Three hours, 10 minutes and 3,600 lives later, it was over

● Reading aloud the names of all those lost in the Troubles was a radical act of empathy

Islipped into the Unitarian Church on St Stephen’s Green on Friday, just in time to hear the reader at the head of the church say “Jean McConville”.

There was no pause to let the name’s significance settle in, no elaboration on the immense tragedy and enduring trauma that that name evokes.

The reader moved on.

“John McConville, died 1976. John McConville, died 1983. Martin Paul McConville.”

There were 30 or so people in the church for this, the annual reading of the names of the lives lost during the Troubles.

The Unitarian Church first held this event on Good Friday in 2001. Early on, they asked themselves would they continue indefinitely; they decided if there were no conflict deaths for five years and the peace process appeared secure, they would stop.

The journalist Lyra McKee was shot dead by a dissident republican during a riot in Derry in 2019.

The fifth anniversary of her death falls on April 18. So it was decided that this would be the final year of the reading.

People came in and out. The readers changed. There were brief interludes for music: pianist Will O’Connell played Peace on Earth by Luka Bloom. And the names continued.

Some of the names were memorable, or notorious. Louis Mountbatten. Robert Nairac. Thomas Niedermayer. Bobby Sands. Billy Wright.

Others stood out simply because they were different.

Abayonni Max Olorenda, from Nigeria, an accountant living in Belfast with his wife and three children, was burned to death in January 1980 when an IRA bomb exploded prematurely on the 4.55pm train from Ballymena to Belfast.

He was killed alongside a schoolboy, Mark Cochrane, and one of the bombers, Kevin Delaney, whose wife was pregnant at the time.

In a statement, the IRA said: “Unfortunately the unexpected is not something we can predict or prevent in the war situation this country is in.”

This is recorded in the book Lost Lives, from which the list of names was taken.

But most of the names were not ones I had forgotten, but ones that I had never known. And it was the relentless, cumulative impact of these that left the greatest impression.

On and on they came. To treat them all with equal dignity was a radical act of empathy.

Then — more than 3,600 names later, after three hours and 10 minutes — it was over.

The minister, Rev Brigid Spain, gave a final blessing. “May love and peace be among us and all people in the days to come.”

What would it mean if Martin McGuinness was exposed as a long-standing informer at the top of the Provisional IRA? For decades, whispered suggestions that the IRA’s Derry commander was a protected species under the watch of the British security forces existed only on the fringes of serious discussion about the Troubles. But that is changing.

Last week, the BBC broadcast an extraordinary investigative documentary. It centred on a film by US writer J Bowyer Bell, in which he was embedded with the IRA at the height of the Troubles in 1972. The worldwide rights to the film were bought by a company that mysteriously then never sold a single copy, leaving it to languish in a store for half-a-century.

The film is dramatic. McGuinness is seen openly preparing a car bomb that injured at least 26 people in Derry, part of a two-day blitz that left eight people dead. Other IRA members, from a 17-year-old schoolgirl to Army Council veterans, talked openly about their actions.

Bowyer Bell’s own CV shows he not only worked for the CIA (though he claimed that began two years later), but had its highest security clearance. The man he recruited to direct the film, Zwy Aldouby, appears to have had no experience of film-making, but had worked for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

Aldouby’s own son, Illan, said he didn’t really know who his “international man of mystery” father was, and that it would be a “clear fit” for him to be working with Mossad at the time, perhaps because of the IRA’s links to Colonel Gaddafi.

The film’s executive producer told the BBC’s Darragh MacIntyre that Bowyer Bell privately said British intelligence viewed the film reels after he took them to London to be developed. The inescapable question here involves McGuinness: why was this evidence not used to jail him, or even interrogate him and then bring charges against one of the IRA’s top figures?

Taken alone, that question would be intriguing. But there are many other dots to be joined.

