When Operation Kenova - the Stakeknife inquiry - was launched in 2016 under Bedfordshire Police chief constable John Boutcher, he said it would take five years.
So the announcement he will recommend prosecutions shortly is a dramatic surprise. Even more dramatic are his revelations of seizing secret documents from MI5 headquarters, making enemies inside MI5, uncovering a welter of fresh evidence and questioning a huge range of suspects. UTV also claims he has prepared a report for publication if the Public Prosecution Service does not act. In 2016 and again this week, Boutcher has referred to John Stalker, the former Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, who conducted a shoot-to-kill inquiry into the RUC in the mid-1980s, only to be drummed out of his job on false accusations just before his report was published.
These references now appear extremely pointed. It seems Boutcher always felt he had been handed a poisoned chalice and put a great deal of thought from the outset into preparing antidotes. An interesting New Year lies ahead.
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Nothing illustrates the witless sectarian paranoia uncorked by the Roscommon eviction than the claim by loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson that six media organisations promptly contacted him to ask if he was responsible.
The chain of reasoning apparently being followed here is that a security guard filmed saying he was British rather than Irish meant he must be a loyalist, as only a loyalist would say such a thing, which meant there must be a connection to Bryson, the internet’s best-known loyalist. This is a laughable insight into how disconnected southern journalists are from Northern Ireland - and how journalists everywhere are spending far too much time online.
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Among the dubious forces attempting to exploit the Roscommon eviction is a would-be ‘yellow vest’ movement in Ireland, modelled on recent protests in France. Meanwhile, Brexiteers in England are warning of a yellow vest movement there if EU departure is compromised. Everyone has apparently forgotten that the UK had a significant yellow vest uprising in 2000 in the form of the fuel protests, which were well understood for years afterwards to have had a major impact on New Labour government - its planned fuel escalator tax has been on hold since. The Conservative Party was accused of agitation in further protests in 2004 and 2007. It says something priceless about the British class system that people in hi-viz jackets feel invisible. The Hatton Garden robbers famously understood this: they wore hi-viz clothing while drilling into a bank in broad daylight, so that nobody would notice them.
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A frightening incident on the Larne to Cairnryan ferry, with lorries toppling over on deck during a storm, demonstrates why ‘sea border’ checks could not be done in transit.
Although such checks appear an ideal solution to Brexit conundrums and have often been suggested, including by people who should know better, they are a non-starter for safety reasons. Vehicles and loads must be secured onboard ship and still shift around in bad weather. You cannot have drivers and inspectors clambering around between them - even in hi-viz jackets.
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Queen’s University Belfast is to stop admitting undergraduates to Union Theological College, the Presbyterian seminary it partners with to provide all its theology degrees, because all the teaching staff are Presbyterian men. Queen's says this is “highly problematic and not sustainable” in today’s Northern Ireland but while its concerns are mainly focused on lack of religious balance, eyebrows will be raised elsewhere on the issue of gender. Staff gender balances vary enormously within the university - it is entirely possible to get the whole way through an engineering degree and only be taught by men, for example. Is Queen’s ready for the implications of declaring this unacceptable?
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The Northern Ireland Civil Service has embarked on advanced no-deal Brexit planning, despite being supposedly constrained by the absence of Stormont ministers. Of course, its real constraint is that is largely useless, as a thankfully minor accident this week demonstrates. A cyclist was knocked down by a car on a protected cycleway in central Belfast, right outside the offices of the Department for Infrastructure, where officials have spent two years reviewing their design of that cycleway, ignoring constant warnings it is fundamentally dangerous. All they have to do to fix it is to put a few more barriers in the holes already installed in the road. But perhaps that can only be approved by a minister.
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For the first time, an Ulster Schools GAA final has featured two integrated schools - Drumragh Integrated and the winner, Lagan College. In 2016, Drumragh was the first integrated school to reach the final. The Lagan College team has been reported by the BBC as “mostly comprising players from a non-GAA background”.
This should finally lay to rest the belief that integrated schools do not take Gaelic games seriously. Four years ago, Sinn Féin assembly member Pat Sheehan went as far as claiming integrated schools ban GAA, telling Stormont “they are a Trojan horse for eroding anything associated with Irishness.”
Sheehan was in Palestine on the day of final.
newton@irishnews.com
