I was at the Queens Film Theatre this afternoon for the last day of the Docs Ireland festival. The showing was "Hunting Captain Nairac" a documentary about the search for the human remains of people disappeared by republican forces during the troubles, in this instance an army intelligence officer who famously walked into a bar in South Armagh full of 200 people and was never seen again. It was an interesting and well made documentary it answered a lot of questions and debunked some old myths but it did leave me with a few questions.
1. It did a lot to humanise Nairac and present his complexities as a person. Fair enough I suppose but I feel like they might be overegging things a little. It presents his Catholicism and seemingly genuine hibernophillia as being in contradiction with his role as an army intelligence officer. That is very simply not the case as anyone who is familiar with British colonial practice can tell you, that just made him better at his job, the British founded the SOAS to train their cadre in the complexities of the cultures they were sending them out to imperialise.
2. Fair play for trying to dispel 2 big myths you'd hear about Niarac, that his body was "fed to the pigs" as my aul Uncle Danny (RIP) used to say (and that was way before Snatch put that particular method of body disposal into the public consciousness). And that the rumours of his involvement with The Miami Showband massacre (which I also heard and believed once) was probably flack generated by the PIRAs counter intelligence machine. That said the extent and nature of his actual activities isn't really touched on. Troublingly, what he was literally said to be doing in the bar that night was to "Further a relationship" with the sister of an IRA activist. I'm sorry but to me that sounds like the very common practice in intelligence circles of undercovers getting in with a particular situation through a sexual relationship, which is rightly considered to be a form of SA as you can't meaningfully consent to sex with someone who is misrepresenting themselves at that level. That's an implication that seems rightly obvious to anyone familiar with these issues. Not that if it was the case that it justifies what happened to him, corpse-napping is a horrible thing to happen and its no more cool when the 'Ra were doing it than when the CIA trained secret police were doing it across Latin America in the 70s and 80s or when Israel do it today, it just seems odd that that's put out there and handwaved very quickly.
My take away from it was that it seemed oddly in step with the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man that was also featured at the Docs Ireland festival the night before (with live commentary by the editor!) about another eccentric wee man with terminal Main Character syndrome who intentionally put himself in the line of danger doing something he was passionate about and paid the ultimate price for it.
I do sincerely hope that his body is found and returned to his people. Its good that for the future generations here to heal properly we need a full reckoning with the past. I just don't want that to come at the cost of downplaying the seriousness of any aspect of the conflict in the name of "balance".
