up to stretch his back.

The space next to him was frequently occupied by his longstanding friend Richard McAuley, who was also a fellow prisoner in Long Kesh in the Seventies. McAuley has a long history in Sinn Féin public relations. Back in 1981, in his role as Provisional Sinn Féin press officer, he helpfully explained the rules of IRA “punishment” shootings of youthful miscreants to a curious New York Times reporter. “No one is kneecapped who is below the age of 16. If he is under 16, he might get a beating.” Most people, he said, were in fact shot in the thigh and not the knee: “They’re in the hospital for a day or two and they hobble around for a week after. It’s more the scare that’s effective than the injury itself. It’s awfully frightening to sit and watch a man pointing a gun at your leg. You have to be very bad to be shot in the knee, and if you are very, very bad you are shot in the kneecaps and elbows.” The Belfast orthopaedic surgeon quoted immediately after McAuley was not so sanguine about the level of long-term damage: he said that roughly 10% of such shootings resulted in amputations, and one-in-five victims would walk with a permanent limp.

Also in the courtroom, sitting on the long bench behind Adams, was Barry Laycock, 86, one of three claimants in this crowd-funded civil action brought against the former Sinn Féin leader. Laycock, a British Rail worker at the time, was injured when the IRA’s 1996 bomb in Manchester’s Arndale shopping centre blew him across the room. He has lived with constant pain ever since, which he dulls with morphine patches. His expression was stoically impassive, but his blue eyes watched proceedings intently. His co-claimants, John Clark and Jonathan Ganesh, were victims of the 1973 Old Bailey bombing and the 1996 Docklands bombing, respectively.

The three claimants sought to establish that Adams was not only a member of the IRA, but was instrumental in directing the bombing campaigns which had caused them lasting pain and distress. They were asking for “vindicatory” damages of just £1 each, but the real point of the exercise, Laycock explained, was that “I want to see justice in the end, and I want to see closure”. The witnesses on behalf of the claimants — testifying to Adams’s pivotal role within the IRA — included a former IRA letter-bomber, a former RUC special branch intelligence officer, a BBC investigative journalist, and a retired Army commander.

Some spoke from beyond the grave. At the end of the court sitting on Monday 16 March, Gerry Adams sat listening carefully, stroking his beard with a greater frequency than usual. The rasping, confiding voice filling the courtroom was that of the late Dolours Price, a former IRA member. Along with her sister, Marian, she had gained notoriety for her active role in a series of London bombings in 1973: as two good-looking young Belfast women, they had attracted unusual levels of publicity and opprobrium when put on trial, and had been force-fed during their hunger strike in jail. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph a year before her death at the age of 62, Price recounted how, in advance of the London campaign, Adams had attended a meeting in Leeson Street, Belfast, and warned those present: “This is a dangerous operation, but a big operation.” He had told those who did not wish to be involved that they could leave, she said. It was clear that Price still retained a certain pride in being one of the women who stayed, when so many men had left: “I said: ‘Hey, lads, don’t knock me down in the rush’. Swear to God, they ran out the door.”

On Wednesday, an immaculately besuited Adams took to the witness stand for his second day. The previous day, March 17, had been his first experience of cross-examination in an English court: he had taken the time to wish the judge, Justice Swift, “Happy St Patrick’s Day”. Throughout the questioning from Sir Max Hill KC, acting for the claimants, the former Sinn Féin leader’s manner was measured, if occasionally prickly, and impeccably evasive. Bespectacled and silver-bearded, dutifully scouring the court papers — with a recurrent difficulty in locating relevant detail that may or may not have had an intended effect of breaking up Hill’s flow — he had the puzzled yet attentive air of a retired sea captain invited to pore over a fusty log book.

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Over the decades, Adams has perfected a response when directly confronted with indignation over IRA killings. He regrets the suffering of all the victims of violence during the Troubles, he says, including those of the IRA. When particularly horrific cases of IRA murder are pointed out to him, he doesn’t hesitate to say that a particular act was “wrong”. Then he goes on to talk with practised certainty and cadence about civil rights and British occupation and armed struggle and the republican movement. He proclaimed himself “stunned” by the 1996 IRA Docklands bomb.

Alongside such lulling assurances, he doggedly continues to celebrate IRA members who committed sectarian horrors against their fellow Northern Irish men and women. On his X/Twitter account, where he now describes himself as an “Optimistic and Hopeful Activist”, Adams recently retweeted a commemoration for Brendan “Bik” McFarlane, remembered “with pride”. The president of Sinn Féin, Mary Lou McDonald, staunchly echoed the sentiment, saying of the late IRA man that he “dedicated his life to the pursuit of freedom, unity, peace and equality…it was a life well lived.” McFarlane, as the 24-year-old leader of a three-man unit of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, was the driver for a 1975 IRA gun and bomb attack on the Bayardo Bar in the Protestant Shankill Road. In it, five people were killed, and 31 injured. One, a 17-year-old girl called Linda Boyle, was pulled out of the rubble. She took a week to die of her injuries. Her younger sister Anne, who was 15 when Linda died, said last year, “Me and Linda shared a bedroom together. I remember the exact clothes she wore that morning going to work. It never goes away.”

It is this frequent clash between an official republican narrative and victims’ reality that leads many Northern Ireland Protestants to mistrust Adams in particular and Sinn Féin in general, along with their own future position in any united Ireland where the party plays a leading role. They know that — behind Sinn Féin’s palatable talk of inclusivity — if it ever faces a choice between mythologising IRA members and acknowledging the human misery that they caused, the former will win out. This has its dark mirror in the Loyalist paramilitaries and their grotesque commemorations for the sectarian killers of Catholic civilians: these organisations, too, publicly confirm their existence by riding roughshod over the pain of the bereaved. But the political traction of Sinn Féin, and therefore its domination of the narrative across Ireland and beyond, is far greater. It is now the biggest single party in Northern Ireland, and the second largest party in the Republic of Ireland.

There was one moment, on his second day of giving evidence, when the net did seem to tighten somewhat around Adams’s IRA membership. It related to Adams’s authorship of the “Brownie” columns in the Seventies, which were written under a pseudonym from inside Long Kesh and published in Republican News. He admitted that he had written some of them, but not all. In one, entitled “Double Talk”, published in May 1976, the author said outright, “Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA volunteer”. That particular one, Adams said, was in fact written by Richard McAuley. But the column spoke of the author’s wife and young son, said Hill, and at that point McAuley had neither — yet it accurately described Adams’s own family set-up. And the last “Brownie” article, published five days after Adams was released from Long Kesh in 1977, once again referenced his wife and child, and their reunion.

Throughout the trial, Adams had produced some form of answer, most often that anyone who said he was in the IRA had a political axe to grind. But on “Brownie”, he seemed temporarily to have run out of arguments: the column, and its contents, has dogged him for decades. Only The Irish Times, which reported the case in some detail, gave the exchange its proper weight. But then, two days later, all the carefully accumulated evidence fell away, because the case collapsed. The judge raised the issue of “abuse of process” — in which a case brought for one reason appears to be a proxy for another — and with it the prospect that the claimants might become liable for Adams’s legal fees, something they had previously been assured would not happen. Suddenly facing the possibility of terrifying personal bills, the claimants felt compelled to discontinue their case with no order as to costs. Barry Laycock, who had hoped for closure, said he was “completely devastated”.

Although the case has succeeded in airing an argument, its conclusion on Adams now remains legally undetermined. Many in the public at large, and perhaps the British establishment, are content to let it stay that way. The appetite for news on Northern Ireland and its sorrowful histories has sharply waned in England. In Ireland, in recent years, Sinn Féin has been retrospectively refashioning the chief impetus for the IRA’s campaign from an “armed struggle” for a united Ireland into one for Catholic civil rights (an argument most neatly, if fiercely, skewered by the late dissident republican Kevin Hannaway, Adams’s cousin and a former IRA man, who was quoted in 2019 saying: “If they were out for an Irish Republic, they failed. If they were out for civil rights, they got it in 1973. So what the fucking hell was the other 30 years of war for?”).

The veteran BBC journalist John Ware, explaining why he was giving evidence for the claimants, said quietly, “as journalists you have an obligation to prevent falsehoods of this magnitude from becoming settled in history… I’m interested in objective truth.” While Adams had indeed played a key role in bringing about an IRA ceasefire, he said, the “rather important missing bit” was the part he had played in the conflict.

Yet, internationally, objective truth is at present having a particularly rocky time. In the multiple fragmented perspectives thrown up by online media, there’s increasingly only “your truth” and “my truth” rather than “the truth”. For many people, facts are a shrinking source of interest: they want stories instead. It’s a cultural shift that has found its ultimate political expression in Donald Trump, and his constant generation of unreliable assertions. Adams was, in many ways, ahead of his time in realising that if you only expound a line doggedly enough, the public memory of what actually happened fades and blurs — apart from for those most directly affected — to be replaced by a narrative of choice. And Sinn Féin’s narrative, in which Provisional IRA freedom fighters reluctantly but bravely took up arms in Northern Ireland primarily to claim their civil rights from the “Orange State”, is one that strongly appeals to many younger voters — so long as the bereaved and the body parts can be successfully kept in the background. The party has been bolstering its position with a high volume of legal actions against journalists, at times raising concerns among press freedom organisations.

At one point during the case, Adams seemed to step back and take a more detached view. Watching proceedings, he said, “I listened to what I thought was old men squabbling over a war that’s over.” Somewhat disarmingly, he included himself, now 77, among that number. But the impression of spent forces is disingenuous. The IRA’s war might indeed be over, but Sinn Féin’s battle for Ireland and control of its narratives is very much alive. And the party is keeping firmly in mind a lesson drawn from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

In Australian indigenous societies, there remains a taboo against broadcasting footage of the dead. There are specific cultural reasons for this, but it also points to wider moral concerns. You only need to glance at celebrity, or pornography, or social media, to realise something monstrous happens when people are reduced to images, and that the Native Americans who reputedly believed cameras stole portions of the soul may have been aware of something we weren’t. Except, of course, it’s not necessarily the camera that is to blame, but rather those who profit from the images — who are rarely the subjects themselves.

This mistrust reaches its apotheosis in the disillusioned war photographer, who wrestles with the ethics of what they’re showing the world and why; those who see horror repackaged for public consumption until platitudes about “raising awareness” or “bearing witness” erode, leaving only troubling unanswerable questions of exploitation, voyeurism and theft.

Adapted from Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning book, Say Nothing is the latest dramatic recreation of the Northern Irish Troubles. Both book and show are centred around the abduction of Jean McConville, kidnapped and murdered by the IRA in 1972, after spuriously being accused of being an informer. Yet if the snatching itself, poignant and chilling, haunts the series from early on, it’s the voiceover that really grasps the programme’s ethos. “The thing about Irish people,” says a female voice, “we’ve been arguing over the same shite for 800 years.” It’s a cliché so squalid, so reductive of a 850-year-long colonial nightmare squeezed into a mere domestic squabble, that it perfectly encapsulates Say Nothing’s flaws.

Alienation is key. If you can make an individual, or a people, seem alien, savage, other, you can do all manner of things to them. This was a cornerstone of imperial policy and Northern Ireland, being one of its final remnants, is no exception. Catholics bore the brunt of “our wee apartheid state” as a character notes, and the resulting conflict affected every aspect of life. There are innumerable tales worth telling therein, and many voices who have longed to be heard. Say Nothing, despite appearances, is not one of those stories. It’s certainly about that place and those people but it’s immediately evident the camera’s eye is doing something else.

