Ah, the silence from the Shinners: the sound of stunned disbelief. This is their worst nightmare come horribly true, when the one single repository of all their secrets turns out to be an agent for the other side.
No secrets, boys: no secrets. Scap knows everything. No wonder you're not calling for a sworn public inquiry into the affair. And suddenly even the Stevens inquiry looks uncommonly like a harrier circling over your hen-coop. Because remember, boys: the Stevens enquiry leaks. It has leaked repeatedly. All your worst secrets can come out. Oh lie awake and sweat, boys, lie awake and sweat.
Other people should be sweating, in the compact of evil that bound the IRA and the Force Research Unit. If an employee of the British government was allowed to interrogate, torture, murder other employees of the British government and others who suspected of such a relationship, then where stands the rule of law? Where stands democracy? Most of all, where now the sense that the state expects higher standards from its servants than those observed by its terrorist enemies?
There are many tragedies in this affair, not least the forfeiture of the moral argument against the IRA and other terrorist organisations. If the FRU was allowing the IRA to murder people, then it was complicit in those murders. If it permitted its agent to torture and kill people, then not merely is it guilty, but so too are those in the British government who knew of and tolerated the FRU licence to murder by proxy.
And though the Shinners - and all their secret auxiliaries in different branches of life in Northern Ireland and the Republic - might now be nervously wondering what will come out, they have had a lifeline thrown to them. This enables the creator of the republican narrative of these Troubles to say: We didn't kill these people, those poor unfortunates bound hand and foot, lying in crumpled heaps on the Border. No, the British did, through their secret agent, Scap.
Such is the unquestioning acquiescence of the political classes in Ireland and Britain towards the creation of the republican narrative of the Troubles that the Shinners might almost have got away with that. But the problem is that Scap is still alive. He is not lying in a bog somewhere. The British have him. And though the British are probably as anxious to keep him quiet as the Shinners are, he knows the truth: he knows who did what, and said what. His story is worth a fortune.
Because though the FRU might have directed loyalists to kill republicans, as far as we can see it "merely" permitted republicans to murder people.
And now those republican leaders can be sure that all those meetings they had with Scap to get this person bumped off, and that person bumped off - Scap has the goods on them. The FRU might have allowed the murders to go ahead, but the killers were still IRA men and women acting on the heathen mandate they derived from their Fenian dead, to whom they have repeatedly turned whenever they've sought permission to enlarge the heavenly host.
He knows, for example, which Shinner commissioned the abduction, torture and murder of Caroline Moreland, a single mother of three from the Falls, just before the first ceasefire, to get her out of the way because such a killing might soon be no longer possible. (As it happened, there was virtually nothing the IRA could do that would undermine the almost insatiable desire of the two governments to appease it, but it couldn't be sure of that at the time. It soon grew to know better.)
One man contains the truest narrative of the Troubles in his head and neither the British nor the Provisionals will want him to speak out. No wonder there are no Shinner demands for a sworn public inquiry into the Scappaticci affair: no wonder the grisly crew that runs the republican movement do not want a Saville inquiry into the complicity of the British security forces in republican terrorism.
Well might they go pale at the gills at that thought. And not just they alone. There are retired merchant bankers and respectable stockbrokers in London who as FRU soldiers were running Scap 25 years ago. They knew of, and in essence permitted, the terrorist activities he was committing in order to protect his status inside the IRA. There are ministers of the crown and civil servants who were similarly accomplices. How large is the circle? How many accomplices did he have in British life? And we know this: none will ever see the inside of a prison cell.
We cannot now allow the IRA and its many apologists in the media and the law to create a narrative that because an element in the British intelligence community knew about killings, the British establishment or the British army did also. Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers stoically served in Northern Ireland without affronting law or liberty, utterly unaware of FRU terrorism.
Moreover, the organisation and the culture which publicly tolerated and justified the abduction, torture and murder of defenceless civilians were purely home-grown: Sinn Féin-IRA provided all the homicidal energy, the historical justification, and the diseased ethos for these murders.
We need to get this vileness exposed for young people to know what the IRA has been up to for 30 years. The most cleansing thing for Irish history would be have a sworn public inquiry into this affair: then let the Scapa flow.