THE SECRET POLICEMAN IN IRELAND | UNDERCOVER COP MARK KENNEDY AND THOSE HE LEFT BEHIND

Sleeping with the enemy

Mark Kennedy/Stone

BY MARY NELIS

I AM SHOCKED. Undercover British agents operating in the 26 Counties. Who ever would have guessed it? Hope Michael D Higgins hasn’t to wait as long for answers from Government Buildings or Garda HQ as the relatives of the Dublin/Monaghan bombings for an explanation as to why undercover British agents were involved in an atrocity which claimed the lives of 34 people and for which no one has ever been made amenable.
The latest revelations that British undercover agents are operating in Dublin came to light with the news of the bizarre case of Mark Kennedy, an undercover British policeman who had infiltrated eco warrior groups in England. He is now being investigated on whether his activities - including sexual liaisons with activists he was reporting on - involved crossing the lines from covert surveillance to a full-blown agent provocateur.
The ‘serious threat’ posed by campaigners on climate change was flagged up Sir Hugh Orde, President of the Association of British Chief Police Officers and former Chief Constable of the RUC. Sir Hugh has been understandably silent on the activities of the erstwhile English tree-climbing eco warrior, for it has emerged that Mark Kennedy (using the name Mark Stone) has made frequent visits to Dublin over the years to train and encourage protesting activists to attack the Garda.
According to the Guardian newspaper, the British undercover policeman was in the vanguard of militant anti-capitalist protesters who attacked the Garda at an EU summit in Dublin in 2004.
He was also reportedly involved in a training programme for anarchist activists and participated in the mass demonstration against the visit of US President George Bush to Ireland.
He has been photographed at Shell to Sea actions in Rossport, County Mayo.
And it now appears that he was not the only British undercover operative in the South in the past seven years.
Mark Kennedy has said he knows of 15 police officers who have done the same work as him - and four are still undercover.
They are just the ones he knows about who were attached to the secretive and elite National Public Order Intelligence Unit, one small part of Britain’s huge web of security agencies.
Indeed, one can speculate if such people were behind most of the violence in past demonstrations, North and South, the most prominent being the Orange Order march through Dublin in 2006 in which many onlookers, Garda and prominent media people were attacked. The finger of suspicion in all such incidents has been pointed towards republicans.
Agent provocateurs, spies and covert intelligence operators have always been part of Britain’s involvement in this island. History has taught us that Britain’s interest in Ireland has been directed at maintaining conflict in Ireland’s affairs, whether political, military, or economic.
Mark Kennedy is only one of the many hundreds of British agents whose role has been to undermine progress towards unity and democracy on this island.
When the Fianna Fáil Government was first formed in 1932, the British sent over two agents to liaise with the then leaders of Fine Gael (Cumann na nGaedhael)on how best to defeat the fledgling government. The modus operandi then and since was to ensure that whichever government was in power in Dublin would sing from the same hymn sheet as the neighbouring island.
Michael D Higgins refers to the role of British Intelligence in the North and its destructive consequences for democracy. But one needs to ask if the dirty hand of England is involved to any degree in the shambles that is now the 26-county, 90 years on from its independence.
Most of us will have forgotten the early 1970s and the arrest of two English men for a series of bank robberies in the South. The Littlejohn brothers, ex-convicts and close friends of Tory MP Geoffrey Johnson Smith and Lord Carrington, were eventually charged but not before the Irish media had instilled into the minds of an outraged Irish public that the robberies were the work of the IRA. It was suspected at the time that the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, had been informed at an early stage by his London ambassador that the Littlejohns were agents working for British Intelligence, which may go some way to explaining how they were able, some time later, to walk out of Mountjoy Prison and disappear to England.
We know that British Intelligence services have been involved in large-scale and sustained monitoring of all communications to Ireland, including diplomatic, security, business and economic data. The latest revelations that British agents are - not were, still are - encouraging civil unrest in the face of possible public demonstrations is a sinister development that in another country would require the expulsion of the Ambassador. But then perhaps Ireland is still sleeping with the enemy.