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That's 1-800-Flowers.com/acast. What you find is on both sides they've got spies going very high up and as they're spying they're also committing acts of terror. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars we end. Right now all eyes are on Washington but who's actually watching Europe at the moment?
To the Middle East now, and more than 50,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the war began. That's according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry. I'm Venetia Rainey, and this is Battle Lines. For this bonus episode, I sit down with The Telegraph's investigative audio journalist, Cara McGugan, to discuss the latest series of her award-winning podcast, Bed of Lies.
Cara won two Society of Editors Press Awards, a Media Freedom Award and a British Journalism Award for her work on the first two seasons of Bed of Lies, a series that looks at major scandals in the UK and how they're covered up. The first season was about undercover police officers and the second about the NHS infected blood scandal, which she later turned into a book called The Poison Line.
The third season, which we'll be discussing on today's episode, is about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a turbulent and hugely sensitive period of conflict right here in the UK that is ignored by many but continues to echo today. The whole season is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Just search Bed of Lies. Here's our conversation.
Kyra, welcome to Battle Lines. You've got a new season of your investigative narrative series, Bed of Lies, out. It explores the British state's involvement in the troubles in Northern Ireland and their use of agents within terror groups on both sides of the conflict. What made you choose this issue for your latest investigation? Thanks for having me on. For the first series of Bed of Lies, I investigated the undercover policing scandal. Undercover cops infiltrated left-wing groups and formed long-term relationships, romantic relationships with women they were spying on.
Shortly after I'd made that series, I was reading a book about the Troubles and I saw two lines in there about an agent who'd been involved in killing someone. And I thought that sounds worryingly like the series that I've made. But in this case, people are being killed.
So I knew that that was something I wanted to come back to. So I kind of made a second series of Bed of Lies about a very different scandal and then decided to return to the kind of world of spies for this series. But overall for me, Bed of Lies is about state cover-up, institutional cover-up, where survivors have been let down for decades and the public awareness is lacking. And I should tell our listeners that the first and second season are absolutely fantastic. The second season you covered the infected blood scandal in the NHS.
both very much worth listening to. One thing that really struck me, and I worked as an executive producer on this podcast with you, is that despite the fact that this conflict happened within the UK, within our living memory, it's shocking how little people who I was speaking to about making this series knew about this conflict outside of Northern Ireland. And I include myself in that. You know, this subject is not taught in schools. And my main reference point prior to working on this was the IRA bombings in London.
Can you start by explaining to listeners who might have my lack of familiarity with the subject what The Troubles was about? Yeah, I totally agree with you. That was one of the reasons also that I wanted to get into this is that I think over here on the mainland in England, our knowledge of The Troubles is severely lacking. I remember my A-level history teacher actually said that
don't answer the question on Northern Ireland, it's too complicated. Instead, let's focus on the death of the Liberal Party in 1914, which is, you know, very useful knowledge. So yeah, it's been a bit of a learning curve for all of us. So at the end of the 1960s, there's civil rights movements around the world. And in Northern Ireland, it's no different. There's protests there.
But those are for kind of one man, one vote, because there the Catholic community were sort of being discriminated against. They were seen as almost like a lower tier of society.
The Protestants were aligned with the rest of the UK, you know, Church of England. They were kind of wanting to stay part of the UK. And they often held the kind of higher jobs, you know, managerial. They had privileges in society. And you found that in some cases, Protestant people could vote more than once because if you owned property, you could vote. And if you owned business...
Whereas Catholics found themselves discriminated against. It was harder to get work. They did lower paid jobs. It was very hard to buy housing, get council housing. And so there was this sort of swell of protests to try and get equal rights. But that was kind of met with a backlash by British military kind of quashing protests, sometimes with too heavy a hand.
And it led to this kind of upsurge in violence. And you had the Protestant loyalists on one side who were fighting to stay part of the United Kingdom. And on the other side, you had Republican Catholic people who wanted to leave the UK and unite with Ireland.