At its heart, in fact, this is a series very much like the Native American’s conception of the camera: it turns people into tropes, stealing their souls for entertainment and cash. Not, of course, that Say Nothing is alone here. On the contrary, the programme’s failures speak to a far wider malaise. We’re so wrapped up in contemporary worries, in our own way of seeing the universe, that we find it increasingly hard to burrow into the minds of others. So much that is claimed as “empathetic”, the boom in literary autofiction for instance, is indistinguishable from navel-gazing. So much political grandstanding is for our personal status, projected within our tribes, that when we do venture out into that vast wilderness called history, it’s all too easy for true crime to focus on perpetrators, on those strange men and women with a willingness to hurt. It doesn’t matter if the depictions condone or condemn. It’s theatre, provided you’re watching from the luxury of a safe distance. If these stories are engaging, they also do the courage and suffering of victims, who may be quiet and stoical, an unforgivable disservice.

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Say Nothing dovetails the McConville saga with the story of one of her killers: Dolours Price. It follows the girl’s move towards the “armed struggle” with the attack on the civil rights march at Burntollet Bridge, which did a fine job of proving JFK’s dictum that those “who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. It’s well-portrayed in Say Nothing, tense and gut-wrenchingly unfair; such instances (to say nothing of internment without trial or the mass murder of protesters during Bloody Sunday and the Ballymurphy Massacre) were crucial steps in the radicalisation of a young generation.

Certain qualities ring true: the glamour of working-class Northern Irish women is recognisable, as is the perpetual appealing, if exhausting, banter of the place. The brutality of nocturnal home invasions, courtesy of the police and army, is painfully accurate and atmospheric. As are the chase scenes, the inner-city bleakness, the casual torture sessions. The general dystopian feel is both true and an indictment of the successive Labour and Tory governments who imposed it upon their own citizens. But if the programme’s portrayal of grubby terraces and casual violence is plausible, the script slips almost instantly into heavy-handed schlock. After being assaulted by Unionist thugs at Burntollet, Dolours returns home to her parents. But rather than fear for their daughter, they instead launch into a facile political tirade. “Girls,” they ask, “why did you not fight back?”

The historically empty-headed opening line, in short, is how Say Nothing means to go on, with the whole programme suffused with a thick grime of anachronism. Just consider Dolours herself, gifted with pseudo-feminist slay queen moments totally implausible in the brutal and sexist Ulster of the Seventies. As befits the patronising orthodoxies of our time, she outwits uncouth lunkheaded men at every turn, every inch the IRA girl boss. When she’s finally accepted, it’s with the same dynamics as a coach spotting a wayward brilliant kid. As Dolours herself puts it: “We wanted to be doing what the boys were doing.”

And if that says something about Price herself, who was doubtless naïve in her early days as a paramilitary, it surely reveals much more about our infantilised platitudes about the past. The projection of one world onto the other results in a grotesque misalignment: follow your dreams, Say Nothing seems to suggest, and someday you too may lead someone to an unmarked grave or blow off the limbs of innocents.

In a sense, that gentle reflection of a bloodstained reality is both Say Nothing’s blessing and its curse. The cinematography, the music, the acting, the accents — it’s all gripping, rich, entertaining. And that’s precisely the problem. The medium is the message, and all the intricacies of the Troubles are condensed and transformed to attract and sustain a Disney+ streaming audience.

While Price is framed less as Countess Markievicz and more as rifle-wielding Mary Sue, the show is also careful to include something for fans of romance. Brendan “The Dark” Hughes, a leading IRA member and one of the architects of the Bloody Friday atrocity, is introduced in a gasp-inducing, fan-fluttering glimpse you’d expect of Mr Darcy — albeit in a Belfast riot not a ballroom. There are enough flirtations and sexual tensions here to hoover up Sally Rooney fans, as is obviously the point. Similarly, while it never descends to McDonagh-levels of paddywhackery, Say Nothing occasionally flirts with it — their greenhorn version of the once very real Kevin McKee, the early depictions of Dolours as a red-headed colleen in her Aran sweater handing out civil rights leaflets, the bank robbery dressed in nuns’ habits. The fact that “the nun with the gun” image was foregrounded and dominated the publicity around the series (alongside much more menacing images of women in balaclavas) shows how the North is viewed from outside and what it’s allowed to be. The primary Stage Irish modes have always been farce or wakes, buffoonery (hence the laboured “humanising” stories here of pet dogs and spud guns) or abject morbidity. That’s your choice. There’s little of the vast shifting territory in-between, where Northern Irish people exist most of the time, even during the Troubles. What a delight, though, to know that the Troubles were sexy after all.

Despite being viscerally nonfiction, with many characters still alive and the wounds still raw, everyone in Say Nothing is reduced to a kind of sanitised fiction. This is not Emily In Par-amilitaries, exactly, but feels far less distant than it should. That’s especially true when you factor in the programme’s tone. At times, Say Nothing felt uncomfortably like an adult Derry Girls. And while that show could slip movingly from comedy into pathos, it’s much harder to move the opposite way, and the scenes played for laughs feel cheap and jarring. At one point, Dolours is asked how much explosive she’s carrying. “Not much,” she quips. “About a car bomb’s worth.”

Then there’s what Say Nothing doesn’t mention. Of course, it’s impossible to cover everything in a conflict as complex as the Troubles. Yet there are so many moments, of human drama, that are treated as mere exposition dumps or ignored entirely: Bloody Sunday is one obvious example. Even worse is how so many pivotal figures — McGuinness and Thatcher, Stakeknife and Sands — are largely conspicuous by their absence. The British authorities are presented as stiff-upper-lip parodies, with only cursory suggestions of personality or family life. The irony is had they been presented in a more humanised and less automaton form, their use of state terror and coercion would have been all the more disturbing. Their gradual vanishing from the story is telling, however, especially given the immense power and damage MI5/Special Branch increasingly wielded over the Republican movement (and how little they protected their sources), a significant factor in the push towards the peace process.

MI5’s infiltration of the upper echelons of Sinn Fein has long been a rumour on Belfast and Derry streets but remains suspiciously taboo in the media. It calls into question the intentions of the original author, an ex-Pentagon staffer and thus no stranger to the security and intelligence services. This issue should be at the heart of this story — it’s one of the chief reasons there’s no truth and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland, given the shared secrets of this dirty war. More relevantly for Say Nothing, it has had a knock-on effect leading to the seizure of the Boston Tapes (a central plot device in the series) and the resulting chilling on any journalist seeking to uncover the bitter truths of the conflict and risking ruin in the process.

Say Nothing is eager to humanise people like Price, with Dolours given ample space to self-pityingly regret her violent life. And yet there’s one key person whose voice we never truly hear: Jean McConville. “You can say anything, Dolours,” the protagonist is told, and largely she gets to. But who was that other woman, that mother, the one treated like a largely wordless widow? What was her past, her dreams? We scarcely find out, probably because they assumed they wouldn’t have been entertaining to hear, even if quietly raising 10 kids in a Belfast tower block is the very definition of feminist heroism.

It hardly helps, of course, that McConville’s relatives have been so thoughtlessly treated by the show. The programme may claim it cares about ethics: “There’s a responsibility. I think that’s the price of admission, the price of trespassing into someone else’s world, be that an American writing about people in Belfast or a guy writing about young women. You have to get it right,” Radden Keefe said. “You have to earn the right to tell that story.” However the dead woman’s son-in-law says Disney never bothered contacting the family. The abduction scene, Seamus McKendry, argues, was “poorly portrayed…it should have shown the full horror of what happened. It didn’t and it left you to guess what had happened.” Michael McConville, Jean’s son, agrees. He refuses to accept the idea that it can be played as entertainment. “The portrayal of the execution and secret burial of my mother is horrendous,” Michael has stated, “and unless you have lived through it, you will never understand just how cruel it is.”

While McConville’s children are depicted in the series, they’ve been shockingly simplified to confirm the programme’s preconceptions. First, they’re portrayed as Rockwellian scamps. Then, in later life, they’re depicted as broken mourners. Both are one-dimensional caricatures, and the camera is careful to forget them during the troubled years they survived in care. To put it differently, then, the McConvilles are denied individuality and depth, reduced instead to passive bystanders in their own lives. They are emphatically, defiantly not, but watch Say Nothing and you come away with the sense that the only characters with any real identity are Dolours Price and the other killers.

It might be tempting, at this point, to look for someone to blame: the writers or producers or even Radden Keefe himself. The truth, though, is that Say Nothing is simply a symptom of a sickness in our culture. We, the audience, are complicit too. Over recent years, there’s been a pushback against the traditional “sexy dead woman on a mortuary slab” style of crime drama: think Twin Peaks or The Fall. In their place have come superlative works such as The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, books that nobly seek to restore the dignity and voices of female murder victims.

Yet these, in turn, are increasingly overshadowed by a new boom: of “true crime”, in podcasts and literature. A number of them (Dark Downeast, In the Dark, The Red Note, Bone Valley, Hands Off My Podcast: True Crime etc) have been commended for being appropriately weighty, victim-centred and justice-seeking. They remain exceptions, and even many of the superior true crime podcasts over-use suspenseful soundtracks and gothically overwrought retellings, all the tricks of fiction essentially undermining their moral force. Others, such as My Favourite Murder and Crime Junkie, seem to wallow in the salacious, speaking of terrible things in seemingly frivolous tones and operating merch stores on the side. Instead, they do us a favour by revealing that deep down, the primary function of the true crime industry is not empathy with victims. True crime’s obsession with compassion is a self-flattering falsehood, born of cynicism and therapy-speak. Nor is this surprising. The true crime industry, after all, is just that: an industry.

At the same time, it’s one focused on the intoxicating idea of trespass, of illicitly examining the psyche of murderers. That’s clear when you consider the attention given to perpetrators, their beliefs and motivations, compared with those of victims. Similarly, the Price sisters and Brendan Hughes are given plentiful space to express themselves and justify their crimes. They could have scarcely imagined this would one day be broadcast for public pleasure.

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And what of the victims? They’re treated as nobodies, as mere ciphers in favour of murky and charismatic criminals. That unnatural distancing was needed to turn their trauma into entertainment for us, in the same way we watch horror films  for comfort. As the harrowing story of the McConville children so vividly shows, this approach nonetheless leaves behind the wreckage of trauma, soon conveniently forgotten.

There are, to be fair, more sensitive paths to tread. If, after all, a writer acknowledges that there’s an inevitable parasitic and sensationalist element to non-fiction, and refuses to fool themselves that they’re empaths burdened with haloes, they may be able to mitigate its worst effects. More to the point, there are documentary filmmakers who consult those involved, cultivate ethical relations with those who are in the know, and crucially listen, a fraught process but a necessary one to even begin conveying the truth and avoid retraumatising generations. Without this, empathy is a pretext, even an alibi, carelessness wrapped in the language of care. What is really happening is that sordid crimes are being made palatable and commercial.

In that sense, at least, Say Nothing succeeds in portraying the Troubles as they actually occurred. The truth, unstated by the show and by Northern Irish society at large, is that the Good Friday Agreement was facilitated by ignoring victims and their families. They paid the price for our peace, with killers released early or heralded as peacemakers, the atrocities of all parties filed away and forgotten. And now, all that’s left is entertainment. “It’s just a lot of theatre,” the Gerry Adams character agrees: except for those who do not have the luxury of being casual spectators. Say Nothing says many things, the most important of which it says despite itself. The moment for us to address these questions, these cruelties, has long since passed — if not the suffering. Until we face these difficult questions and realities, we will always be vulnerable to the soul-stealing that follows.

