TAOISEACH MICHEÁL MARTIN has named Freddie Scappaticci in the Dáil as the former British army agent referred to as ‘Stakeknife’.

Martin said that Stakeknife’s identity is “clear to everybody”. 

He further said that Scappaticci was implicated in “grotesque and serious crimes committed for and with the Provisional IRA”. 

Martin said this included 14 murders and 15 abductions. 

Scappaticci was from West Belfast and died in 2023. He has never been identified by the British Government due to their policy of ‘Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ regarding intelligence practices. 

Operation Kenova, a probe which examined the activities of Stakeknife, a mole operating within the Provisional IRA’s Internal Security Unit concluded that more lives were probably lost than saved through the operation of the agent.

The unit was known as the “nutting squad” because its role was to identify and interrogate informers and shoot them in the head.  

Martin told the Dáil that Scappaticci was recruited by the British army, and worked for them between the late 1970s and 1990s. 

“He was a prized informant and during this period the British army dedicated a 24-hour phoneline within its intelligence section to his cause,” he further said. 

The Kenova report which detailed Scappaticci’s activities while preserving his anonymity found that ‘Stakeknife’ was involved in murders and tortures, and concluded that more lives were lost than saved through his actions. 

Martin said today that the past cannot be “hidden” and that he hoped the Kenova report would get the “attention it deserves”. 

He said that the Provisional IRA was a “scourge on all communities” and tried to “intimidate and subjugate the nationalist and republican communities across the North”. 

Martin also named Sinn Fein as “supporters” of the IRA, while he lambasted “aggressive revisionist history”, and said it could not erase the crimes people committed against their own communities. 

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald TD said that she was sorry for the “lives lost during the conflict and for the hurt and loss endured during those years of violence”. 

She said that the findings of the Kenova report are “stark and deeply disturbing”. 

McDonald added that “collusion” was not “an aberration” but a “defining feature of British state policy during the conflict. 

Social Democrats TD Sinead Gibney highlighted the Kenova reports confirmation that collusion caused 127 deaths during the Troubles. 

She said that the British government failed to name Stakeknife, and that further information related to the crimes he is implicated in “is desperately needed”. 

Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik said the report saw real accountability and made the testimony of people impacted central. 

“A failure to implement Kenova’s recommendations will erode trust further,” she said.