As the 70s hit, the kind of violence surged and surged. There were multiple incidents of the British Army kind of sparking further issues, heavy-handed use of riot batons and rubber bullets and Bloody Sunday. And so there's this kind of real upsurge and you've got the sort of three parties would be the IRA who want to unite with Ireland, the loyalists who want to kind of protect Protestant communities and stay part of the UK and then the British Army
and the police kind of trying to get a handle on the kind of growing unrest. Okay, and we'll tuck into those three actors in a moment.
When we think about conflict, we think about death toll. What was the death toll for this conflict? So in total, around three and a half thousand people died from the end of the 60s until the end of the 90s. And some 47,000 were seriously injured. And Northern Ireland's a small place. The population is about two million. So when you think of that kind of scale of that
Almost everybody I met in Northern Ireland knows someone who was killed or injured and has experienced some form of trauma from the Troubles themselves, either having lived through it or because their parents, their grandparents did. There's a funny, slightly euphemistic thing about the name The Troubles. It's not really referred to as a civil war, is it?
Why not? And where did the name The Troubles come from? Like everything in Northern Ireland, that's a very kind of political issue. You would find that kind of Catholic Republican people might actually be more inclined to say this was a civil war, whereas the British establishment doesn't want to acknowledge that. So that's how it became known as The Troubles. And that has been a term used throughout Irish history. But I think you'll find it's the sort of like...
British perspective being put on the kind of the issues, the troubles happening over there. But is there another name for it in Northern Ireland that people use to refer to this period? I haven't heard of another name for it, but I have spoken to people who have said it was a civil war and they kind of like repeat that idea. Let's talk a bit more about the main players in this conflict.
A lot of people will have heard about the Catholic Republican Terror Group, the IRA, but I'm willing to bet a lot less people have heard of the Protestant loyalist counterparts, the UDA and the UVF. Can you tell us a bit about them? So like I said with the word the Troubles, there's a lot to get your head around in this. There's a lot of acronyms, there's a lot of kind of words you should use, shouldn't use or certain phrases to use to some people and not others. For example, if you're in a Republican area, most people will call it the North of Ireland and what's
will get quite upset if you call it Northern Ireland. Whereas if you're speaking to loyalists, Protestant people, they would get upset if you said the North of Ireland. So there's a lot to kind of get your head around. And it's the same with the actual paramilitary groups themselves.
The IRA, over the years, they've kind of evolved and they've split off into different factions and kind of developed over time. So you have the official IRA, the provisional IRA, which is the one that we mostly, when we think of the IRA, it's the provisionals we're thinking of, sometimes called the provos. Then now you've got the real IRA, the new IRA. People, you know, fall out, create a splinter group. One's more violent than the other, fighting each other, fighting the loyalists, etc., etc.,
On the loyalist side, similarly fractured groups, a lot of their names have Ulster in their titles because Ulster is the county in the north part of Ireland and six of the counties of Ulster make up Northern Ireland.
So you've got the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster Defence Association, UVF, UDA, then there's others, UFF, etc, etc. And they often started as sort of like community protection. You've got the kind of violence in the Republican areas. So they're kind of taking out guns to kind of march around their communities and protect. But then they're also going into the Republican areas to like have street fights and protests.
cause problems at night time with each other so they kind of start up and then they grow and grow and then eventually they're setting off bombs just like the IRA more so in Northern Ireland than outside
but committing similar atrocities as they fight each other. Okay, so you've got these groups, you've got the IRA, which is fighting for Northern Ireland or the North of Ireland, as they would refer to it, to be reunited with mainland Ireland. And then you've got the UDA, UVF, these Protestant paramilitary organisations, normally with Ulster at the beginning, who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK.
Within these groups, and this is what your series really focuses on, you have all these agents who are working for the British state. Sometimes the army, sometimes the police force, sometimes shadowy units within the army, which we'll get onto.
The most famous of those is Stakenife. Can you start by telling us a bit about him and why people might have heard his name recently? Stakenife was a top army agent in the IRA and he was in a unit of the IRA called the Nutting Squad, the internal security unit, which were trying to root out spies within the IRA. So it's quite ironic that one of the top spy catchers was himself a spy.