The dispute highlights the extraordinary revival of Irish underway in Northern Ireland, and the country’s divided politics, still overshadowed by its frozen ethnic conflict — both brought to international attention by the new, heavily Irish-language Kneecap film. At his office in West Belfast’s Nationalist Falls Road, An Dream Dearg’s Pádraig Ó Tiarnaigh tells me that after the Troubles, “the Irish language became intertwined with that sense of identity of what people feel to connect them to this place, to their heritage, to that sort of indigenous aspect of language and land”. Yet despite Westminster’s 2022 approval of the landmark Identity and Language Act, he says, “the status quo here is monolingual. It is English only, and by definition, the Irish language is excluded”. Activists face “huge political opposition from the DUP and others not to give any sort of equivalence or legitimacy in public life or in official government legislation to the Irish language”.

Since the passing of the Language Act, Irish has become increasingly part of the country’s public life. On Belfast’s East-West Glider metro system, buses heading to mostly Nationalist West Belfast announce their destinations in both Irish and English; those heading to mostly Unionist East Belfast pointedly do not. Living in a leafy Catholic area, I am surrounded by the Irish language: our street signs are bilingual, and Sinn Féin-branded Go Mall (“go slow”) signs are prominently affixed to trees.

A few weeks ago, our middle child started at an Irish-language nursery, one of more than 50,000 children across the island currently educated in Gaeilge (or in Ulster Irish, Gaeilg); when our youngest child was born, we chose a dual-language birth certificate. In our case, these choices were made for essentially apolitical, even romantic reasons: both my maternal grandparents were native Irish speakers, as were my wife’s family a generation earlier, and we want to undo the recent loss of our ancestral language. But within the context of Northern Irish society, the choice to adopt it is often viewed as an overtly political act, both by its supporters and its detractors.

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For Ian McLaughlin, a DUP councillor representing the staunchly Loyalist Shankill area, dominated by paramilitary groups, Irish has become a weapon wielded by the Nationalist community against a politically divided Unionist constituency that is now, in Belfast, a minority. The greatest controversy is over Irish-language signage in “interface areas” — streets where Catholic and Protestant communities abut each other, and where Irish-language signage is routinely defaced. For some, like the Catholic writer Malachi O’Doherty, the presence or absence of Irish street signs may unintentionally function as the equivalent of the paramilitary murals and flags that still mark the transition from one area to another, heightening sectarian divisions.

“I think in many ways, it reflects a change in demographics in this area. That’s fine, but it also is taken by very many people within the Unionist community as Republicanism baring its teeth to show that they have more control in this city,” McLaughlin told me. “In many, many streets and areas, the change in signage was not asked for by the residents. It was asked for by Sinn Féin or other Nationalists and their public and political representatives. So there’s a whole issue in there about the democracy behind this.”

“If we’re promoting our identity, they might feel that it’s stepping on top of their identity, but instead of fighting against ours, perhaps they should shout for their own identity,” Ferdia Carson, an activist in North Belfast told me, as live traditional music wafted from the bustling Irish-language Caifé Ceoil below us. “Really like, if you want to be British, my Irishness won’t erode you. Personally, I have no interest in politics… We just promote and are looking for Irish-language rights as an Irish speaker, as a gaeilgeoir… So I’m called Ferdia Carson. So who founded Unionism? Edward Carson… He was a prominent Irish speaker and a prominent hurler, so if I was to meet him today, I’d speak Irish and I’d play hurling with him, even from completely different ends of the spectrum. When did this happen? When did Sinn Féin own Irish? And why can Protestants not take ownership of it?”

Indeed, many Protestants, as the Irish-language historian Ian Malcolm observes, descend from Irish speakers, with both the Presbyterian and Church of Ireland communities possessing strong, if now de-emphasised, traditions of Irish-language worship. As spoken Irish collapsed across the island during the 19th century, due to the Famine and the promotion of English in schools and church, Protestant antiquarians and activists helped ensure both the language’s survival and then its cultural revival. But the Gaelic League’s drift towards Irish revolutionary nationalism, and the shock of partition following the Irish War of Independence, saw the previously neutral language viewed with new disfavour by Ulster Protestants. The days when the burghers of Belfast could welcome Queen Victoria beneath huge Irish-language banners, or the Gaelic League could count the Grand Master of Belfast’s Orange Lodge as a member, were over. Under the new country’s Stormont government, official attitudes towards Irish oscillated between neglect and active discouragement, with Northern Ireland’s remaining rural Gaeltachts allowed to wither and die.

During the Troubles, Sinn Féin’s active promotion of Irish in furthering the Republican cause, like the “Jailtacht” of Republican prisoners learning it in the Maze, simultaneously sparked its present-day revival in Northern Ireland while heightening Protestant perceptions of its politicisation. “The Irish language is a divisive thing in this city,” DUP councillor Sarah Bunting told me. “It has been used, it’s been politicised by Sinn Féin in the past. That quote that’s used to us as Unionist politicians, quite often, is that every word spoken in Irish is a bullet fired in the fight for a united Ireland… People still remember it being used against them through the Troubles. It’s not a fear of the language, it’s hurt that has been caused by people who have used the language in the past.”

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As a result of the Troubles, “the Irish language developed even more negative connotations for people from the Protestant Unionist background, and I suppose that has intensified as they’ve seen the Irish language become much more visible”, Malcolm told me. “Personally, I’m from a Unionist background, Protestant. I wouldn’t describe myself as Loyalist, but I’d certainly be Unionist. And I regard the Irish language very, very much as my language.” As Malcolm observes, with Northern Ireland emerging from the conflict’s shadow, his stance is becoming increasingly common: “When I started teaching about 12 years ago, the vast majority of students in my classes would have been from a Catholic, Nationalist background. Now I would say the majority would be from a Protestant Unionist background. So, I think that shows the direction of travel, that animosity and hostility towards the language is diminishing.”

In East Belfast’s Turas cultural centre, on a street surrounded by UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) murals and gentrifying new businesses, Irish-language activist Linda Ervine is trying to change local perceptions. “What we didn’t want to do was set up the Protestant version of the Irish language, we weren’t interested in that,” Ervine told me. “We just wanted to take our place within the Irish-language community, and the interest over the years has just grown and grown and grown.” Yet her plans this term to expand her thriving Irish-language nursery into a primary school or naíscoil in the heart of East Belfast were hampered by local discontent, with hundreds of “concerned residents” attending a meeting organised by Loyalist activists to express their opposition. “They had a public meeting, full of misrepresentation and out-and-out lies,” Ervine told me, “you know, if our children were doing PE they’d all be doing GAA, and before you’d know it, they’d be taking part in the Bobby Sands Cup. You know, madness. But our Facebook is open, our Twitter is open, and if you’d gone on last May you’d have seen our children with all their wee crowns celebrating the King’s coronation. So that’s the dangerous individuals we are.”

For Ervine, rather than a marker of apartness from Britain, the Irish language, like its daughter languages Manx and Scottish Gaelic, serves as a reminder of the intertwined cultural history of the British Isles, dating far beyond the Irish nationalist struggle to reject Westminster’s rule: “What it says to us is that we’re a group of islands and we have these familial ties to each other, and that’s something that we want to build on.” Ervine looks at the relatively uncomplicated bilingualism of official signage in Wales and the Scottish Highlands with something approaching envy. “If we think about ourselves being British citizens, and compare ourselves to the way minority languages are treated in other parts of the UK, there is visibility, there is signage, and of course, we have the right to do that, but unfortunately, the way it’s played out in the media, the way it’s seen then as something irrational and unreasonable, makes my job more difficult.”

As with so many things in Northern Ireland, the country’s troubled history makes alignment with mainland British norms harder. “It’s not valid to see the language as representative of Republicanism or only belonging to Republicanism, because it doesn’t… Should I, as a Protestant, be denied the opportunity to speak Irish, learn Irish, because of something that you see as a wrong in the past? No, that’s just madness.”

It is an undeniable fact that the revival of the Irish language in present-day Northern Ireland derives from the Nationalist and Republican movement, spawning a West Belfast Gaeltacht and a booming ecosystem of Irish-medium schools and cultural centres. Indeed, in some ways Northern Ireland’s heavily charged political atmosphere around Irish, like a time-delayed Gaelic Revival, means the language may be in a healthier state than in the Republic, where it is a compulsory school subject loathed by many. Yet the association with the Republican and Nationalist tradition also presents difficulties for Protestant Gaeilge activists and aspiring learners, forcing them into a position of defensiveness within their own community. “The only people I feel denying me my rights,” Linda Ervine said, “denying these parents their rights to have integrated Irish-medium education for their children, are other Protestants.”

“The Irish language is political, we can say anything is political, anything that has a cause can be defined as political,” Ó Tiarnaigh replied when I asked him whether Nationalist activists should de-emphasise the political aspects of their movement in pursuit of the language’s wider spread. “If you apply the exact same logic to the English language, which inevitably has been the language of conquest and Empire right across the world for centuries, would you say that the English language is a political language?”

In his classic text on ethnic conflict, the political scientist Donald L. Horowitz characterised ethnically divided societies as ones where “rather than merely setting the framework for politics, [group relations] become the recurring subjects of politics” as “conflicts over needs and interests are subordinated to conflicts over group status… and the symbolic sector of politics looms large.” Just like the post-BLM debate over imperial statuary in mainland Britain, demographic anxieties are subsumed in debates over the symbolic realm, in the Northern Irish context focussing on Irish-language signage.

The frozen ethnic conflict, and Northern Ireland’s tenuous position within the United Kingdom, simultaneously preserve strong attachments to cultural identity enviable to mainland eyes, yet also distort the country’s political life into essentially unresolvable tussles over symbolism and public representation. It is ironic that the Loyalist battle to preserve Ulster’s Britishness sets Northern Ireland apart from the easy bilingualism of Wales and Scotland, further embedding the country in an Irish historical and political context. Yet it is also ironic that the legacy of Nationalist and Republican Irish-language activism may hinder its broader acceptance, perhaps to the detriment of the language’s survival. As Nationalist and Loyalist activists wage a symbolic war with each other over the expansion of Irish into the public sphere, it’s hard not to empathise with Protestant Irish activists stuck in the middle, trying to promote the language itself while defanging it of its 20th century political associations.

“I believe the Irish language belongs to everybody, I’ve embraced it, I love it, it’s part of my DNA,” Malcolm told me. “And to be honest, it’s in the DNA of pretty much everybody who was born in Northern Ireland. The problem is that many people don’t realise that, but I think we need to de-escalate rather than escalate.” Yet in Northern Ireland history still looms like an oppressive cloud. Without its political conflict, there would be no revival of Irish in Northern Ireland; yet the politicisation that brought the language back from extinction still makes something as innocuous as street signs a symbolic battleground.

Last week, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) released its long-awaited report from Operation Kenova, a seven-year criminal investigation costing £38 million, into the activities of a British Army agent known in the media as “Stakeknife”. Rumours about this agent first surfaced at around the time of the Good Friday Agreement, in 1998. Stakeknife was said to be Freddie Scappaticci, a bricklayer from Belfast who was recruited by the army in the late Seventies. It was claimed that his intelligence had saved “countless” lives, even if it came at a terrible price.