Almost two decades ago, former British army intelligence officer Ian Hurst (then using the pseudonym Martin Ingram) claimed McGuinness had been working for MI6, with the code J118. Hurst was the person who revealed Freddie Scappaticci was British agent Stakeknife. Top republicans lined up to scorn those questioning Scappaticci’s loyalty to the IRA, but Hurst was proved right.

That doesn’t mean he’s right about McGuinness, but it means he can’t be immediately dismissed.

Unlike Stakeknife, however, Hurst made clear his evidence on McGuinness being an informer didn’t come from his time in the military, but was based on a document later given to him. The distinguished journalist Liam Clarke, the first to publish Hurst’s allegations, came to believe the document had been forged before being given to Hurst, but that paradoxically it led to other, more credible, suspicions about McGuinness emerging.

Raymond Gilmour, a Derry IRA man who became an informer, said at the time: “I could never understand how I was allowed to run so long and do so much damage. Now I can see McGuinness was looking out for me.”

However, that story died away, and McGuinness went on to become Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister and shake hands with Queen Elizabeth. He presided over the longest period of devolved government since the 1972 collapse of devolution, which he had helped to topple.

More recently, a slew of separate claims has added to the questions around this republican icon.

MI5 agent Willie Carlin was so close to McGuinness in Derry that he wrote his statements. In his 2019 memoir, the exiled former Provo said he saw McGuinness in a car at MI5’s safe house in Limavady and that MI5 worked to protect McGuinness.

Last year, ex-IRA man Richard O’Rawe was told by several former IRA members that they either believed or suspected McGuinness was an informer.

A Derry city commander told O’Rawe: “Years ago, if someone had said to me that [Freddie Scappaticci] was a dodgy boy, I’d have said, ‘You’re full of shit’. Same thing with Martin. In fact, if somebody had told me Martin was a tout, I might have shot his accuser. Not so sure now.”

The evidence pointing towards the possibility that McGuinness in some way co-operated with Britain is circumstantial. It includes the fact that Derry went from being the hub of the Troubles to one of the quietest areas, McGuinness’s promotion of agents to key posts and the way in which IRA hardliners opposed to Adams and McGuinness were marginalised or wiped out, sometimes by the SAS.

Shane Paul O’Doherty, a Derry IRA member who later repented after becoming a Christian, recently drew attention to how, in 1973, two IRA men suddenly recognised a British court to take responsibility for explosives found in a car with two young women. One of those women, Bernadette Canning, was McGuinness’s girlfriend and they married the following year.

O’Doherty said the incident showed McGuinness “was capable of blatant acts of self-interest”. He highlighted that the policy did not extend to other females facing IRA charges, many of whom ended up in jail for years.

The RUC was close to bringing charges against McGuinness in the early 1990s, in what it codenamed Operation Taurus, but it was stopped. That may have been political interference to protect the growing peace process. However, with the Provisionals now known to have been saturated with informers right up to senior levels, how can we be sure?

A former RUC Special Branch officer told me last week he did not think McGuinness was an informer, though he said it would have been above his rank if he was.

Why was this evidence never used to jail McGuinness or even to interrogate him?

McGuinness is dead, so if he was an informer, he can’t confirm it, either by an admission or by fleeing. His handlers, if they existed, are unlikely to do so. What is clear is that Britain’s security agencies decided to keep Adams and McGuinness in post, while others, such as hardliner Brian Keenan, were put behind bars.

If McGuinness was providing information to the security services, it would be disastrous for Sinn Féin, which has deified him. But it would also be awkward for a lot of unionists.

While there are many possibilities, from his being a full-blown agent to someone who gave limited co-operation where it suited him, if the man they hated for decades was, in fact, working for their side, that opens up the possibility that their side allowed him to inflict on them the horrific pain many of them endured.

Three years ago, Sinn Féin’s Joe Dwyer suggested a statue of McGuinness should be installed at Stormont to “show how far things have come”. If such a statue were erected, who knows which side might be paying their respects there a century from now?