There's a culture of deep suspicion about agents because you've got these intense loyalties and you've got, you know, to your area, to the kind of politics of the area and the groups that are sort of running these areas. So anyone who's spying is a deep betrayal. In the IRA's minds, a spy or a tout is a death sentence, is the punishment.
And often it's the same on the loyalist side. Stakeknife was trying to root out spies for police, army and so forth while spying himself. He was involved in 14 murders and 15 abductions. And the way the IRA would always try and send a message. So people would be stripped, interrogated. There's often forms of torture used. And then
shot in the back of the head or nutted and then their bodies sort of abandoned to be found in quite public ways you know down an alleyway on a roadside there's lots of news reports from the troubles of these kind of like bound gagged bodies just kind of discarded and then you also have what's called the disappeared where people were taken and their bodies have never been found the
The police and army would say these spies were helping them build a picture, like an intelligence picture that would help them kind of bring the troubles to an end. What you find is on both sides, they've got spies going very high up. And as they're spying, they're also committing acts of terror. In the last episode of the series, you spoke to a relative of a victim of Stakeknife who was breaking his silence for the first time about his father's abduction and murder. Let's hear a clip from that.
Like many families before him, Paul decided he needed more help. So he went to lawyer Kevin Winters. What do you want to achieve now, ultimately? I want to read everything that pertains to my dad's death.
And if I get to see unredacted files relating to Dad's case, you'd never hear from us again.
Paul has a new strategy to get what he wants. I'm going to try and move forward and get a public inquiry. I believe I have a duty to my father to go as far as I can and say at the end of the day, I did my utmost, I did my best. There's nothing more I can do. And do you think a public inquiry should focus on Stakeknife or do you think there should be a wider public inquiry on agents across the board? I think the public inquiry should be on MI5 and the state.
MI5 have done nothing but hinder, obstruct, obscure, and nigh-at-the-minute delay.
Paul Wilson's only just decided to break his silence because he's been upset by the current inquiry into Stakeknife and doesn't feel that it will bring him justice after all this time. So he's now kind of wanting to tell his story. And that's a sign for me of just how badly families have been let down over this kind of 30-year cover-up. One of the other agents that you look at who's working for
A Protestant paramilitary organisation, the UDA, is Brian Nelson. People have probably heard a bit less about him, but he's very well known within Northern Ireland. Tell us a bit about what he did. So Brian Nelson has been described to me as Stakeknife's mirror image in the UDA. He was the head of intelligence for the UDA, and that meant it was his job to kind of pick out targets for the UDA to go after, i.e. to shoot and kill. In his role as an army agent, he had a suitcase full of
police records, official intelligence about IRA figures that he would then hand out to gunmen and say, oh, we should pick off this person and they'd go off and shoot them. So he's directly involved in planning and conducting these killings. And all the while he's got the help of the army and he's in the pay of them. I find it quite fascinating. These two agents are receiving a
tens of thousands of pounds over many years. There's instances of them being offered family holidays as a break from their intense work as a spy and their handlers in the army sort of knowing full well the work that they're getting up to while they're also spying. You've spoken to the children of Michael Power. Brian Nelson is believed to have been involved in his murder. We're going to hear a short clip from them now.
The first shot blew out the front windows, the two front windows. The noise was deafening. I mean, we couldn't hear. It was just that ringing in your ears. To me, it was just like silence with the ringing, the constant ringing. When you fire a shotgun, it sprays. Almost like if you were to put your thumb over a hose, you know, the top of a hose at high pressure, and it kind of sprays out in all directions.
The shrapnel hit my eyes so I actually couldn't see. I just was in immediate pain. I felt like they've missed me and I kept myself low under the back seat. That was the headshot that they fired through the windscreen, striking my father. My father was covered in blood. There was just blood everywhere. The blood was all over him, it was all over the car. I didn't want to leave him. I tapped him on his arm and was calling his name and, you know, he didn't respond obviously.