The chilling allegation against Freddie Scappaticci was that during his time as an army agent he became a senior figure in the IRA’s infamous “Nutting Squad” (to “nut”, in Northern Ireland, is to shoot someone in the head). Part of Scappaticci’s job had been to find spies in the IRA and interrogate them, in other words hunting down people like him. If the Nutting Squad extracted a confession from a suspected agent, a recording was sent to the IRA Army Council where the likes of Martin McGuinness would decide if the victim was to live or die. Usually, Scappaticci recalled, the order that came back was: “take him out and give him it”. Newspaper reports suggested that Scappaticci might have been involved in as many as 50 murders. In itself, this was shocking. Far more disturbing was the idea that his army handlers knew about this and may have been complicit.

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Operation Kenova was set up in 2016 to investigate the claims about Scappaticci and, if true, build a criminal case against him and his handlers. It was hoped that this would provide justice for the families of those who had been abducted and murdered by the Nutting Squad. Over the next seven years, a team of 72 detectives conducted 336 interviews, and went through more than 12,000 classified records from the archives of the local police, the army and MI5, in what will ultimately go down as the largest murder investigation in British history. But it led to no criminal prosecutions. That’s mainly because its principal target, Freddie Scappaticci, died before final charging decisions could be reached. The man leading Operation Kenova, Jon Boutcher, recently appointed Chief Constable of the PSNI, accepted that his investigation had failed to deliver justice. But he was adamant that it could still remedy the historical record, and provide lessons for future British governments.

The Operation Kenova report published last week was clear and uncompromising. On too many occasions, Boutcher wrote, Scappaticci’s handlers turned a blind eye to their agent’s horrific crimes. Some of these handlers, when questioned by Boutcher’s detectives, argued that Scappaticci’s intelligence had allowed them to save “hundreds” of lives. Boutcher strongly disagreed. After going through most of the written reports attributed to Stakeknife, he estimated that this intelligence saved no more than about 10 lives. Although his team did not find any direct evidence of Scappaticci taking someone’s life, they estimated that he was personally involved in as many as 14 killings. Based on this, Boutcher estimated that more lives were lost as a result of Stakeknife than were saved, a catastrophic inversion of the moral trolley problem that his handlers had been playing with real lives in Northern Ireland.

What’s interesting about this conclusion is that Boutcher did not criticise the initial decision to recruit Scappaticci. Nor did he state that this agent should have been dropped as soon as he joined the Nutting Squad. Instead, Boutcher argued this was a question of degree: that Scappaticci had been allowed to go too far and that his handlers had failed to provide rigorous oversight. And they did this because Stakeknife was a prize asset. The ultimate goal for anyone in the business of running spies is to recruit an enemy official as an agent. That’s been the case since the dawn of espionage, and it was true in Northern Ireland. Britain wanted agents deep inside the IRA, and would sacrifice at least some principles to get them there. But this wasn’t following some existing law, nor are there other well-known examples of agents from MI5 or MI6 being free to kill with impunity. And that’s why the Stakeknife story should make us fundamentally confront what it means for Britain’s operatives to pose as members of violent extremist organisations.

In Britain, we have historically maintained a respectful epistemological distance from our intelligence agencies. “Secrecy”, the historian Peter Hennessy wrote, “is as much a part of the English landscape as the Cotswolds.” As recently as the late Eighties, we indulged the idea that MI5 did not officially exist — during the Sixties, MI6’s headquarters still displayed a plaque saying it was the “Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company”. When it comes to the secret world, we have a history of looking the other way.

During the Troubles, this laissez-faire stance bled into the way that agents like Stakeknife were run. When a senior Special Branch officer went to Margaret Thatcher in 1986 and told her that a worrying number of police informants in Northern Ireland were taking part in serious crimes, the response from Downing Street was clear: “Please continue to do what you’re doing. But for goodness’ sake, try not to get caught.” This attitude percolated down from the top, until it reached the men and women looking after the likes of Scappaticci. It was in the background as they tried to figure out what to do with the intelligence he was supplying. Each time he told them about a forthcoming attack, or a murder that was being planned, they faced a dilemma: will we save more lives if we act on this intelligence, or if we don’t?

The same real-life game theory was applied during the Second World War by government officials in Bletchley Park. They knew that if they acted on everything, the Germans would work out that their encrypted Enigma messages were being read and change their codes. As a result, there were times when the British chose not to intervene in order to save more lives in the long run. In a very similar sense, Scappaticci’s handlers often chose not to act, hoping that protecting their source would ultimately allow them to save more lives. But according to Jon Boutcher, they frequently made the wrong call, and should have intervened many more times than they actually did. And part of the problem, Boutcher suggested, was that those in the intelligence community had “a tendency to view the Stakeknife case through rose-tinted spectacles”. They were beguiled, he felt, by the mythology surrounding this agent, and the “irony” and “poetic justice” of having a spy inside the IRA’s spy-hunting unit. Maybe they also believed that nobody was ever going to rake over the details of what they were doing, which would help to explain why they were willing to give Scappaticci what was, in all but name, a licence to kill.

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It’s rare for a police investigation to lead to new legislation, but the Stakeknife case was the driving force behind the government’s 2020 Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill. Never before had Parliament debated whether government agents should be allowed to take part in murder. But Operation Kenova had shown that the law on agent-running was woefully inadequate. This new bill would clear up just how far government agents could go. Some politicians called for an upper limit on agent criminality, and hoped that this bill would make it impossible for spies to participate in serious crimes including sexual violence, murder and torture. No amount of intelligence, they argued, could ever justify murder.

But the government — or rather the intelligence agencies — disagreed. Their argument was that by allowing some crimes, and not others, it might be possible for a terrorist leader to identify any spies in their group by asking them to carry out a proscribed activity. Anyone who refused would come under suspicion. As a result, the final draft of this unprecedented legislation, described in The Guardian as “shameful”, had no upper limit on agent criminality. It became known as the “licence to kill bill” before it had even passed.

On the face of it, this new law is deeply troubling. MI5, MI6, the police, and a surprisingly long list of other government agencies now have the power to authorise their agents to commit serious crimes. But look at the detail of the legislation, and you can see that a situation like the one in which Freddie Scappaticci found himself, when he came to believe that he had a licence to kill and could freely take part in as many IRA killings as he saw fit, is unlikely ever to happen again. The new law is by no means perfect, though it has introduced a system of checks and balances that were not there during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But ultimately it only relitigates one of the central ethical dilemmas of liberal society: how much harm do we permit the security services to inflict in order to keep us safe?

Martin, who by that time had met with the presidents of both Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, had two main objectives. The first was to reinvigorate the push for a two-state solution, which had stalled partly due to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and partly due to the election of a hardline Israeli government in 2022. The second objective was almost as ambitious. Martin sought to convey the message that Ireland, contrary to common perception, was a friend of Israel. Dublin may speak louder than most in favour of Palestinian rights, but that doesn’t mean it is blind to Israel’s security needs, he argued.

The Israelis weren’t convinced. There were niceties and handshakes, but the Irish delegation was met with an undeniable coolness in Jerusalem. Israeli diplomatic officials repeatedly expressed frustration to Irish journalists that Dublin was far quicker to condemn the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) than those of Palestinian militants. “When Hamas kills Israelis, why are they not called terrorists in your newspapers?” one asked.

Before departing for Jordan, Martin attempted to put a positive spin on the visit, expressing hope that a plan to restore relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia may enable some progress on the Palestine question. Now, in the wake of Hamas’s barbaric October 7 attack and the devastating IDF response that has left thousands dead in Gaza, that hope seems to have been misplaced. Not only is the two-state solution more distant than ever, but Irish-Israeli relations are at perhaps their lowest point in history — lower even than in 2010, when Dublin expelled an Israeli diplomat in response to Mossad agents using Irish passports during the assassination of a Hamas official in the UAE.

Since the start of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, Ireland, along with a small number of EU countries, has been pushing for a ceasefire, instead of the “humanitarian pause” favoured by the EU as a whole. And as the death toll climbs, the Irish government’s rhetoric has gradually strengthened. Earlier this month, Varadkar said Israel’s response has gone beyond self-defence and “resembles something more approaching revenge”. The Taoiseach ducked the question of whether Israel is guilty of war crimes, but noted that “the targeting of civilians, collective punishment: these are breaches of humanitarian law whoever commits them”. Martin, who is Varadkar’s coalition partner, is usually more careful with his words, but even he has called Israel’s attacks “disproportionate” and “not necessary”.

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At this autumn’s Fianna Fáil party conference, the Israeli ambassador to Ireland Dana Erlich likely felt uncomfortable listening to Martin strongly criticise her government’s actions. (The Palestinian representative sat a few seats away.) In the same speech, Martin rejected calls from Sinn Féin to expel her. But his main rationale was that diplomatic channels must be kept open to negotiate the extraction of some 40 Irish passport-holders from Gaza. It’s a far cry from the warmth shown to the Israeli diplomatic corps in most other EU capitals. Israel’s foreign affairs minister Eli Cohen said, last month, that Erlich is “representing the State of Israel in one of the more challenging arenas for Israel in Europe”.

That relations between Ireland and Israel are so poor is perhaps surprising, given the two nations’ extensive historic links. Israel’s sixth president, Chaim Herzog, was born in Belfast in 1918, to Ireland’s chief Rabbi, a vocal Irish nationalist and fluent Irish speaker. The current president, Isaac Herzog, is Chaim’s son. During Joe Biden’s visit last year, the two bonded over their shared Irish heritage.

Ireland also has a history of supporting and inspiring the Jewish fight for religious freedom. Near the town of Nazareth is Éamon de Valera Forest, named in recognition of the Irish leader’s support for the Jewish people, whom he explicitly protected by inserting a clause in Ireland’s 1937 Constitution. And in the Forties, Jewish independence fighters explicitly adopted guerrilla tactics that were used by Irish revolutionaries. Israeli leader Yitzhak Shamir even assumed the nom de guerre Michael, after his Irish counterpart Michael Collins, during his country’s formative struggle for independence.

Still, commentators can easily point to darker moments in Irish-Jewish relations. For instance, after Hitler took power, Dublin refused to admit refugees fleeing Germany, with one Irish official stating they had “to some extent… brought the trouble [on] themselves”. And then there was de Valera’s extraordinary ill-judged visit to the German legation to pay his condolences on Hitler’s death, a fact that was unsurprisingly not mentioned when an Israeli forest was dedicated to him, but which frequently appears in the Israeli press.

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However, it is Ireland’s support of Palestinians’ rights, rather than its patchy record of supporting Jews, which has defined its relations with Israel. Officially, Dublin has yet to formally recognise a Palestinian state, despite both houses of parliament backing such a move. But in recent months, as Israeli settlers have increasingly and illegally encroached onto Palestinian land, Martin has signalled that he is open to progressing formal recognition — something no other country in western Europe has done.

There is also significant support for Palestinian rights at a local government level. On Monday, Dublin city council debated a motion to fly the Palestinian flag over City Hall for a week in a show of solidarity (it received majority support but failed to meet the required three-quarters of the vote). In its place, lampposts across the capital have been adorned with stickers in support of Palestine. Last week, pro-Palestine activists occupied the Department of Transport, calling on the Government to “stand with the Palestinian people by halting any transportation of weapons bound for Israel” through Ireland.

Why do the Irish people support Palestine so passionately? The received wisdom is that Ireland sees its own struggle for independence reflected in that of the Palestinian people. Indeed, the Palestinian flag is a common sight in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland, and it is not unusual to see an Irish Tricolour flying in Ramallah or Gaza. But the full explanation is more prosaic. As a small, democratic nation with no real military power, Ireland is very invested in maintaining a rules-based international order, as opposed to a more muscular geopolitics. Hence the full-throated support for Ukraine.

