Gordon Carrera

He said, we should have an apology from Sinn Féin.

There's obviously a bit of politics here in Ireland which acknowledge that in respect of the activities of the provisional IRA as documented in this report, the Canova report.

It's long past time for that apology and renunciation of what happened to occur.

So, you know, not named by the British state still, but named by the Irish state, which I guess brings us, you know, to the end.

I mean, to the kind of really...

I think, really complicated issues around the value of steak knife.

Just one point to start us off.

There is a debate amongst people about the role intelligence played, before we get to steak knife himself, overall in bringing the conflict to an end.

There are different aspects of this.

We've not delved into all of it.

One was there was a role for MI6, which we've not really talked about in this series, who ran a back channel

through to the IRA, through much of the conflict, which allowed deniable communications at key moments, even when the government's official line was, we don't talk to terrorists, which was how they described the IRA.

And we're actually going to look at that back channel in a bonus episode for club members with the journalist Peter Taylor.

who covered the whole of the troubles, lots of work on the intelligence side, but particularly is the expert on that back channel.

So we'll look at that issue separately.

But then there's also this claim that intelligence played a role because the level of penetration of the IRA by the security forces was so big that it put pressure on the IRA to eventually

give up the campaign of violence.

I mean, this crazy estimate, and I don't know how anyone really knows the truth, but that up to a quarter or to a half of people in the IRA either were agents or had agents close to them.

Yeah.

was either agents or had an agent close to them.