Supergrass trials: A dirty system in a dirty war... but it did have its advantages

There was a dark joke within the fractious ranks of the Irish National Liberation Army in the mid-1980s about their comrades incarcerated inside Belfast's Crumlin Road jail.

It was a prophecy about what would happen if the supergrass system collapsed, which had led to the jailing of scores of republicans and loyalists.

The joke/portent predicted that their freed colleagues would all be dead by the time the prison gates opened and they reached Carlisle Circus because they had been more busy fighting with each other than trying to escape or attack their loyalist enemies.

That black humour, of course, predated the vicious internal feud that would rip INLA apart from early 1987, which had its origins partly inside the 'Crum' when one member of one faction bit the nose off another, and where the likes of Gerard 'Dr Death' Steenson pleaded for guns to be smuggled into the prison because he feared assassination – not from the UVF or UDA but former comrades in his movement.

At one level the British State was held in the dock of international opinion over its use of paramilitary 'pentiti' – the self- confessed killers and gunmen who were given immunity from prosecution in return to giving evidence against their old mates in the IRA, INLA, UVF and, to a lesser extent, the UDA.

The supergrass system was condemned across the world and those the State recruited were dubbed "paid perjurers".

Yet from the viewpoint of the State's secret, often dirty war, it could be argued that the system, in a sense, worked.

The emergence of supergrasses created an atmosphere of internal paranoia and suspicion within all paramilitary movements and in the INLA's case, exacerbated the already deadly divisions within its ranks.

It was, of course, never clean or moral to offer deals to men who were themselves responsible for participating in heinous crimes, such as the ones UVF supergrass Gary Haggarty now stands accused of.

But Northern Ireland is not on its own when it comes to the State having to subvert natural justice and recruit some of the most violent criminals or political activists to its side.

Some of the most notorious 'pentiti' to emerge in the Italian Mafia cases of the 1980s, for example – the so-called 'Maxi Trial' in particular – involved Cosa Nostra figures with blood on their hands giving evidence.

Moreover, it could be argued that the British State, in the interest of the peace process, elevated and encouraged men who also had blood on their hands. Think of John White, for instance, who became an advocate of the loyalist ceasefire but was responsible for the horrific double torture murder of Paddy Wilson and Irene Andrews, to name but a few.

What the Haggarty trial reminds us about once more is that the war fought between 1969 to 1997, and its backwash, was indeed a dirty one, with morally dubious tactics deployed by all sides.

Even if Haggarty's evidence is deemed unfit to reach successful prosecutions, the State and its defenders will argue that at the very least this case has thrown light into the darkest recesses of yet another shadowy organisation, the UVF – one that unlike the INLA, has until recent times had a reputation for being a more coherent, united and secretive movement.

Belfast Telegraph