Another cornerstone of Irish foreign policy is consistency. Our diplomats tend to take the view that core positions on international conflicts should not change overnight, no matter what narrative is currently dominating the headlines. Ireland’s position today is the same as a decade ago: both sides need to make sacrifices and swallow their pride for peace. This is exactly what the people of Ireland did in 1998, when they voted by an overwhelming majority to renounce any constitutional claim to Northern Ireland. Irish diplomats are fond of reminding their international counterparts of this moment.

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The Irish public concurs: people across the political spectrum were revolted both by the images coming from Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7 and the images of children buried under rubble in Gaza. For decades, the nationalist and unionist communities on this island each claimed victim status; a rare silver lining of the Troubles is that the Irish now recognise that there is no hierarchy of suffering, and that targeting innocents is wrong no matter the cause. As a result, public opinion is behind the idea that a ceasefire is the only option in Gaza.

Lest we become too misty-eyed over Irish morality, it should also be noted that Ireland’s Jewish population is tiny — less than 3,000, a tenth of the UK’s Jewish population. Partly for this reason, the lobby in favour of Israel’s position is almost non-existent. There have been some prominent voices defending the nation’s actions over the past five weeks, most notably the former Minister for Justice Alan Shatter, a party colleague of Varadkar who compared pro-Palestinian marches to “the third Reich on the streets of Dublin”. He has also argued that because Ireland was a “bystander” during the Holocaust, it has no right to lecture Israel now.

Elsewhere, a handful of commentators have equated Irish criticism of Israel with antisemitism. For instance, a few months ago, another former Government Minister and pro-Israel campaigner Lucinda Creighton claimed that “it’s difficult to extract antisemitism from anti-Zionist and anti-Israel sentiment” in Ireland. And it’s true that, as in other European nations, some people in Ireland have been more intent on expressing their pro-Palestine credentials than condemning Hamas terrorism — with one group in Dublin proudly tearing down posters calling for the return of kidnapped Israelis. (That’s despite the fact that one of Hamas’s victims was an Irish citizen; the group is also believed to have abducted Emily Hand, the eight-year-old daughter of Irishman Tom Hand.)

But it’s worth emphasising that most of these unsavoury responses came from dissident republican or far-Left groups: to say they represent a tiny minority is an understatement. And contrary to some erroneous reporting, Hamas is officially designated a terrorist group by the Government. As a result, Irish officials refuse to even speak to the organisation.

Even so, Ireland still remains an outlier among Western nations in its strident criticism of Israeli militarism — and Netanyahu’s recent proposal for “tactical little pauses” to allow aid to reach Palestine is unlikely to change this. Only last week, Varadkar described his “enormous fears” that the violence will escalate. For if it does, Ireland’s already vulnerable relationship with Israel will likely be another casualty.

Obituaries give shape to a death and hold it in context, allowing us to extract explanations and lessons. But Scappaticci died distant from his victims, accusers, collaborators, investigators — geographically and chronologically removed from Northern Ireland, the Troubles and his role in them. He died far out of context, which was perhaps fitting for a spy.

Scappaticci had made an art of elusiveness. I searched for him 18 years ago, when he became known by the code name given to him by Britain’s security services: Stakeknife. As their agent, he had risen within the IRA to head its own internal security unit, the Nutting Squad, famous for shooting its subjects in the back of the “nut”, or head. Scappaticci stood accused of killing and torturing many people while also, his handlers claimed, saving untold other lives. Sir John Wilsey, the top British general in Northern Ireland during much of the conflict, called Scappaticci the army’s “golden egg”.

Along the way I found others close to him. A bomb maker. An intelligence officer. In 2005, in Belfast, I met Denis Donaldson, a longtime IRA recruiter and then Sinn Féin party leader. He sat at his kitchen table next to his wife and smoked, often glancing towards a set of security monitors. Just outside the kitchen, a wrought-iron gate blocked access to stairs leading up to his home’s second floor. Donaldson was a careful man who had survived hunger strikes and imprisonment at Long Kesh and cross-border IRA missions. Even so, the Stakeknife revelations shook him. “I still can’t believe it,” he said. “My God.”

In the meantime, Scappaticci — Scap, to his IRA friends — had disappeared from the landscape of County Antrim only to reportedly reappear, vaguely, somewhere in Italy. Then back in Northern Ireland, somehow. Then maybe a coastal village in Scotland. In retrospect, he had better instincts for survival than some of his cohort; early one morning, I received a call from a source who said: “Yer man Denis Donaldson has just been expelled from Sinn Féin, about three minutes ago — for being a British spy.” A few months later, my source called again, to say Donaldson had been found in County Donegal, in a remote cottage without electricity or running water. He’d been shot to death. “Missing a hand,” he said.

So, when I heard Stakeknife had died on Tuesday, I wondered at first who had finally found him. It seems time itself had.

Scappaticci grew up in Belfast’s Markets area in the Fifties, the son of an Italian immigrant who sold ice cream from a van. He had the funny name, with its plosive foreign consonants, but he lived like any other Belfast boy — playing football for fun, then laying bricks for money — until the Troubles began. In 1971, police picked him up for rioting and interned him at Long Kesh alongside Gerry Adams, the future Sinn Féin president; Scappaticci became his bodyguard. The short, broad-chested young man was, like all of Northern Ireland, reborn as something new.

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The IRA was hard on its foot soldiers and, the story goes, in 1978 one of Scappaticci’s senior officers beat him as punishment for some organisational infraction. Afterwards, outraged, he marched into a British army office and offered his services as a spy. The impulse was small but pivotal for the entire conflict; with the help of his handlers, Scappaticci climbed into the untouchable role of the IRA’s head spy-hunter. From that vantage he interrogated and allegedly killed informers or “touts”, some of whom were his own unwitting British security counterparts. Investigators say he is “linked” to at least 18 deaths, and may have played a role in many more.

That violence — that intensity of violence, at least — came to an end 25 years ago this week, with the Good Friday Agreement. The peace has held, defying gravity all these years. The “peace walls” still divide Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods, and social housing is still almost entirely segregated, but the churn of blood and flesh has stopped.

The price is weak government. The Good Friday Agreement is a power-sharing arrangement with parity and fragility built in; if either side walks away, the government falls apart. That has happened half a dozen times since the Agreement began, and it’s happening now. Today, people in Northern Ireland can expect a handful of the barest public services, but there’s no leadership in power, no direction. The Northern Irish are, in many ways, adrift.

A generation of people have grown up under the Good Friday Agreement, knowing only peace. Some of them — a frustrated splinter — feel a nostalgia for a conflict they can’t remember. So they romanticise past violence. Now, on the Republican side, the New IRA gathers young people to itself, and lashes out in old ways. In February, its gunmen attempted to kill policeman John Caldwell in Omagh, shooting him multiple times as he finished coaching a youth football practice, scattering children and leaving Caldwell almost dead. In March, MI5 raised the threat of terrorism from “substantial” to “severe”, indicating an attack is highly likely. And this week police foiled a New IRA bomb plot in Derry, set to coincide with Joe Biden’s brief visit.

There is frustration on the opposite side, too. The feeling of adriftness has deepened in recent years as Brexit has forced the government to draw a customs border on one side or the other of Northern Ireland, implicitly asking whether it is more Irish or British. The Sunak administration has placed the border in the Irish Sea and Westminster has assented, alienating Unionists on the outlying side of that border. They view it as a government capitulation to the threat of Republican violence.

Most young people, though, simply want something resembling the life Freddie Scappaticci knew before the Troubles began: playing sports, finding productive work. They go to concerts, buy homes, start families. And they yearn for something they have never known: a functioning government. The power-sharing structure of the Good Friday Agreement dictates, absurdly, that votes from third-party representation in the Northern Ireland Assembly don’t count. Despite this, the third-largest, fastest-growing party now is the centrist Alliance Party. The Protestant and Catholic wings have shrunk so that neither holds a majority, and it’s not difficult to imagine a day when a plurality of Northern Irish voices go unheard, while outnumbered partisans bicker over control.

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The peace exacts one other price, in the form of accountability. Various inquiries and reports have investigated the worst atrocities of the Troubles, and one, Operation Kenova, is dedicated entirely to the work of Stakeknife. It has employed 50 investigators and cost more than £30 million, but has not yet issued its report. On the news of Scappaticci’s death, Kenova’s head investigator, Jon Boutcher, told the BBC that “old age may catch up with those affected, be they perpetrators, witnesses, victims, family members or those who simply lived through those times, before matters are concluded”.

That’s more revealing than intended. As we search for the meaning in Scappaticci’s death, it seems he has made one last escape. It may upset us that he and his controllers have eluded justice, but there lies the truth of Northern Ireland’s future. Most of us who did not grow up within the Troubles remain unable to grasp the fullness of the conflict. It’s too complex. It unfurls and loops back to touch itself, an endless fractal of loyalties and recriminations: thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of lives destroyed, and countless ugly street encounters and dinner-table spats.

Instead, this one death — this informer, this spy — seems more graspable. So we reach for explanation, for understanding, for warning. But the lessons of Freddie Scappaticci’s death, even placed in its context, are ultimately as unsearchable as the man himself. Scappaticci, for his part, denied ever spying in the first place. His death offers no solutions to or illumination of the chaos in which he lived and acted, and no hope for Northern Ireland. Those answers, like Stakeknife, remain elusive.

Trimble and Hume had grown up in the Northern Ireland that existed before the anarchy. They had known peace and they wanted it back. To get there, each had decided it was time to make the leap together: Hume to jump with Trimble and Trimble to accept only the vaguest promises of IRA decommissioning. Each was placing a bet on the other but also, just as important, on their electorates to reward them for doing so. Only one side of this bet would pay out.

In his essay, “Why I Became A Conservative“, Roger Scruton wrote that the romantic core of the creed was the search for the “lost experience of home”, the dream of a childhood that cannot ever be fully recaptured, but can be “regained and remodelled, to reward us for all the toil of separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression”. At the heart of conservatism, in other words, is love: love for things that exist or existed and must be saved. Twenty-five years ago, as Trimble and Hume approached the moment of their destiny, it is telling that their thoughts returned to this land; the home that existed before the transgression.

That morning, exhausted and perhaps a little jubilant, they were confident that they were on the verge of bringing it back. “I know I’ve done the right thing,” Trimble said: “Aye, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea and it’s not ideal, but it’s worthwhile.”

Trimble had always tried to be realistic about the peace in Northern Ireland. “It would be a dereliction of duty if I only conjured up good and generous ghosts, and failed to specify the spectres at the feast,” he said eight months later, when accepting his Nobel Peace Prize.

Back then, the spectre haunting Northern Ireland was the IRA’s failure to decommission its weapons. Today, it is the breakdown of the power-sharing institutions created 25 years ago, and the loss of support for the agreement among unionists. Trimble was clear at the time that the challenge was not just to decommission arms and ammunition, but also to win “hearts and minds”. To do so would be key if Northern Ireland were ever to realise Trimble’s greatest hope: “What we democratic politicians want in Northern Ireland is not some utopian society but a normal society,” he said. This was the goal: a normal society.

This has not happened. While everyday life has returned to some level of normality in Northern Ireland, its politics remain distinctly abnormal. And that, in part, is because of the Good Friday Agreement itself.

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For Trimble, parliamentary democracy was the route to normalcy. This is what the struggle against the IRA had been about: democracy over the jackboot of violent imposition. The Good Friday Agreement was the final victory in this fight, a constitutional defeat for terroristic Republicanism; confirmation of Northern Ireland’s legitimacy and place in the union with Britain. And yet, democracy in Northern Ireland is not normal. Power, according to the Agreement, is always shared between the two competing tribes. Neither can govern without the other. You cannot easily kick the rascals out, because both sides must always work with the other.

