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UK and the IRA colluded to bury secrets of The Troubles, author claims
'There are only a few people who know how many stones there are and how deep they go,' says journalist and author Martin Dillon.
Hazel Doupe as Marian Price and Lola Petticrew as Dolours Price in Say Nothing
The UK and the IRA are unlikely partners in collusion to bury the secrets of the Troubles.
That's the view of celebrated journalist and author Martin Dillon.
'Deleted files, executed informants, a suppression of the truth about what really happened — who does that suit the most?
'Is that not the definition of collusion?'
There can be few people who know more about what happened during the conflict than Dillon. He has written extensively on the Dirty War — to borrow the title of one of his works — with a series of books under his belt.
He has turned over many stones and even now in 2025 believes there are many, many more to be flipped.
His book on the Shankill Butchers is one of the seminal works of the last 50 years and he has since written extensively on all aspects of the Troubles.
'There are only a few people who know how many stones there are and how deep they go,' he said.
His most recent nook The Sorrow And The Loss examines what he calls the 'tragic shadow cast by the Troubles on the lives of women'' and he admits it took him on a difficult journey.
'I wondered at my own sanity sometimes,' he said. 'Firstly I've no desire to reawaken the trauma of the past for these people — they live with it every day, it never goes away — but it brought back so many memories and experiences for me.
'It was on a visit to the beach with my wife when I first talked about it with her, but she said you know, no one has ever done it before, the story of the women of the Troubles.
'This was the most difficult one I've done — but that's it, no more.'
Dillon, a former Irish News and Belfast Telegraph journalist before 18 award-winning years at the BBC, was the first to uncover the IRA's practice of 'disappearing' people and the first to reveal the last living days of Jean McConville.
The book focuses not just on victims but also those who were players in the theatre of war — people like Mairéad Farrell, one of the Gibraltar Three shot dead by the SAS in 1988.
Jean McConville
He is convinced the IRA knowingly sacrificed the three — Danny McCann and Sean Savage being the others.
'Mairéad Farrell could have been anything she wanted to be but, like so many others, she was sucked into everything and she became a dedicated active service member, but she always had a resentment toward the IRA leadership,' he said.
While in Armagh Prison in 1981 she and two others went on hunger strike in solidarity with the men on the Maze H-Blocks.
'She felt the women never got the recognition they deserved — it was if they were sidelined because they were women — she was never happy with the way women were treated by the IRA leadership,' Dillon said.
The shooting of the Gibraltar Three was carried on the direct orders of another woman key to the conflict — Margaret Thatcher.
'Thatcher was determined they were never coming back alive. There was no question of arrest, I think the IRA knew that and let them go, sent them to their deaths effectively. Everybody knew there was no bomb in Gibraltar. It was in Torremolinos, they were unarmed, Thatcher didn't care.
'I think Mairéad always felt she would die young and so it proved. McCann had been dumped from the brigade staff because he opposed the direction McGuinness and Adams were taking the movement, he didn't want to go [to Gibraltar] but [the IRA] made him. What did he know?'
McGuinness ordered a board of inquiry in the wake of the compromised operation.
'Who did he put in charge? [Freddie] Scappaticci — 'Scap', 'Stakeknife'. It stinks. Stakeknife wasn't a person, it was an operation, there were other agents who have never been identified but it suits the British and the IRA to blame everything on one person.' The operation to take out the three was called Operation Flavius — Latin for blond, the colour of McCann's hair.
Dillon said it was the impact on women's lives that affected him most.
The female RUC officer, a gifted Irish dancer who survived a bomb blast in which she witnessed her colleagues being killed.
PACEMAKER BELFAST ARCHIVE CAROLINE MORELAND SHOT DEAD AS AN INFORMER
Caroline Moreland, executed by the IRA on the eve of their 1994 ceasefire after she 'confessed' to being a British agent.
'They [IRA] knew it was over. Why did they kill her? Maybe they were terrified she knew too much.'
Or the wife of a British solder whose husband was posted to Northern Ireland three days after their wedding. Within months he was dead.
'It shaped her life, her whole life. She married again but it failed because her husband believed she loved her dead husband more than him,' Dillon says.
Throughout the conversation Dillon flits from tragedy to tragedy. His sympathies are with the women on both sides of the argument, dragged into the Dirty War.
Tracey Coulter, whose father Jackie, a UDA man, was murdered during the UVF/UDA feud of 2000 and who had a turbulent relationship with UFF assassin Stevie 'Top Gun' McKeag.
'She hid nothing, she just tells the truth,' Dillon says. 'I have the utmost respect for Tracey, for her bravery and her honesty. She has never gotten over the loss of her father and she has suffered at the hands of paramilitaries in her own community.'
Hazel Doupe as Marian Price and Lola Petticrew as Dolours Price in Say Nothing
He is animated about the Jean McConville case and dismissive of the Disney+ series Say Nothing.
He said the mother of 10 died at the hands of a three-person shooting party.
'They all shot her so that no one could prove it was their shot that killed her,' he says.
There was also a three-person gravedigger detail — collectively they were called The Unknowns, an IRA unit tasked with execution and disposal.
But one, claims Dillon, was a Garda agent.
'That person and others know what happened. The truth is yet to come out — Say Nothing did nothing for that case.'
The lasting impact of the Troubles is something that continues to surprise and resonate with the author.
Home for the 75-year-old for some time has been New York, but Belfast is never far from his mind.
'I don't recognise Belfast now,' he said, 'I get lost when I come back, which is a good thing — it has changed so much. But journalism still has a job to do, we can't let these stories be shut down, because so many people deserve the truth.
'This book has brought me full circle, it's up to someone else from now on.'
The Sorrow And The Loss, published by Merrion Press, is available now.
