The recent upsurge in interest around collusion has me
thinking about the claim from the securocrats and their apologists that the
agents they controlled were actually saving lives and that the ends justified
the means. The means being that these
agents were given carte blanche to carry out whatever criminal acts they
desired so long as their cover was not blown.
This was the thinking that led to so many deaths and injuries: this we
know. What we don’t know is how many
lives were saved.
However this is not the point. All of the potential lives saved cannot
justify the lives that were ruined by the actions of those who were supposed to
be protecting us. Maybe the powers that
be should have taken a lesson from their predecessors in the Royal Irish
Constabulary. I am reading a book at the
minute (Irish Conspiracies – Frederick Moir Bussy, 1910) which chronicles the
life of John Mallon, a senior detective in the RIC at the end of the 19th
Century. He controlled a network of
informers within the secret societies of Ireland. Societies like the Fenians, the Invincibles
and the Land Leaguers.
Mallon had a more unconventional way of doing things. He preferred to ‘nip things in the bud’. He was ‘… ever keen to preserve the life and
liberty […] of the would-be felon’. ‘His
first consideration, however, was to spare innocent persons and families the
bitterness and pain of personal injury and bereavement’. His primary objective was the prevention of crime.
Mallon chose to ‘prevent outrage and social convulsion by
timely warning – in contradistinction to the laying of traps for intended
criminals’. He even tipped off a
potential plotter that he knew of a conspiracy to kill Mallon himself. He wanted to save the ‘evilly inclined from
wrongdoing’.
If only our protectors had followed the Mallon route and
prevented crimes instead of directing them.
If only…
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