Even in 1998, as Trimble wrestled with this tension in his Nobel speech, he was clear that Northern Ireland’s Assembly needed to become more than a mere “congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests”. Quoting the great Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, Trimble said the assembly needed to become a “deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole.” Today, the assembly is not even sitting because the leading party of unionism, the DUP, believes its wishes have been ignored. And so stasis reigns, the ambassadors of hostile interests unable to find common cause.

This is the spectre at the feast that we cannot ignore. While there is little evidence that any other settlement was possible in 1998 — or any other time — the Agreement itself helps to ensure that the hostile interests remain separate. It both reflects Northern Ireland’s abnormality and entrenches it, for as long as the basic power-sharing structure remains in place, “normal” politics can’t resume. And yet, if the Agreement did not exist, politics in Northern Ireland would be even more abnormal than it is today. This is Northern Ireland’s tragedy.

Many of those around both Trimble and Tony Blair did not think this would be the case. The working assumption was that once the heat was drawn from the conflict, normal politics could slowly emerge and eventually replace the sectarian divide. Then a new settlement might naturally come into play. After Trimble lost his grip on power, he even switched his allegiance from the Ulster Unionist Party to the Conservative Party, convinced that this would eventually come about.

Jonathan Powell, who was Blair’s chief of staff at the time and played a key role in the negotiations, tells me Trimble had told him soon after the agreement that Northern Irish politics would eventually resolve itself into normal Left-Right politics. “I thought he was right, but that hasn’t happened.” People were fed up with the two extremes on offer, he says, and that this explained the subsequent rise in support for the Alliance Party. “Power sharing doesn’t work in the long run. Normal politics has to break through eventually, but it takes time.”

Blair remains optimistic that this could still happen. “One of things I learned about the peace process is, you can create an agreement, and you can create a legal framework, and you can do the reforms and pass the laws, but that’s not the same as two communities trusting each other,” he said recently. “But at least if there’s peace and, if we get back to some form of political stability, I think you’ve got the right circumstances for that reconciliation.”

Yet, if anything, the divide has hardened. The largest parties in Northern Ireland today are no longer Trimble’s moderate UUP and Hume’s SDLP, but the hardline DUP and Sinn Féin. Meanwhile, the great losers are the Alliance Party, the one major party in Northern Ireland which seeks an end to the unionist-nationalist dichotomy. After decades of treading water, the party has recently seen its popularity jump and many believe we are witnessing the birth of a new normal in which three tribes must be brought together and not just two.

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Should the Alliance continue to hoover up support, some of the basic tenets of the peace settlement would start to lose their legitimacy. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the votes of Alliance party MLAs at Stormont simply do not count for as much as their DUP and Sinn Fein colleagues. Power has to be shared between nationalists and unionists — not with those who refuse to define as either. This will no longer be tenable if 20-30% of Northern Ireland is voting for parties outside the divide.

This is one of the major reasons — alongside the DUP’s continuing refusal to serve — why there are now calls for the Good Friday Agreement to be reformed. But those calling for reform are essentially calling for an entirely new agreement — and usually because they want to bypass the DUP. But you can’t ask unionism to share power when it is a majority, and then to give up its veto the moment it becomes a minority. The Good Friday Agreement, as Blair said, can only be changed if both communities agree. And this can’t happen until the current crisis has ended, which can only happen if the DUP’s concerns are met — or enough voters abandon the party in protest. As Powell puts it: “You can’t impose it, or change the rules in the middle of a crisis. It can only happen when the conditions are right.”

But what if they never are? Either way, the great irony is that as Northern Ireland becomes more normal, the Good Friday Agreement becomes less workable. This is in large part because it has always meant different things to each side. For many nationalists it was a process. As Gerry Adams said in 1999: “The Agreement is not a peace settlement, nor does it purport to be one.” Rather, he claimed, it was “the beginning of a transitional period towards Irish unification”. To unionists, it was no such thing. It was a settlement, a reasonable compromise upon which a new Northern Ireland could grow.

Trimble’s Peace Prize speech is remembered today largely for his remark that unionists built a solid house in the north after Irish independence, but one that was “a cold house for Catholics”. Less well-remembered — but just as important — was his next sentence. “And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.”

Many northern nationalists do want the house to burn down — and legitimately so. Seeking Northern Ireland’s withdrawal from the UK and absorption into the Republic is just as legitimate and noble a cause as wanting the house to remain standing forever, like some Victorian terrace connected to Great Britain on the other side of the wall. Yet, the reality of Northern Ireland’s existential uncertainty means the “assembly of one nation” that Trimble so desperately wanted is an impossible dream. At heart there remain two nations, with two interests each opposed to the other. And while his imperfect and incomplete set of political compromises solved some of the most intractable problems in western Europe, it only replaced them with others.

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Northern Ireland is one of the most constitutionally uncertain places on earth — by design. The Good Friday Agreement is ambiguous on how a future border poll will come about, for example, or even what Irish unity looks like. All that is said about a future referendum is that one must be called by the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland “if it appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be a part of the United Kingdom”. But how this might be determined is not stipulated. Nor what it would mean, should it happen. The Irish government believes all that is required for a referendum to be called is a majority in the Northern Ireland assembly. The British Government has not made its position clear. Adding further uncertainty is the fact that, once a first referendum takes place, subsequent polls can then be called every seven years: a recipe for permanent instability. No nation on earth could create any meaningful unity of purpose should its very existence be put to a public vote every seven years. The stakes to avoid a first one are therefore extraordinarily high for unionism.

But even if the cause of Irish nationalism were to triumph in a poll, it is unclear what would happen then. Once the reality of Irish unity is set out in black and white, some may be less keen — and others more.

Rory Montgomery, a member of the Irish delegation in 1998, told me it was important to remember that while the agreement was a remarkable achievement, it was also the work of imperfect humans negotiated with great haste. “This was not handed down on tablets of stone by great men.” Many issues were resolved by the agreement, but many more had to be parked, chief among them how to deal with the legacies of the past and the continuing reality of sectarianism.

One of the problems today, Montgomery told me, was that the politicians in Northern Ireland had become “addicted to the constitutional question and the politics of crisis and intervention”. For a small place, it continues to be treated with great solemnity, a source of conversation in London and Washington, Dublin and Brussels. “The politics has remained focused on the constitutional issue and the rivalry of the two communities,” he said. “Even if Stormont was sitting for a relatively long period, there hasn’t been much focus on usual politics. And you have to be honest: the performance of the institutions has been mediocre at best.” It is hard to argue with this conclusion.

Back in 1998, Trimble warned that peace needed magnanimity, but also political prudence, “a willingness at times nor to be too precise or pedantic”. It is not for one generation of politicians to future-proof a set of laws and strictures. They must work within the bounds of what exists, not seek to perfect the world. Trimble quotes Amos Oz, who said inconsistency was the basis of coexistence. “The heroes of tragedy driven by consistency and by righteousness, destroy each other. He who seeks total supreme justice seeks death.” This is true, and yet nothing can be built on foundations that never settle. The house that Trimble and Hume built is still standing, but the running repairs are racking up.

Irish communities have long shaped politics on the British Isles. It’s largely forgotten now but until well into the 20th century, Liverpool was the most Tory city in England. In the first general election of 1910, 11 of the 13 Merseyside constituencies returned a “Unionist” (as the Conservatives were referred to), outnumbering one solitary Liberal and, uniquely for the mainland United Kingdom, one Irish Nationalist, T.P. O’Connor, who represented the Liverpool Scotland constituency from 1885-1929.

The decisive factor in the strength of Unionism in Edwardian Liverpool was its proximity to Ireland, and the presence of so many Irish people in the industrial towns of Northern England and Scotland. The Third Irish Home Rule Bill mattered to the rest of the public in the later Edwardian period because of the enduring importance of the Union, the Empire and Protestant Christianity in the matrix of British national identity at the end of the long 19th century — an identity which had emerged from the febrile era of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Gunpowder Plot, and then the centuries of wars with Catholic Spain and France.

Yet popular opposition to Irish Home Rule in the years before the First World War has been almost entirely memory-holed in British history. In the two years from 1912, the Ulster Unionist leader Sir Edward Carson toured Britain to thump the tub for “Loyal Ulster” remaining in that Union, and outside the jurisdiction of a Dublin parliament. No other contemporary political campaign could match that led by Carson for the breadth and intensity of its appeal. Although William Gladstone is remembered for addressing over 83,000 in the course of his famous Midlothian Campaign in the 1880s, Carson probably addressed 10 times that number in the years before the First World War. By 1914, the future of Ulster was, in the words of the Times, “not only the subject, but the scenes of all political interest” — a fact that might surprise a British public that has grown increasingly apathetic about Northern Ireland. Few have followed the twists and turns over sausages and seed potatoes in the post-Brexit negotiations with the EU with much interest.

Historical amnesia is especially acute in the Socialist Republic of Merseyside, where Liverpudlians routinely boo the national anthem and revel in anti-Unionist “Scouse not English” identity. This has completely airbrushed out the local traditions of plebeian Orangeism, and the fact that Liverpool FC was founded by the Orangeman and Conservative Lord Mayor of the City, Sir John Houlding. It is telling, of course, that after signing the famous “Ulster Covenant” against Irish Home Rule in 1912, it was to Liverpool that Carson sailed from Belfast. He was then met by a vast and rapturous crowd of over 150,000 at the Pier Head, before a torchlight procession led by Orange Order bands progressed in triumph through the city.

It was more like Palm Sunday than an ordinary political gathering, and the religious overtones in the anti-Home Rule campaign are obvious. In fact, the Home Rule crisis, between 1912 and 1914, was the last time religion seriously mattered in British politics. As Linda Colley argued in Britons: Forging the Nation, Catholics were the archetypal “other”, helping to unite the kingdom. In fact, it is useful to see the events of 1912 to 1914 as the culmination of a sequence of flash points — from Catholic emancipation in 1829 to the debates around Irish church disestablishment in 1869, from the Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1892 to the changes to the British coronation oath in 1910, which removed those passages judged offensive to Catholics.

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All of these episodes were given added piquancy in Britain by the arrival of the Catholic Irish in massive numbers in the middle of the nineteenth century. But it is important to remember that Irish migration included Protestants too. Hence events such as the huge sectarian riots that rocked Liverpool in 1909 — probably sparked by a provocative procession through Everton led by a pig carcass bearing the insult “Cured at Lourdes”.

Inter-Irish tension was exploited skilfully by the leadership of the Unionist party in this period — notably by Andrew Bonar Law, an unscrupulous Scots-Canadian of Ulster Presbyterian stock. Having been an MP in Glasgow and Liverpool, Law well understood the emotions that the Irish question generated — and how playing the “Orange card”, as Randolph Churchill had done against Gladstone in 1886, could rescue the Unionist party from the doldrums. He once proclaimed in a speech in 1912 that he could “imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will go which I shall not be ready to support and in which they will not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people”. For a Leader of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, Law was playing with fire. It undoubtedly encouraged the Unionists in Ulster, who had recently founded the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force, and whose parades were attended on horseback by leading Conservative politicians such as the dissolute Liverpool MP, F.E. “Galloper” Smith, later the 1st Earl of Birkenhead.

