THE Catholic Council for Maintained Schools seems not to be concerned that a former IRA spy is now the vice principal in a school.
Rosa McLaughlin once targeted an RUC officer and gathered information on Bangor police station.
The IRA murdered police officers, so it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out how such information could have been used.
The horror at Ms McLaughlin’s appointment might be reduced if she spoke out to say that she had been young at the time of her offences, and misguided, and that she deeply regrets having assisted a paramilitary gang.
But that is not the mood within nationalism today, which is all too willing to retrospectively legitimise the IRA murder campaign.
Backed by a foolish British state, nationalists are getting endless probes into supposed collusion by the RUC, which in truth was a disciplined police force with a high clear-up rate against loyalists (thugs who plainly had poor intelligence because most of their victims were innocent Catholics).
Nationalists now have a raft of inquests which will examine supposed state failings.
They have or demand inquiries into certain killings, such as Bloody Sunday or Ballymurphy or Pat Finucane.
Meanwhile, the HET is making some headway solving loyalist killings or those involving police wrongdoing, but seemingly none in the IRA’s many murders.
And now, even moderate nationalists are calling for dissidents to be freed.
It is almost no surprise that a terrorist can be a top teacher.
Ms McLaughlin’s position sends a message to children that the sectarian campaigns of republicans, past and present, are acceptable.
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