Editorial: The successful use of IRA informers is a triumph of the Troubles that saved lives and is to be celebrated

It is the 40th anniversary of the IRA murder of the academic and lawyer Edgar Graham.

​We will write more about that killing in coming days.

It is also the 38th anniversary of the murder of Billy Clements, the RUC man father of Rev David Clements, who has worked on legacy. Billy and George Gilliland were slain by an IRA gang led a sectarian thug Jim Lynagh, who killed en masse until belatedly stopped by the SAS as they launched another murder mission at Loughgall in 1987.

Yet an inquest into the killings of that band of murderers, killings that will have saved countless lives, is one of the many in utterly lopsided legacy inquests into state killings that might not go ahead due to the legacy act. Legacy probes, as this newspaper has reported for years, have been grossly unbalanced.

There are profound problems with the very premise of Operation Kenova, the major investigation into the handling of information provided by another brutal IRA killer, Freddie Scappaticci, who was both in charge of IRA discipline (torture and execution) and an informer.

There are problems with the premise of Jon Boutcher’s other investigations, such as into the Glenanne killings, and whether the entire Kenova process will perpetuate the legacy imbalance against past state actions. But the latest decision not to prosecute people including ex security personnel does not bring Kenova to a close so best to pause before judging it.

What we can do now is recognise the restraint with which UK security forces responded to three decades of IRA murder and mayhem, contrary to nationalist claims about collusion. Only a country as civilised as Britain would have been so soft. Above all these heroic state operatives deserve plaudits for their deep penetration of the IRA murder machine.

Influential ‘human-rights-for-murderers’ types should not be allowed to thwart the use of informers now against dissident terrorists.