Activists Jason Kirkpatrick & Kate Wilson, Belfast High Court, 7 February 2017

An undercover officer from a disgraced political policing unit infiltrated Northern Irish civil rights groups, including the Bloody Sunday march organisers.

Under the name ‘Sean Lynch’, the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad undercover officer infiltrated several organisations from 1968-74.

These included the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign and Sinn Féin (London). NICRA was the organiser of the Bloody Sunday march in 1972 when the British army shot dead 14 unarmed demonstrators.

The revelation came last week from the Undercover Policing Inquiry, which is examining the ‘spycops’ units that targeted political campaigns for 50 years from 1968. Officers lived for years at a time as activists; many were arrested and went to court under their fake identities. The majority of profiled officers had sexual relationships with women they spied on.

SPYING CROSSED BORDERS, SO MUST THE INQUIRY

Though spycops were mostly Metropolitan Police officers, some travelled throughout the UK and beyond. The public inquiry attracted criticism in 2015 when then-Home Secretary Theresa May limited it to events in England & Wales.

Former Northern Irish justice ministers Claire Sugden and David Ford have both backed the call to extend it to the whole UK, but to no avail. This week’s shock announcement may change that.

The fact of the SDS’ involvement in NICRA was not revealed to the Saville Inquiry of 2000-2010 that was supposed to fully examine Bloody Sunday. This mirrors the SDS’ spying on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence but failing to tell the subsequent Macpherson Inquiry.

Officers have already been known to spy beyond the borders of England and Wales, but the fresh information about ‘Sean Lynch’, who is now deceased, shows the Met unit had an involved interest in the politics of Northern Ireland.

The Home Office has rebuffed repeated requests from the Scottish Government for Scotland to be included in the Inquiry. In March, Amnesty called for it to extend to Northern Ireland:

‘Activities of undercover police were not limited to England and Wales, so nor should the inquiry… The need for full transparency and accountability of policing in Northern Ireland must not be compromised.’

At that time only one spycops officer, Mark Jenner, was known to have been involved in Irish politics.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland say local forces were ‘completely blind’ to the SDS officers’ presence, and do not appear to have been given any information for use afterwards. PSNI’s Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton said deploying undercover officers without local forces’ risk assessments would be ‘an act of madness’.

Eamonn McCann was a member of both the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association & Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign, and later went on to have a seat in Northern Ireland’s Legislative Assembly.

Responding to the admission that his groups had been targeted by ‘Sean Lynch,’ McCann told Irish News:

‘It’s now obvious that undercover police officers, intelligence and security officers were infiltrating everything.’

ACTIVIST’S ACTION FOR ANSWERS

Environmental activist Jason Kirkpatrick has been granted core participant status at the Undercover Policing Inquiry due to being spied on by officer Mark Kennedy – in Northern Ireland as well as England.

In 2005 Kennedy took Kirkpatrick and fellow campaigner Kim Bryan on a speaking tour in Northern Ireland, with the officer paying the bills and driving them around. They held public events at Belfast City Church as well as a public ‘environmental pub quiz’ at Menagerie Bar in the Belfast Holy Lands.

Kirkpatrick has launched a judicial review of the decision to exclude Northern Ireland from the Inquiry. He feels his 16 month wait for the case to come to court is extreme, and this week’s announcement adds great weight to his case:

‘With these fresh revelations, it is clear that an arbitrarily limited inquiry that fails to take account of operations by their undercover police in Northern Ireland is nothing short of a whitewash. The wait caused by Home Office delays to my current Northern Irish Judicial Review case is becoming absolutely unbearable.’

Kim Bryan said there can be no excuse for keeping the details hidden any longer:

‘Discovering the spycops infiltrated civil rights campaigns changes everything. Bloody Sunday was a pivotal event and yet the Met hid their involvement from the Inquiry. This might be the tip of the iceberg. The truth is long overdue. The Undercover Policing Inquiry must be extended to Northern Ireland.’

Nobody thought that sort of thing happened in this country. For 40 years, the public were unaware of secret police units dedicated to infiltrating and undermining a swathe of political groups.

The spycops units were more counter-democratic than counter-terrorist. More than 1,000 organisations were targeted: peace campaigns, environmentalists, anti-racists, trade unions – even Labour MPs & the Young Liberals.

When undercover officer Mark Kennedy was unmasked in 2010, the lid was lifted. Spycops had lied to courts and withheld evidence. Kennedy alone was responsible for 49 wrongful convictions. If Kennedy is average, this means over 7,000 miscarriages of justice have been secured by the 144 spycops. Even if we conservatively say it’s only one per officer per year undercover, it’s around 600.

Spycops stole the identities of dead children to create their fake personas. Perhaps most shockingly, they deceived women they spied on into sexual relationships – many integrated into families with plans for a lifetime together. The women’s personal stories are absolutely harrowing.

PUBLIC SHOULD MEAN PUBLIC

These were not rogue officers; these activities were how the units operated. The spycops were trained, monitored and guided to do this, with their managers being drawn from earlier generations of the same unit. This was an institutional failing.

The police have thrown every obstacle into the path of victims seeking answers. It took four years for the deceived women to get an apology, admitting:

‘these relationships were a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma’.

The Met have since specified that they violated the right to a private life, and the right to freedom from torture, inhuman or degrading treatment – a fundamental right that officers are sworn to uphold.

In 2014 it was revealed they had spied on the family of Stephen Lawrence, and a full-scale public inquiry was ordered. Scheduled to finish in 2018, it has yet to formally begin; the ‘ambitious’ finishing date is now set for December 2023. The police have obstructed it just as they have the victims’ legal claims. They even applied to have the entire process held in secret, seemingly unable to understand the term ‘public inquiry’.

The Inquiry’s new Chair, Sir John Mitting, is steering it towards collapse. Before we can begin, we need the list of cover names spycops used so that people can identify infiltrators and report what they did. Victims have repeatedly made this plain.

But Mitting is granting maximum anonymity to many officers, asserting that those in long marriages are presumed incapable of misconduct. Mitting needs to be replaced by, or at least sit alongside, a panel of people with life experience relevant to victims.

THE LUSH POSTER IS SIMPLE

At this crucial moment Lush, with their history of supporting human rights causes, have worked closely with victims on their new campaign. The poster is simple – a face that’s half police officer, half someone else. The message is not hard to grasp, even if you divorce it from the words and other material that surround the image.

Mashing up two ideas to create a third is a basic device that children enjoy with collage. Those who claim not to understand this visual language must be very confused by other adverts, GIFs and emoji.

When the BBC abuse scandal broke, we understood that even though most 1970s presenters didn’t sexually assault anyone, and the BBC does a lot of good work, there was an institutional failing. This doesn’t mean every current BBC employee is an abuser. Yet some police officers are trying hard to pretend that’s what Lush is doing in calling out the spycops.

The response of officers who have intimidated Lush staff into taking down posters is an extension of what we’ve seen from their management over the last eight years.

If they care about the service being brought into disrepute, they should aim their anger at those who grossly abuse police power to violate citizens, lie to courts and undermine democratic groups, rather than those of us who point it out.

A slightly shorter version of this article appeared in The i Paper on 5 June 2018.