John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Let me begin by removing any ambiguity that may surround the phrase "collusive behaviour", as applied by the Police Ombudsman in the North, Marie Anderson, regarding her report on the relationship between the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries. Evidence of collusive behaviour is evidence of collusion. Collusion is evidenced throughout the pages of Ms Anderson's report, which details instance after instance where the security forces of the British Government engaged in a concerted campaign of murder against the very citizens it purported to govern. It was a campaign which has imprinted the names of Sean Graham's bookies, Greysteel and Castlerock, to name but a few, onto the atlas of tragedy.

It may be argued, however, that the term "collusion" is itself misleading. It suggests that the main protagonists were in some way merely aided and abetted by a third party. There is ample evidence, sitting alongside glaring patterns of historical continuity, which reveal a situation where loyalist murder gangs were provided with leadership and direction by uniformed agents of the British Government. This is the crux of the matter. The loyalist murder gangs were not just given assistance; they were led and directed by the security forces of the British Government in pursuit of the strategic objectives of the various arms of the British state. Members of the RUC and, in particular, the RUC special branch employed loyalist murder gangs as a tactical instrument against the nationalist community in an attempt to derail the peace process.

A whole chapter, or perhaps, more accurately, a whole book, is absent here on the record of British military intelligence and MI5 in Britain's dirty war in Ireland. Lest we forget, during a period when suspects were being routinely abused and tortured in Castlereagh interrogation centre, the British intelligence services had secretly bugged all the interrogation rooms there at that time. This was only discovered by RUC interrogators during a torture session. In the process of repeatedly throwing a suspect against a wall, they managed to dislodge some of the wall tiles and reveal sophisticated listening devices hidden underneath. A subsequent search by the RUC of other rooms found additional bugging devices.

The purpose of this British intelligence operation was multifold. It was intended to identify suspects who had broken under interrogation and agreed to work as informers for RUC special branch and then to allow the intelligence services to intercede through their own devices and to intimidate those informers into also working for them. This led to the situation where informers were actively working for the RUC special branch and, simultaneously, for British intelligence. It also led to the compromising of members of the RUC, who were guilty of torturing and abusing suspects during interrogations, into becoming more amenable to direction by British intelligence. In some instances, these members directly served the agenda of British intelligence for fear of prosecution for human rights abuses.

Let us be clear here that in the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a significant element within the RUC special branch which was prepared to settle for nothing less than the military defeat of the IRA.

The fledgling peace process, which the republican leadership was attempting to develop, represented a threat to the obsession of the RUC special branch with its war against the IRA. The solution the RUC special branch sought was to recruit agents from the ranks of the British armed forces and to place them within loyalist paramilitary organisations, where their military training and the assistance offered to them by their masters in both the special branch and British intelligence, brought a whole new level of operational efficiency and direction to the activities of loyalist murder gangs.

At this stage, having positioned their agents where they wanted, they then proceeded to arm them from a variety of sources, including a vast arsenal of weapons provided to loyalists by a former member of the British army working as a high-ranking agent for British intelligence, who imported the weapons from the apartheid state of South Africa. These were weapons that have been linked to close to 100 murders in the North. Many other weapons were sourced directly from serving members of the RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment, UDR, such as weapons reported lost or stolen, including the personal weapons of members of the RUC who refused to co-operate with the ombudsman's investigation. They were weapons that were used in more than 100 additional murders by loyalists during this period. In some instances, there were situations where weapons were discovered during police searches only to be handed back to loyalists by the RUC to be used again in subsequent murders.

Having placed their agents within the murder gangs and having provided them with automatic weapons, the RUC special branch and British intelligence used their agents as a conduit to provide the murder gangs with RUC and British army intelligence and training to develop sophisticated intelligence databases on targeted members of the nationalist community. The list goes on and on as does the evidence.

See this speech in context