When I got out of the car, I felt so alone. I just ran, ran down the street. I remember just shouting, "They've missed me, but they've got my dad. They've missed me, but they've got my dad."
So yes, that was Gavin and Michelle who've been fighting for answers about their dad Michael's killing for many, many years. He was killed in the late 80s and, you know, to this day they don't have answers and justice over that. Brian Nelson wrote a diary of everything he did and he laid out how he was at a meeting with gunmen as they plotted to kill Michael Power as he drove to church with his family in the car. He then met with the gunmen afterwards. He's written their names down.
Those names would have been known to his handlers. But rather than using that intelligence of stopping the attack against Michael Power or using it to catch his killers, he cooks up a plan with the army handlers to actually get more involved in the UDA, to climb the ranks and say to his boss, oh, well, this Michael Power killing, that was such a shock because...
he was an innocent family man, had nothing to do with the IRA, we shouldn't have killed him. So we need to actually get more professional in our targeting, put me in charge. So you can see the sort of like workings through that story of how Brian Nelson as a spy doesn't seem to be there to protect people and to arrest
violent gunman, but actually to, you know, climb his way through the ranks. That's the whole problem with this. It's everything is in service of intelligence and gathering intelligence. Stakeknife, Brian Nelson, other agents across the board are
They get more and more involved in vicious crimes because their handlers say they're gathering useful intelligence. They need them to be climbing the ranks. But the families now say, well, why haven't the gunmen been brought to justice? Why wasn't that attack stopped? If a spy was in there, as it was being planned, my dad should still be alive.
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Your series looks at lots more agents. Stake Knife, Freddy Scappaticci and Brian Nelson were not the only agents by any stretch. And you go to a great length to make that point. But I want to move on to the people who were handling them, the army, the police and these shadowy units within the army. Why don't you start by telling us about the FRU? Yes. So there was this clandestine unit of the British Army that was at work in Northern Ireland called the Force Research Unit or FRU.
And their job was to infiltrate the paramilitary groups to gather military intelligence. And then you had the police's special branch also infiltrating them to gather more police intelligence. Now, where exactly the divisions lie there is quite complicated. And there's actually quite a lot of infighting between those two. But essentially what it means is you have...
the police, the army and MI5 all infiltrating the paramilitaries and there's kind of hundreds of agents running across the board throughout the troubles. The force research unit was run by a man called Brigadier Gordon Kerr and it's been described as being a maverick unit. A recent inquiry into Stakeknife said that agent handling was often seen as a sort of dark art practiced off the books.
That very much appears to be the case. The Frou was formed at the end of the 70s when Margaret Thatcher wanted to get a handle on the Troubles. She felt that there had been too many attacks that they had failed to stop, not least Lord Mountbatten, a relative of the Queen.
So Margaret Thatcher took the former head of MI6 out of retirement, Sir Maurice Oldfield, sent him to Northern Ireland and said, kind of, we need to get a handle on this, revamp whatever's going on over there. And out of that was born this new intelligence structure where it was intelligence first, arrests later. So rather than...
paramilitary members, putting them in prison for terror offences, which had been a big early strategy. It was now bring them in and try and turn them and bring them onto our side. And that was happening in kind of police cells across the board and in kind of military circles as well. And this created...
what has been sort of thought of as a sort of protected species because people that were brought in who agreed to become agents informers would be let off crimes and like Brian Nelson and steak knife found to almost have a license to kill when they're in the field and
rather than kind of, we're going to use this intelligence to catch people and put them in prison. I mean, you end up with this slightly ridiculous situation, which in some murders like that of Pat Finucane, the lawyer who was representing mostly Catholics, you have multiple agents working alongside each other who appear to have been involved in his murder.
How deep does the collusion go? And I know that's a word that features prominently in the series. How serious did you find that it was? We don't know the full extent of agents. There's still lots of them who are kind of question mark agents. But the picture presented is that
The paramilitaries were, the police and army did a very effective job of infiltrating them and agents were scattered throughout. So you found agents were working alongside one another that didn't know about it, going all the way up to the top of organisations. There's stories of kind of heads of paramilitaries speaking with the police and getting information back and forth. That's more on the problem.
