Danny Morrison has witnessed dramatic changes in his 72 years.
A teenager at the beginning of the conflict, he has lived to enjoy the fruits of the electoral seeds he and others sowed in the 1980s, with Sinn Féin now topping the polls in Westminster, Stormont and council elections.
But electoral success doesn’t automatically deliver political solutions.
“The objective is to improve people’s lives, to move resources from the rich towards the poor, but obviously they (the Sinn Féin-led Stormont executive) are constrained by being connected to Westminster and the British exchequer,” he says.
“But I have never viewed Stormont as a permanent institution. To me, this is an experiment and it’s an experiment that unionists continually undermine.”
He argues that rather than “quote unquote making Northern Ireland work, unionists do the exact opposite”.
He accuses unionist politicians of a failure to reciprocate gestures by republicans, such as Michelle O’Neill laying a wreath at the Belfast cenotaph or attending King Charles‘s coronation.
But despite intransigence, Morrison says he has seen northern society transform.
“Nationalists are very confident people, they are in every profession now,” he says.
“If you look at the judiciary, the arts, though they always were in the arts, but all around the situation has dramatically changed but without being resolved.”
He believes the “direction of travel is towards Irish unity” but sees resistance and not only from unionists.
The British government should publish the criteria for triggering a border poll, he argues, but most of all the Micheál Martin-led government in Dublin needs to change tack.
“Imagine any other country in the world where the independence of your country was within peaceful constitutional reach, and you have somebody who’s allegedly the leader of the ