SPIN member Dr. Thomas Leahy (Cardiff University), along with Dr. Eleanor Leah Williams (University of Oxford), have published an article in Intelligence and National Security, offering a case study on how state and non-state actors try to address alleged and self-confessed informing.
The legacy of informers in all conflicts is complex. Northern Ireland is no different. Those accused of or self-confessed to informing on the Irish Republican Army before 1998 have a difficult place in legacy discussions. Both the IRA and UK state have reservations about engaging with alleged or self-confessed informers. Nonetheless, some progress has been made. But divisions between those accused of informing and those self-confessed in their perceptions of what informing involved means a single process to deal with their cases won’t work. The UK Government’s recent unilateral conflict legacy amnesty bill has made this area more complex.
This open access article is available here.
The case of Northern Ireland and ex-IRA informers demonstrates the difficulty of dealing with the informer legacy post-conflict. We explain why Sinn Féin and the UK state have dealt with some conflict legacy cases involving informers but not with others. Contemporary political and reputational reasons are an important explanation, but there are also legal considerations and communal pressures at play. Divisions amongst alleged and self-confessed informers further facilitate this unstructured approach to legacy. These difficulties with informers’ legacy are not unique to Northern Ireland. Similar challenges in reconciling former state agents with paramilitaries are evident across other conflicts.