Protestant side rather than Republican. And yes, then you have cases like the murder of Pat Finucane, where there's multiple agents involved in that. You have Brian Nelson, then you've got police special branch agents who were actually involved in shooting him. And then the getaway driver, when he was caught by the police afterwards, was actually turned into an informer, like I said previously about how turn people onto your side, don't convict them.
So it seems to have basically become a sort of lawless system. Now, the handlers would push back on that and they would say that that wasn't the case and they were doing a very hard job, but they would all immediately admit...
that there was no legal framework. And one person I spoke to, Ray White, the former head of special branch in Belfast, actually went to Margaret Thatcher and said, I'm breaking about five laws every day when I go into work, you know, by encouraging people to join terror groups, going further into them, speaking to them about their plans to pick up weapons and attack people.
And sort of Margaret Thatcher went back to London, spoke with people around her. What should they do? And the sort of word that came back was carry on doing what you're doing, but don't get caught. Now, Ray is firmly on the side of there was no collusion. That needs to involve basically a handler going to a terrorist and saying, shoot that person. We shouldn't be left, as it were, being labelled terrorists.
as being collusive. Do you think there were any mistakes that were made that you would put on record? There was mistakes, I'm sure. And I'm not saying that the police service or the military were entirely clean. When you have 30,000-odd people through the police service and a quarter of a million through the military...
You're bound to have a bad apple or two, as it were, in the barrel. The picture was a lot more complicated than that. And, you know, examples I've said, like not stopping attacks, not catching killers afterwards, generally not seemingly using this intelligence to make society safer and paying money towards society.
people who are in terror groups to continue doing those jobs. All that kind of paints a pretty damning picture of collusion. The state's argument for this whole policy of having so many agents in all these paramilitary groups was that they wanted to frustrate their efforts and they argue that ultimately they saved more lives than they cost. Where did you come down on that in your reporting? It's hard to really know because
It's so secretive. They will never say we stopped all of these attacks. So I was told that there were whole weapons caches, explosive devices seized from paramilitaries because of the work of agents that stopped...
many bombings from happening etc but we can't know about the bombings that never happened and you know in America sort of the CIA and FBI I think are very good at actually publicizing their successes whereas we have this culture of secrecy that means that to this day they can't tell us so we can't fully know the accounting but what we do know is that there are families that
hundreds of families who have found out that their loved ones were brutally killed and an agent was involved. And to this day, they don't have justice. And as they're fighting for that, they're being met by brick wall after brick wall from the state, claiming national security and not giving them answers. So it's very hard to establish the picture. But what we do know is that
When the Ministry of Defence has come up with calculations of Brian Nelson and steak knife Freddy Scappaticci and how many lives they cost versus saved, both times the Army came up with, the Ministry of Defence came up with a number that was
in the hundreds and both times inquiries have found out that was vastly overinflated and both agents cost many more lives than they saved. I want to pick up on something you briefly mentioned there and that I found very interesting while I was working on the series but you didn't have the time to get into it in full length and that's where these weapons were coming from that were fueling the conflict. You mentioned Libya and South Africa in the series. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Northern Ireland's a very small place and obviously it's on an island so they were not
making their own weapons, but it was large imports that kind of really caused these kind of surges of violence. And the Republican side, they were getting a lot of help from Libya, from Gaddafi. And on the loyalist side, there was a big weapons hall that came in from South Africa. And actually, Agent Brian Nelson helped coordinate that import. And
where the army should have sort of monitored that import, and they did do this on other occasions, monitored that import and then either sort of what's known as jerked the weapons, which is kind of making them less effective, or bugging them so that they could kind of monitor them, or seizing them. They failed to. They lost sight of that weapon haul and...