But Sir Edward Carson was the main attraction wherever he went. A Dublin-born barrister, known for defending the Marquess of Queensberry in a libel case against Carson’s own schoolmate Oscar Wilde, Carson was the archetypal “charismatic leader”, and a man who was marketed carefully as the embodiment of the Union. Some historians have seen a premonition of fascism in the hero-worship of the lantern-jawed Carson at rallies from Plymouth to Inverness, Norwich to the Rhondda Valley; Professor Roy Foster has even noted his sexual appeal, and the effect this had on the still voteless but enthusiastic women of Northern Ireland and beyond.

What is more, after the rapid industrialisation of Northern and Western Britain, the English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh were no longer neatly confined within their own national territory. Liverpool was a land of opportunity, and though its Irishness is well known, its Scottish links were deep-rooted too (William Gladstone was born in the city to parents from Leith and Dingwall). And by 1900, Liverpool had over 90 Welsh chapels, and even Welsh language newspapers — making it “the capital of North Wales”.

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This internal migration within the UK strengthened familial and fraternal bonds, and by extension, the emotional appeal of the Union. Indeed, the nexus between the Lagan, Mersey, Clyde and Tyne formed a kind of northern industrial zone that featured prominently on the itineraries of Carson and others. The pull of sectarian politics explains why Bonar Law focused his national campaigning on opposing Irish Home Rule, not for sentimental reasons, but because of cold political calculation; he even admitted privately to H.H.Asquith that, “Protestantism, or at least dislike of Catholicism”, motivated his core vote.

And his approach was effective. By 1914, Unionist demonstrations were happening all over the country, they had the government on the back foot in parliament and the Liberal Party’s worst by-election performances coincided with the most frenetic period of anti-Home Rule activity. The Unionists had probably mobilised enough of their core vote over Home Rule to have been favourites to win the next general election, planned for 1914 or 1915, but never held because of the outbreak of war.

Extra-parliamentary resistance was gaining support too. By 1914, a “British Covenant” had gained hundreds of thousands of signatories, while the “British League for the Support of Ulster and the Union” was openly drilling armed volunteers in Glasgow, Liverpool and London, in preparation to fight in Ulster. And most alarming of all, the army itself — especially its Anglo-Irish officer caste — was havering on whether they could be relied upon impose Home Rule on Ulster.

This was serious, and far from being the Indian summer of popular memory, Britain in 1914 was arguably on the verge of civil war. Indeed, the Liverpool Courier observed that, “The first blood spilled in Ulster would raise a storm in the large towns of England and Scotland… the problem of the working classes of Liverpool, Glasgow, Barrow, Manchester and Newcastle would be difficult to handle and would be even worse than in Belfast.”

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By Andrew Doyle

In the middle of all this, an Austrian archduke was shot to death in a Sarajevo side street, and all was changed, changed utterly. Asquith even wrote to his wife saying, “at least we won’t have to talk about Ireland for a while”. But the horrors of the First World War merely postponed the reckoning for Northern Ireland, which eventually achieved a sort of Home Rule that the Ulster Unionists had fought so hard to resist.

Still, attitudes in Britain were changed by the years of war, as class began to overtake religion as a source of identity and political allegiance. Religious observance cratered and the old suspicions of Catholics as a disloyal fifth column were disproved, as soldiers shared hardships with men they would never ordinarily have mixed with in civilian life. Even Robert Graves in his lucid war memoir, Goodbye To All That, noted that despite being raised with “a horror of Roman Catholicism”, he and his fellow soldiers developed a huge respect for the gallantry of the RC padres, who went into the battle line to give extreme unction to the dying. Even in Liverpool, where they still hold rather desultory Orange marches every year on the Glorious Twelfth, sectarian tensions waned, not least because — unlike Glasgow — the city’s two main football teams never really developed unambiguous Protestant or Catholic identities.

Until the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, the Union hadn’t been the central focus of British politics for precisely 100 years. Even the 30 years of terrible violence during The Troubles never really made any difference to how people voted in the United Kingdom. Unlike the Edwardian hero-worship of Carson, by the end of the century, the fulminating Ulsterman had become a figure of ridicule, and Unionism itself was becoming such a low-status opinion that many British people — especially the more disgruntled and online Remainers — began to express support for both Scottish independence and Irish unification, experiencing no cognitive dissonance whatsoever. The challenges that Brexit posed Ireland may have been surmounted by the Windsor Agreement. The SNP may yet find a charismatic new leader. But it remains to be seen whether the ideal of the United Kingdom will trouble the British public enough for them to fight for it.

Within a week, amid widespread criticism, the video disappeared and the Government’s official ‘Ireland 2016’ website was quietly taken down — though not before it emerged that it had used Google to translate The Proclamation of the Irish Republic and historian Diarmaid Ferriter had labelled the video “embarrassing, unhistoric shit”.

Four years later, the Irish Government was similarly humiliated when Leo Varadkar, Enda Kenny’s replacement as Taoiseach, revealed his plans to commemorate the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) with a state ceremony. Not only were the RIC formed as the armed wing of British imperialism in the 1800s, used to protect British landowners during the famine, but many viewed the announced commemoration as an attempt to memorialise the infamous Black and Tans — thugs often recruited from British prisons who joined the RIC to violently hunt down Republicans during the early 1900s. In response to Varadkar’s plan to give “right and proper” status to the “police officers who were killed”, the Irish public sent the Wolfe Tones to the top of the charts with Come out Ye Black and Tans.

More than anything else, the past decade of Irish centenaries has shown how memorials and commemorations can be tense affairs. To say the Government in the south hasn’t done well when it comes to remembering is an understatement. And as Ireland prepares to commemorate 50 years since Bloody Sunday this weekend, that doesn’t look like changing; if anything, nowhere is the squeamishness with which Irish politicians approach the past more present than in its current Taoiseach, Micheál Martin.

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Earlier this month, Martin spoke at a conference commemorating the handover of Dublin Castle to the newly elected chairman of the Provisional government, Michael Collins. Addressing an audience at Trinity College Dublin, Martin said that “every state has a right to remember and honour its founders and the traditions which both won the support of the people and secured progress”. He then warned that “we live at a moment when attempts to distort and manage public histories are becoming more and more serious”. Calling on the need for “independent historical scholarship”, he lamented that “ours is a world where disinformation and populism are a very real threat to the sustainability of free democracies”.

Such charged language distinguished the framing of this commemoration from those that came before. This was more than a matter of bluster and ineptitude; here we had a blatant display of revisionism, one designed to bolster the Taoiseach’s anti-democratic agenda.

Far from a declaration of a new, free Ireland, the treaty that Collins handed over at Dublin Castle in January 1922 was signed on the condition that the members of parliament in an Irish Free State swore an oath of allegiance to the British Crown: Collins and others were forced to “solemnly swear” to be “faithful to His Majesty King George V, his heirs and successors by law” and agree membership of the British Commonwealth.

As well as selling out the six counties in the North, the brutal civil war between Republicans following the handover was based on the popular notion that the treaty had been a means for British establishment figures to use Irish heads of state to quell what had been a populist rebellion. A century later, as Irish politicians use the event to rail against “populism” and “disinformation”, some might wonder how much has changed.

Indeed, last September, Irish president Michael D. Higgins caused a stir by being the only southern politician who refused to engage in the historical whitewashing of partition. When invited to attend a church service in Armagh in the North to commemorate the “formation of Northern Ireland”, Higgins declined as the service was not “politically neutral” and failed to acknowledge the “coercion” involved in that moment of history.

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He clearly struck a nerve: DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson responded by calling Higgins’s refusal a “retrograde step”, while Ruth Dudley-Edwards described Higgins’s “bigotry” as being inspired by the southern Irish populace’s “latent Anglophobia”. Many unionists are equally up in arms at the fact that Higgins is billed to be attending the Bloody Sunday memorial this weekend.

And should we be surprised? As the past decade of anniversaries has shown, how the Irish political elite approach their nation’s collective history has always mattered. But at a time when a majority of people are in favour of holding a border poll in the next five years, and growing support for Sinn Féin shows that the issue of Irish unification is here to stay, the use and abuse of the past carries even more weight.

Since 1998, Irish politicians have been able to seek refuge in the stipulations imposed by the Good Friday Agreement: a border poll cannot be officially called unless the Secretary of State in the North is convinced that it “appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland”. In essence, you have to win before you are allowed to have a go.

A common refrain among politicians to those calling for a border poll has been the assurance that no one wants to return to the violence and chaos of Northern Ireland during the Seventies and Eighties. Yet the Irish political elite is not engaging in a war on history simply because they fear the return of the Troubles — but because reconciling with the past also involves taking stock of the present.

Perhaps more than anything else, unionist and loyalist forces in the North wish to avoid a border poll because it would call into question their political legitimacy and reveal the democratic deficit in Northern Irish politics. The power-sharing arrangement imposed by the Good Friday Agreement has long proven to be a block on political engagement, with Stormont disbanded for years at a time because of petty spats over flags, language and green energy bills.

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For the south, meanwhile, a border poll would mean southern politicians coming to terms with years of ignoring the discriminatory nature of partition. As former Republican prisoner Danny Morrison wrote in the Irish Times last week, “Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael deliberately attempt to conflate the Republic of Ireland with Ireland, to create the perception that the Republic of Ireland is the nation and that the North is ‘other’”. (The Irish elite, ever keen to suck up to their Brussels counterparts, are also aware of the dislike with which the EU views anything with a whiff of nationalist sentiment.)

So calling a border poll would be a painful process, one in which the “disinformation” condemned by Martin would be exposed as having coloured much of the establishment’s revisionist representation of Irish history. But it might also be inevitable; how long they can avoid their history remains to be seen.

The Irish author Colm Tóibín recently told British readers in the Guardian that people arguing for a united Ireland in their lifetime were engaging in “mystical blather”. It was a typical defence of the status quo — an attempt to pose the prospect of change as unreasonable, idealistic or as dreams of ‘sunny uplands’.

But a hundred years on from a treaty forced by British rule and opposed by Irish men and women — which not only went on to spark civil war but decades of unrest and political uprisings in the North — is such complacency wise? For too long, Ireland’s political elite have busied themselves rewriting history at the expense of addressing the present. As they lumber from one display of incompetence to another, it’s only a matter of time before it catches up with them.

Yet reconstitution of a fighting force would take some doing, not least because its recruiting ground, northern Catholics, are more prosperous and less easy to mobilise than their parents and grandparents were in the late sixties. And mobilise for what? Polls continually show that a majority do not want, at least not soon, a United Ireland — the IRA and Sinn Fein’s reason for existence. In any case, Irish nationalists of every stripe now see themselves as in the ascendant, and thus believe that political pressure and elections will bring nationalist majorities in parliaments, both in Ireland and in the North. This is similar to the belief held by Scottish nationalists: both groups have faith that youthful cohorts will support radical change – unity for Ireland, secession for Scotland – and will, when the cagey elders remove themselves, bring victory .

Nationalists believe that Ireland’s geography is destiny, and that unionists should see that the island has room for only one nation state. The view isn’t a Sinn Fein preserve: Simon Coveney the Irish Foreign Minister in the Fianna Fail government described its formation this as a “terrible mistake (which) caused extraordinary division”.

Behind this view, overtly or by implication, stand the Catholic Church, the European Union, all the Irish political parties and — at times the heaviest guns — American politicians with Irish forebears. They, from the Kennedys through Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, have felt empowered to intervene in the business of the British government to secure a greater all-Irish dimension to Northern Ireland’s politics, a tendency not confined to American leaders of Irish descent, and one always couched in terms of securing better relationships and lasting peace.

