At year’s end, and in the spirit of my last blog about the need for hope, I am once again going to shamelessly lift a whole column from another writer, and once again it’s from the superb Belfast Telegraph journalist and Sunday Independent columnist, Sam McBride. I admire McBride for his loyalty to and determination to tell the truth about his much maligned home place. This is his story about mercy and forgiveness between former combatants in that home place, Northern Ireland (or the North of Ireland).

“Lying bleeding on the Crossmaglen ground after being shot by a Royal Marine Commando, the IRA man thought he was dying. The soldiers he’d attacked were now attacking him and continued to do so after a shot brought him to the ground. As death loomed, a soldier saved his life. That one moral act now might be central to solving a mystery stemming from one of the most immoral acts of the Troubles.

That former IRA man has now spoken not just about how he escaped death, but to reveal a secret personal crusade to find the body of Captain Robert Nairac, the undercover soldier who was abducted, killed and secretly buried by republicans in 1977.

The man’s remarkable motivation is told in a podcast ‘Assume Nothing: The Secret Search for Captain Nairac’ by Gordon Adair, a former BBC NI journalist. He had been a contact of Adair’s for years and had told him the story — but only now agreed to be interviewed.

It takes a lot for a former IRA man to spend three decades on a secret personal search to honour a former foe. Yet the reason is stunningly simple. It’s a story of hope from one of the most hopeless times.

All’s fair in love and war, or so the aphorism goes. Yet we know it’s not. It’s not OK to sleep with your best friend’s wife. It’s not OK to kill a defenceless civilian. In the Troubles, such basic morality often seemed absent, yet in truth it was everywhere. It was why the vast majority of the bereaved didn’t respond by bombing or shooting their neighbours. It’s why so many victims made tearful appeals for no retribution. It’s why the bloodshed never tipped into irretrievable civil war.

Adair’s contact wasn’t involved in Nairac’s abduction, murder or burial. Most of those involved in that weren’t IRA members, even if they were sympathisers. Yet one incident altered this south Armagh man’s perspective on humanity and ultimately drove him to a personal crusade to find Nairac’s body.

While attacking Crossmaglen army barracks in the mid-1970s, the man was shot and seriously wounded. He recalled: “As I lay on the ground, I thought of really only one person. I thought of my mother. I knew it was going to destroy her.”

Lying defenceless, he said he was “treated badly” by the soldiers, “but I was expecting that”. Then one individual changed his life. “Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one man coming toward me and he just put his finger to his lips to let me know ‘don’t saying anything; be quiet’. He stopped them from doing that. I can still hear his words now: ‘Leave him alone. Leave him alone. He’s a soldier,’” he said.

Bleeding through the mouth and nose, he thought he was dying, but he survived. The gratitude he still feels many decades later is audible in how he speaks: “This man was exceptionally kind to me… it had a profound effect on me… this man saved my life.” He described summary execution, irrespective of the circumstances, as “a disgusting thing to do” and Nairac’s death as “a disgusting war crime”.

There were lurid stories that Nairac’s body had been put through a mincer. Adair’s contact said that after years of talking to a host of individuals, some of whom were directly involved, he’s definitively clear that’s wrong: “He’s definitely available.”

Similarly, after conducting his own investigations into allegations that Nairac was involved in atrocities, he doesn’t believe them. “Robert Nairac was an honourable man. From his own narrative, from his own idea of why he was posted to Ireland, he was acting, I think, at all times with morality… In a different conflict, in a different period, in a different epoch, I’d be very glad to have Robert Nairac by my side because he was a very brave man,” he said.

To the staunchest ideologues on either side, this man’s story is challenging; it doesn’t easily fit the black-and-white depiction of irredeemable good fighting irredeemable evil. Yet it’s compelling because it’s so deeply human. The man said: “I could not give up. My own life being saved by a decent man in a British army uniform has a profound effect on you… that experience created an indelible mark on my own sense of fair play and moral compass.”

He now wants to “show the man the respect he deserves” and a few months ago led the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains (ICLVR) — set up to recover the bodies of the Disappeared — to a field in County Louth where he believes Nairac’s body was buried. In October, that search was halted without success because the ICLVR said “more information is needed”. Nairac’s body may be there, but finding the bones of a man in a field after almost half a century isn’t straightforward without precise information.

Yet even the telling of this story has had a powerful reconciling impact on some of those who’ve heard it. Former Ulster Unionist leader Doug Beattie — himself a former Royal Irish Regiment captain highly decorated for bravery — said the IRA man’s words were “as close to true reconciliation between enemies from our Troubles as I’ve heard”.

There’s a wider truth here. Some ex-paramilitaries cling to the belief that they had no choice; they were simply products of their environment which inexorably pushed them towards killing. This simplistic and self-serving belief system is demonstrably nonsensical when we consider that the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland, whatever their politics or religion, rejected the murder which surrounded them.

It’s too easy to say ‘we’d no moral choice’. What both the Royal Marine medic and the IRA man demonstrate is the impact one moral person can have. Our actions have consequences which echo for good or evil long after the instant in which we exist.”

If you have information about the location of the bodies of the final four Disappeared victims — Joe Lynskey, Columba McVeigh, Robert Nairac and Seamus Maguire — you can contact the ICLVR on 00353 1 602 8655, or secretary@iclvr.ie, or ICLVR PO Box 10827 Dublin 2.”¹

¹ ‘One Small Act of Mercy – Captain Nairac, Sunday Independent, 22 December