Editorial: Naming an informer officially would undermine the whole system of running agents - as those who demand naming well know

​Today the Kenova report into the IRA agent Stakeknife will be published.​

It has already, as this column noted last week, been a very troubling saga, in which the security and intelligence successes in penetrating the IRA murder machine have been treated with suspicion.

There will be so much information to absorb today that one specific aspect of the saga is in danger of being overlooked, the naming of the late Fred Scappaticci as Stakeknife.

Scappaticci’s role as probably the most important informer within the IRA has been widely known for 20 years. This has led to pressure on Jon Boutcher to name him officially.

To do so would be to overturn a policy known as Neither Confirm Nor Deny (NCND), in which government and state officials never confirm or deny whether someone has been an informer. It is a vital policy, and it explains why informers from the 1919-1921 War of Independence in Ireland have still not been named a century later.

Think how important this policy obviously is. No-one would ever become an informer if their identity was immediately divulged by those to whom they were giving information. They would not become an informer if they thought they were going to be identified in 10 or 20 years. In fact, many people would decline to become an informer even if they only thought they were going to be named many decades after they had died. They might not, for example, want their descendants to suffer stigma in their own communities.

But there is a push to name Scappaticci on the grounds that his identity is already known. This is a misleading line of argument, because it uses an example in which an informer was widely known to undermine the very system of informing. And some people pushing for the scrapping of NCND would be happy to see that system of informing undermined