With these centres of influence now must be counted most of the Irish commentariat and intellectuals — men and women who command space in the Republic’s newspapers, talk shows and opinion websites and blogs. The leader among them is Fintan O’Toole, a writer with a large Anglophone audience for his commentaries in the Irish Times, The Guardian, the New York Review of Books and beyond. His book, Heroic Failure (2018), pictures Britain in masochistic but rebellious submission to a Brussels dominatrix, a posture he believes had been deliberately prepared for by the well-timed publication of Fifty Shades of Grey in 2011.

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His visceral dislike of Brexit and by extension the present British state is amplified by other powerful voices, such as Bobby McDonagh, a former Irish ambassador to the UK and a reliable defender of all the European Union does and says. They view the unionists’ Euroscepticism, and their anger at the Protocol which retains large EU control over their border with Ireland, as evidence of reaction.

The columnist Emma de Souza sees Protocol denial as “chest-pounding bravado and posturing”. Pat Leahy, the Irish Times’ political editor, believes Sinn Fein is a government-in-waiting — an increasingly common trope among Irish columnists. O’Toole, a long-time and continuing critic of Sinn Fein’s “amnesia” about the IRA’s decades of massacre, torture and crime, still believes that it should be part of a “progressive” government coalition. A large exception: Ireland’s most remarkable novelist, Colm Toibin, who in a Guardian column asked of the anti-British, pro-United Ireland/Sinn Fein crowd: “do they want to import sectarian hatred and the politics of perpetual grievance from the north into the south”?

Sinn Fein, at 32% in the opinion polls, is 10 points ahead of both Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, governing together in a unique coalition. Leahy salutes the party’s “waves of energy, commitment and conviction”.

For unionists, Sinn Fein is remembered as having other qualities. In his essay, the deputy editor of the Belfast daily News Letter Ben Lowry laments that IRA leaders, including the late Martin McGuiness, a former head of the Londonderry IRA, were not brought to any kind of justice for the many killings they ordered. He quotes Alan McQuillan, a former assistant chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, as noting that investigators face pressure from both the British and Irish governments “not to pursue those whose arrest would destabilise the peace process”.

The force and power of Irish commentary has spurred the unionist intelligentsia to a collective response. In a collection of essays out this week — The Idea of the Union — they give tongue to defiance of nationalists’ growing assumption that the territory’s time as British possession is up, and that unionists must sooner or later recognise it.

Thus two sets of highly educated, strongly motivated, radically conflicting groups lay out their respective stalls. On the Northern side, this comes with a painful recognition of a subaltern status. “Nationalism,” writes Arthur Aughey, among the most lucid of Unionist intellectuals, “can mobilise its friends and unionism has few or no friends — and, in the text of the present post-Brexit protocol, has been betrayed once more by those it believed were its friends” — in this case, Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

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Note the “once more”: it is an insistent theme in the essays, that unionists, the most demonstratively patriotic of all the national groups which make up the United Kingdom, should, over the long century of the province’s existence, have been so grievously disregarded by their own government. The political scientist Geoffrey Sloan highlights a Northern Ireland Office discussion paper of 1972 which insists that all policy on the province must reside within an “Irish Dimension” – instead, Sloan writes, “of defending the integrity of Northern Ireland’s territorial boundaries as part of the British state, a distancing process was set in motion”.

The historian Paul Bew, now a crossbench peer, notes that a “remarkable aspect” of the negotiations over the Northern Ireland Protocol was “the way in which the British government allowed the Irish government to control the narrative”. The former Northern Ireland first minister David (now Lord) Trimble writes that the Protocol , “rips the heart out” of the 1998 Good Friday or Belfast Agreement, which set up a  government sharing power between the two main parties, Sinn Fein and the United Unionists (later the Democratic Unionists): “it does so by removing the assurance that democratic consent is needed to make any change to the status of Northern Ireland.”

Leo Varadkar, Taioseach until June 2020 and now Tanaiste (deputy prime minister) to Micheal Martin, is much blamed for being used by the European Union to pile pressure on the British. Ray Bassett, a former head of the Irish Consular Service and now a stern critic of his country’s policies towards Northern Ireland, accuses Varadkar of “misusing the border issue to maintain Brussels control… to display its euro credentials”.

Micheal Martin as Taoiseach has been more emollient than Varadkar: but the issue of the Northern Ireland Protocol prevents any serious softening. The deal, agreed in December 2020, was necessary for a quick agreement on the terms of Brexit, and keeps the movement of goods free from check between north and south, while erecting a new trade border with the UK — retaining the authority of the European Court of Justice over the arrangement, a clear diminution of British sovereignty.

Yesterday, the European Union revealed it would offer “far-reaching” reductions on the checks presently required on goods moving between the British mainland and Northern Ireland: but, in the negotiations to come, will be reluctant to reduce the ECJ’s authority, and thus the wound to Britain’s sovereignty. There is little hope that the Irish government will take the British side on this, or even use its good offices to bring about compromise.

Some of the essayists in The Idea of the Union seek to cut Irish claims down to size — none more forensically than the economist Geoff Gudgin, now an advisor to the Brexit negotiator Lord Frost, who by careful statistical accountancy shows that the Irish claim of possessing one of highest GDPs in Europe, substantially higher than that of the UK, is based on it being one of the greatest of world tax havens. All of the more than 20 writers, inflamed or moderate in their tone, insist on what they see as the core truth: unionism is not to be argued, seduced, persuaded or charmed with any greater success than it was terrorised away.

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It is a different culture: prepared to live in friendship (and often doing so, in Northern Irish communities) but not to have unity thrust upon them. If attitudes in the south have become more militant, those in the north have hardened round the old cry: “No Surrender”.

Irish intellectuals, as jealous of their independence as any other such national grouping, now line up with their government’s pro-EU, anti-Brexit, anti-Unionist themes. Katy Hayward, writing in the French journal Etudes Irlandaises, remarks that Irish intellectuals “play an increasingly “functionary” role in debates about “Europe”, in effect “supporting the official position of the Irish government without being given much scope for critiquing or elaborating upon it”.

They are not alone in this. The Scottish National Party enjoys the support of some intellectuals — such as Tom Nairn, the cornerstone of nationalist ideology through his diabolisation of England, the commentator Neil Ascherson and the academics Ben Jackson and Scott Hames. They are fleshed out by enthusiastic support from some English intellectuals: the novelist Will Self, the founder of Open Democracy Anthony Barnett and the writer Paul Mason. And it has nearly all the “creative” community behind it, including two novelists who won the Booker prize, James Kelman in 1989 and Douglas Stuart in 2020. This broad strand of opinion generally sees Irish unity as desirable, without violence if possible.

The well-worn observation of Orwell in England, Your England — that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals 
are ashamed of their own nationality” — seems to remain substantially true, taking extra strength from the horror with which the intelligentsia, together with the bulk of the middle class, view Brexit. It is a horror which, much magnified, has given the Irish intelligentsia, and their governments, a new lease of anti-British life; and their Northern Irish unionist equivalents a tighter grip on their Britishness.

Of course, such candour has its advantages. But not in frontline politics — where, for good or ill, a different set of skills is needed to make allies and get things done.

And so it was hardly surprising that Mercer was unceremoniously sacked this week, after expressing anger at the Government’s failure to keep its promise to protect veterans of the British Armed Forces from facing prosecution for historic offences. Next week, two unnamed veterans will go on trial in Belfast for the 1972 murder of an IRA commander — the first time that British soldiers will be prosecuted for the alleged killing of an IRA terrorist.

Mercer was understandably frustrated; the Government had previously pledged that such a prosecution would never occur. Few sacked politicians can say they were dismissed for taking a stand on an important issue. Mercer, in that respect, is the exception.

For ultimately, it would have been far easier for Mercer to have taken the easy way out and turn a blind eye to the trial. The issue of historic prosecutions is an ethical and political nightmare, one which is very easy to put off — as successive governments have demonstrated.

Even when such investigations do take place, they tend to be far from fruitful. Take, for example, the probe into the killings in Londonderry in 1972 that became known as Bloody Sunday, when 13 people were killed. It gave rise to the longest and costliest inquiry in British legal history.

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The Saville Inquiry published its findings in 2010 — a full 12 years after it was established — and found that a number of the soldiers present on the day fired in a way that was “unjustified and unjustifiable”. And yet, for the soldiers who took part, the Saville inquiry was of little utility. They were granted legal immunity from future prosecution so long as they told the truth. But a number of the soldiers — most notably the man known as Soldier F — perjured themselves in their attempts to whitewash their actions, thus leaving themselves open for future prosecution.

Not that anyone was in any hurry to do so. After Lord Saville’s report was published, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) announced that it would begin a murder investigation into the killings. And there was a distinct sense of foot-dragging around the matter.

The PSNI announced that it would have to begin its investigations as though they were starting from scratch, implying that the incomparably detailed Saville report had no worth. It took almost a decade for them to decide to only prosecute one of the soldiers — Soldier F — for his actions on the day. Even now Soldier F only faces prosecution for two of the deaths he was most likely responsible for — much to the horror of the families of other victims, who are believed to have been killed by Soldier F.

Today, discussion surrounding Soldier F’s prosecution tends to be strikingly reductive: either wholeheartedly in support of the prosecution or in defence of the veteran.

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And on the face of it, it seems like a straightforward decision to make. Having watched Soldier F testify in 2003 — and written a book on the matter — I can say with certainty that he is a liar. He pretends to have no memory of what happened on that day because he knows that what he did was indefensible; he disgraced not just his regiment but his country. In any normal situation, it would be impossible to justify not prosecuting him.

But the situation in Northern Ireland is not normal — not least because prosecutions there have become a very one-sided affair. In order to secure the current peace arrangements, it was necessary to take decisions that would ordinarily be unconscionable. Most notably, the British government, led by Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, carried out secret side-deals with the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein as part of the Good Friday Agreement. These included the assurance to unconvicted terrorists who were “on the run” that they would not be prosecuted for their historic crimes.

Blair and Campbell kept the existence of these letters classified, knowing full well that the British public would not be able to stomach them. Indeed, these “get out of jail free” letters remained such a secret that when John Downey was prosecuted in 2014 for his participation in the IRA’s 1982 Hyde Park Bombing, the trial collapsed when the defence produced the assurances secretly given to Downey by the British government.

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Downey was as responsible for the Hyde Park Bombing as Soldier F was for Bloody Sunday — yet it is only one of these men who faces prosecution. And as a result, many believe there is a double-standard at play here: why should Soldier F face the possibility of being charged one day when a number of the terrorists Britain was fighting are able to walk free?

Certainly it’s a legitimate concern. But is this double-standard not defensible? After all, Downey was a member of a proscribed terrorist organisation, while Soldier F was a serving representative of the state. Surely a soldier must be held to a higher standard than a terrorist?

For the most part, that claim has a certain appeal, and if it were the case that the army still has lessons to learn from Bloody Sunday and its aftermath, then it might be more applicable. But it is almost fifty years since Bloody Sunday happened, and the inquiries into it — in particular the Saville Inquiry — have already established the many lessons that should have been learned. There has even been a Prime Ministerial apology for the actions of British soldiers on the day. What more is there to achieve?

Mercer, then, was right to condemn the Government for failing on its promise not to allow former servicemen to appear in court. But now that he is on the backbenches, perhaps he can put forward a more subtle argument that needs making.

For ultimately, even in the case of Soldier F, there is little need to condone or defend the historical actions of the few rogue British troops in Northern Ireland. That doesn’t mean whitewashing Soldier F for his crimes, any more than it means whitewashing Downey for his.

But either both men are in court or neither is. Make that case, and it’s up to Sinn Fein and their supporters to make the next move.