nolympics writes "The 'war on terrorism'? Northern Ireland knows something about that particular concept, and is learning more and more about how easily 'on' mutates into 'of'.



The other day an apologist for the security forces said on radio what a tough job cops and soldiers had, working through all the years of the Troubles to "control terrorists". Someone pointed out to him just how terribly apt that verb, 'control', had turned out to be.



It would be unfair to say that Belfast is reeling from the news that the British Army had a highly placed informer in the IRA. "If you had asked me 10 years ago if there were informers, I would have said 'of course there are'," one senior republican told me in a Falls Road coffee-shop. "And the Brits were hardly going to bother putting them in black taxis."



So Sinn Fein tries to wax philosophical and even 'optimistical' -- the same republican insisted that the revelations were simply a sign of the British security apparatus disintegrating sloppily in the post-war context, and said they were not affecting morale locally. In public the party even tries to throw a veil of doubt over the particular claim that Freddie Scappaticci, formerly a central figure in the IRA's 'internal security' unit, was 'Stakeknife', a key British agent."