The war's over – and taken Ulster's big scoops with it
Last week the Sunday Times shut up its Northern Ireland operation to concentrate resources in Dublin. Liam Clarke, its Northern Ireland Editor, looks back on the thrills and spills of 20 years reporting the Troubles
The news of Eamon Collins's murder was the worst moment of my 20 years working for the Sunday Times. It was January 27 1999 when he was found battered and stabbed to death at the side of the road near his home in Newry's Barcroft Park.
Gerry Adams said there was no reason to suspect foul play, but there was little doubt that the father of four had been killed by the IRA. He had given evidence against Thomas "Slab" Murphy, the IRA chief of staff, in a libel Murphy brought against the paper after it accused him of mass murder.
Eamon was a former Provo intelligence officer and his account of attending terrorist meetings with Murphy had swung the case. Tom Murphy had gone into court to claim half a million in damages but he walked out of it owing the paper 600,000 in costs. His name, once virtually unknown, was now
public property: and his
reputation was in tatters.
Eamon didn't stop there; he conducted an unremitting
publicity campaign against the South Armagh IRA, which Murphy headed. He had appeared on BBC Newsnight to denounce them only a few days before his death.
The Sunday Times had offered to move him and give him a new start outside Northern Ireland, but he had instead used the money to renovate an old house near Camlough which had been burnt down as it neared
completion.
He was accused of being an informer, but that was never true. What he had said about the IRA had been said in print and on television, not to some Special Branch handler and he had been more critical of himself than of anyone else. His was a man torn between his devotion to the republican ideal and his horror of what he had done in pursuit of it.
His death brought home to me the fact that words can kill those who utter them.
nnn
My association with the Sunday Times goes back to the mid '80s and in that time more than 2000 stories which appeared in the paper bear my "by-line".
Many were humdrum enough but the ones which the paper really valued me for told
stories that someone, somewhere
wanted concealed.
I liked the freedom and resources which working for the paper gave me to delve into the secrets of the troubles but I
followed news priorities set by Andrew Neil and John Witherow, the two editors I worked under.
The main criteria was always the likely impact that a story would have, other considerations came in afterwards. They were prepared to fight the
Government through the courts to publish and the only times
stories were watered down was when it was necessary to save life.
Both Neil and Witherow, who became editor around the time of the IRA ceasefire of 1994, were gifted professionals who knew what sold papers and what set agendas. Both of them were clear about what they wanted to achieve and were prepared to provide back-up if the going got rough.
In the early part of my career, roughly corresponding to Neil's editorship, my problems came largely from paramilitaries who held me personally responsible for the paper's news values and investigations.
In March 1988, following the murder of two British Army
corporals at an IRA funeral, the paper ran a double page spread by the Insight team, a large group for which I worked at the time, entitled "Eight faces of Hate in the Moment the Mob Smelt Blood".
It included pictures of
mourners attacking the
corporals' car despite the fact that the IRA had threatened
photographers and seized and exposed a number of rolls of film.
In his biography Neil describes how he personally drove this story through, but at the time I was held responsible.
Often such stories produced contacts from disillusioned republicans who had material they wanted publicised. The IRA knew this and later that year an active service unit responsible for most of the killings in Belfast at the time attempted to lure me to a meeting on the promise of information about a split in the organisation.
Friends tipped me off to the plot and left me in no doubt that I would be killed if I attended. I later met a member of the IRA Northern Command with Fr Alec Reid, a good friend who bravely agreed to defuse the situation.
The IRA representative told me that there would be no active threat but that I might not be safe socialising in republican areas and the Sinn Fein Press office would be reluctant to deal with me if I continued writing as I did. There was a simultaneous loyalist threat which a prisoner warned me about. As a result the paper sought police advice and moved me out of Belfast.
Ironically the knowledge that there had been this degree of hostility prompted both police and grassroots republicans, who were now confident that I would not pass on what they said to the IRA leadership, to speak to me.
As my knowledge of the
paramilitaries grew I began to glimpse the degree to which they were infiltrated and manipulated by intelligence agencies.
Several people with undercover roles were prepared to talk to me. Sean O'Callaghan, described by his Garda handler as the most important agent in the history of the Irish state, gave me several interviews from his prison cell in Maghaberry, disclosing his role as an informer. The light which he threw on the inner workings of the IRA as well as Garda and MI5 intelligence methods was unprecedented at the time.
Others who spoke to me in the wake of O'Callaghan included Raymond Gilmour, the Londonderry supergrass, Martin McGartland (who had infiltrated the IRA unit which tried to kill me), Kevin Fulton (the pseudonym I gave to a military intelligence agent from Newry), Willie Carlin (who penetrated Sinn Fein in Derry and whose handler, a Soviet agent within MI5 called Michael Bettany, betrayed him to the IRA) and John Weir, a police sergeant who joined the UVF spoke freely to me about
collusion with loyalists in the 1970s.
There were complaints from government. The most serious concerned "Martin Ingram", a member of the British Army Force Research Unit (FRU) who blew the whistle on a number of security force abuses. These included the burning of the Sir John Stevens's office by FRU supporters in an effort to disrupt an inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane. Ingram was arrested and I was questioned by police but, thanks largely to the legal backup provided by Times
newspapers, charges fell through.
Another arrest came when my wife Kathryn Johnston and I were hauled into Antrim anti-terrorist holding centre overnight for publishing transcripts of bugged telephone calls from Martin McGuinness's home number. The transcripts, reproduced in our biography of McGuinness, showed the Sinn Fein leader laughing and joking with senior government figures including Mo Mowlam, the Secretary of State at the time, and Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff.
Charges never stuck and we were later able to claim compensation for wrongful imprisonment.
There were many expressions of support from unexpected quarters, including one from Mowlam herself who offered to help our legal team if we were prosecuted. I asked her if she had signed the warrant to tap McGuinness's phone herself.
"Well now I signed so many, but don't you want to know if there is one for you?" she laughed.
nnn
Those days of violence and threat are now over, and who can regret their passing?
With the end of the
Troubles the Sunday Times has decided it no longer needs a member of full time staff in Northern Ireland.
Stories which will shock and intrigue English
readers on a Sunday
morning are not being
produced in Belfast.
Within Ireland the paper's emphasis is now on the republic where it employs around 28 people in its current drive to build up its circulation and
revenue in the land of
the Celtic Tiger.
Sky TV has also shut its Belfast office.
It's called normality,
and it gives us all a chance to move on to something better.
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Tuesday 29 May 2012
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