The Britsh and the Provos must be held to account over depraved agent Freddie Scappaticci
by Suzanne Breen, Sunday Life
Freddie Scappaticci is one of the most depraved characters to have emerged from the Troubles. For me, he is right up there with the Shankill Butchers.
Plenty of men and women here, who joined paramilitary groups, would never have been involved in taking life had they not grown up in an abnormal society.
But Scappaticci is different. It’s not just that he perhaps enjoyed the murders in which he partook. It’s that he seems to have gotten kicks out of telling victims’ families the gruesome details later.
How else could you explain him visiting Frank Mulhern to disclose that he had to order the gunman to shoot his son a second time because the first bullet hadn’t killed him?
Yet I think there are people far more sinister and culpable than Freddie Scappaticci – those who employed him.
The high-ranking state officials with names we never get to hear who protected, and are still protecting, their agent.
The men in suits, with posh accents and fat salaries, who let Scap away with murder. The men who didn’t care what the IRA’s nutting squad did to Caroline Moreland, a single mother and low-ranking informer.
Caroline and her ilk could be thrown to the wolves to protect more valuable agents.
Darragh MacIntyre’s brilliant Spotlight programme last week contrasted the fates of the two informers and raised serious questions for the British state. Depressingly, there hasn’t been a rush by other media outlets to pursue the issue.
Secretary of State, Theresa Villiers, and other Cabinet ministers should be quizzed on air about the contents of the programme.
The Provos, of course, have major questions to answer too. They did everything possible to discredit those trying to expose Scap as a British agent in 2003.
Gerry Adams said he believed his close associate’s denials and rebuked journalists for their coverage.
Bizzarely, the Sinn Féin president said: “The losers were the media folks because in an unquestioning way they took a line from faceless people. There is a big job of work to be done by the media to redeem yourselves.”
Martin McGuinness also said he believed Scap’s denials and blamed the allegations on “nameless, faceless securocrats”.
Martin and Gerry should be held to account for how they sided against those trying to tell the truth about the dirty war and Freddie Scappaticci.