those weapons flooded this area called Middlestar where the loyalist UVF gang kind of had a real upsurge of violence and I've spoken to many people from that area who you know teenagers teenage girls teenagers
people's siblings killed in brutal ways by these guns that Brian Nelson helped import from South Africa. There's a lot of very strong accounts from civilians, just ordinary people in Northern Ireland who are caught in the middle of all of this. One of the most powerful stories I thought was in episode eight where you talk about the mobile shop murders in Craigavon in Mid-Alster, that area you just mentioned. Can you tell us a bit about that story? So this is just a heartbreaking story. It was three people killed in a mobile shop in a shooting range.
by a loyalist gunman. Two teenage girls, Eileen and Katrina...
an older man, Brian, and two of them were kind of hanging out in the shop. One came to buy stuff and a gunman kind of sped around the corner, jumped out and shot them at point blank range. And he has never been caught, even though the families know exactly who he is. Recently, a civil court found him liable for the killings. He's called Alan Oliver. But to this day, there's been sort of no repercussions for him. He's sort of been involved in a
as many as 14 murders, one of which he conducted without a balaclava, so he was actually identified. And the gun, one of these guns brought in from South Africa that seemed to belong to him has been sort of connected to all these killings.
Now, with the sort of murky world of collusion, the state secrecy that we've seen, the families believe Alan Oliver may have been a state agent and that's why he seems to have been protected. He was named by the getaway driver as the shooter of the Craig Avan mobile shop murders, but he was never arrested for it. So there's a question of why. Was it poor policing or was there an ulterior motive there? Let's hear a clip from...
The relatives of one of the victims of the mobile shop murders, Katrina Rennie, were going to hear from her mother, Mary, and her sister, Fiona. In all my reporting for this series, my conversations with these families have been among the most heartbreaking. Katrina's mum, Mary, and her sister, Fiona, were in tears as soon as I sat down with them. The whole house was just cold. There was no smiling, no happiness, no... Everything was just...
It was just blank. You just had to get on and work with your life and that was it. And go to bed at night, that's when you went to bed at night, all your worries started. When there was nobody listening, you cried yourself maybe to sleep so nobody heard you. I was out lost, I'd be out day and night looking for her and I wouldn't stop until I found her. But I know she's not where she is, she's not coming back. That's the sad thing about it, none of them are coming back. Whenever I was 11, I developed epilepsy.
I got the epilepsy. It was psychological. I didn't cope. I didn't cope. Still, I'm not coping.
I'm speaking to you just after the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which in 1998 finally brought an end to the worst of the violence of the Troubles. What was it like going to Northern Ireland to report this today? Does it feel like this is a country at peace with that history? It's a real mixed picture. I think you find some people who are like, why are you digging around in that now? We've all moved on. We want to move on. We don't want to keep raking up the past.
Some people who are desperate to get their stories out there and who's still searching for the truth after so long, who feel that they've sort of been left behind because the rest of the UK, as we said at the beginning, just know very little about this and it's seen as an over-there problem and not kind of like Westminster national government issue. And then you have a small fraction of people who are still fighting with one another. The paramilitaries exist in England
certain forms still there is some violence there's a lot of criminal racketeering type behavior more so from those now involved in kind of drugs and other criminality as opposed to pure political violence but they do still exist
I think one of the things that surprises a lot of visitors to Belfast is the peace walls, which still divide sections of the city who were at war with one another for 30 years. There's a sort of tourism industry that's grown up in Belfast. It's a lovely place. I highly recommend it.
You will not find better pubs. They are my favourite pubs ever. It's a really good place to visit. But there's these kind of retired black taxis and often it was a lot of ex-paramilitary members. I don't think they always are, but...
They have been. And they drive you around the kind of areas of Belfast where the troubles began. And you see the peace walls, you see the murals, the kind of bright colors, the distinction on both sides of like the Union Jack, the Irish flag, your sort of hunger striker Bobby Sands on the Republican side, and then sort of like William of Orange and the king in the Protestant loyalist area.
