In the basement room of a Belfast hotel, Claire Dignam cried recalling how she hid for years because she believed she had married an informer.
Beside her, a row of women nodded in agreement.
“It was the shame, the guilt, the trying to fit in ... Now I feel alive and I am not going to hide again,” said Dignam.
“My husband was Johnny Dignam, and I don’t care what anyone said about him in the past. My husband was innocent.”
RM Block
This was the first time families who lost loved ones to a notorious IRA unit that murdered suspected informants during the 1980s had gathered publicly.
Since 2016, they were among those who privately co-operated with an independent investigation into the British army’s top IRA spy, code-named Stakeknife, during the Troubles.
On Tuesday, the final Operation Kenova report of that £40 million investigation was finally unveiled. Its findings were scathing.
British security forces “time and time again” prioritised the role of Stakeknife, widely identified as west Belfast senior IRA member Freddie Scappaticci, over the lives of victims.
Vital intelligence that could have been used to save people was instead “quietly filed away” by the British army and RUC special branch to protect its “golden egg” double agent.
Despite “vast” amount of intelligence supplied by Stakeknife – Kenova discovered more than 3,500 reports attributed to him – the report repeated the devastating conclusion of its interim findings: Stakeknife ultimately cost more lives than he saved.
His protection led to him being implicated in “grotesque serious crimes” including 14 murders and the abductions of 15 individuals.
Scappaticci is not named in the final 164-page report due to the UK security policy of “neither confirm nor deny” on sensitive security issues, a decision described as a “farce” by its former lead investigator, Jon Boutcher.
Boutcher, now the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), warned of a “culture of secrecy” that had led to key intelligence being withheld from investigators and families.
Among the families sitting in the basement room of the hotel on Tuesday afternoon – Kenova’s findings were delivered an hour earlier two floors up in the grand ballroom – there was anger.
Anger at knowing their loved ones lived could potentially have been saved and anger at how Scappaticci was protected and indulged by his British Army handlers who flew him twice on holiday by military aircraft when he was wanted by police.
Horror at the role of MI5 – the families’ solicitor Kevin Winters described Kenova as opening up a “Pandora’s box” on the intelligence agency – was also expressed.
Moira Todd, whose brother, Eugene Simons, was secretly killed and buried by Stakeknife’s internal security unit in 1981, questioned how infiltrated the IRA unit was by British agents – and how high up the chain of the UK government the information about Stakeknife went.
“Did it go to Margaret Thatcher, did she approve anything? Those are the things we need to know,” she said.
Todd told the room that her family were spat on because of the “stigma” of the “tout”.
“Forty-five years on, I’m sitting here, really none the wiser, and hearing about the truth being suppressed, and the government avoiding accountability, and it’s just totally frustrating,” she said.
Paul Wilson, whose father Thomas Emmanuel Wilson was also killed by the IRA’s internal unit or so-called nutting squad in 1987, questioned the lack of the “key detail” of naming Stakeknife.
“You can’t investigate the agent known as Stakeknife, spend all the money, and then not find out who he is – that seems like a gaping own goal,” he said.
In March 2024, when the interim report on Operation Kenova was published, no family members were present.
The fact that so many had chosen to attend and “held their heads high” on Tuesday represented a “sea change”, Winters remarked.
For decades, families of suspected informers were ostracised by their communities when many were in fact innocent.
As Claire Dignam headed home, she said she felt overwhelmed by the findings.
Now 59, she had two young children when her husband was murdered by the IRA in 1992.
“What made me speak up today was when I heard a woman say her brother could have been saved 45 years ago and the authorities knew where he was,” she told The Irish Times.
“My husband’s death could have been prevented. I took heart today from other families, they know how I feel.
“I wanted to be invisible for years. It’s different now. I feel brave.”