And what you find out from the drivers will sort of take you and then at the end, they'll go, well, which side do you think I'm on? And make you sort of guess their allegiances. One driver, I've done it three times, real fangirl. One of the drivers told me that, you know, even people from the Republic of Ireland have expressed surprise at the peace wars. It's just something that it's not really like broadcast, you don't really know about it. But there's
miles and miles of them across Northern Ireland, dividing these areas, keeping people safe. They were meant to come down 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement. So when I first pitched this idea, I was sort of thinking 2023 was like a crucial year that these walls were going to come down. But there's been sort of no conversation about that. And it seems for now that they're there to stay. Yeah.
Your reporting for Bed of Lies focuses, as you mentioned earlier, on the cover-up, but also on the process of justice and accountability. You go over a lot of the inquiries and investigations that have occurred over the years to try and expose the worst of the troubles.
What do you think hasn't been done that needs to be done to address what one person describes to you as these festering wounds? And what are the costs of not doing it? I think everybody sort of knows the phrase like truth and reconciliation. From, you know, South Africa was a big example after apartheid. They had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And it acknowledged this idea that after a real kind of catastrophic disaster,
in society, if you kind of have the truth, you acknowledge that, you allow people to kind of confront one another in a safer space, give answers, apologise, that can sort of foster reconciliation. That has never happened in Northern Ireland. And one person, as you say, said to me, until these wounds are healed...
they'll continue to fester. There's been talk of like different ideas over the years of how to address this. The most recent one, the Legacy Act, suggested an amnesty. So to allow for the idea of truth for like ex-paramilitary members, soldiers, etc., to come forward and sort of
own up to what they've done so that victims and families got the truth but without the fear of them going to prison but that has caused complete uproar nobody wants that so it's really hard to know exactly what to do but I think at the moment the idea of doing nothing is not really viable I've
in my reporting in the last two series, I've seen how a public inquiry can address these issues after so many years. And for the people with undercover policing and infected blood...
All they wanted was a public inquiry. And those inquiries have offered them the answers and the kind of space for anger, closure, hopefully getting compensation. So I've started to think that maybe there needs to be a public inquiry into agents in the troubles in order to just kind of like rip that bandaid off and like address it head on.
There was a kind of commission, the Ames Bradley Commission, which would have created a sort of truth and reconciliation type model and involved a plan to bring down the peace walls, etc., which I think people thought was very sensible. But the Legacy Act, which the Conservative government brought in and Labour's now kind of amending, doesn't seem like it's going to do the job. And why?
what's the cost of not doing something? Is this a conflict that could erupt again, do you think? I think from people I've spoken to, they don't feel like
the troubles would kick off again. I've spoken to like former IRA members who actually say we think we're better off staying part of the UK now. We've got the NHS, we've got kind of social care that we might not have if we were part of Ireland. So it's kind of there has been a sort of shift and now for the first time Catholics are a majority in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin are a majority party there. So
society is shifting. Maybe we'll see a referendum one day, like we did in Scotland, whether or not it would lead to a yes or a no, I don't know. I think, you know, we've had Brexit, which has caused another real division, because once more, you've got the kind of Republican side that want to be part of Ireland, part of the EU, and then the kind of Protestant side who want to be part of the UK out of the EU. And then the border issues. I
As my history teacher said, it's always very complicated. But I think the paramilitaries do still exist, but I haven't had a sense from anyone I've spoken to that it's likely to kind of erupt into violence again. But I think it's not a resolved issue and it's something that we're going to still be talking about for years to come.
That was Cara McGugan talking about the latest season of her investigative podcast, Bed of Lies. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. Just search Bed of Lies. We'll also link to the first episode of season three in the show notes. That's all for this episode of Battlelines. We'll be back again on Friday with an exclusive interview with former UK ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch. We'll be discussing Trump, trade and Tehran. Until then, goodbye.
Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles and hosted by me, Venetia Rainey and Roland Oliphant. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battle Lines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it really helps others find the show.
To stay on top of all of our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter, or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest. You can get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes. The producer is Peter Shevlin. The executive producer is Louisa Wells.
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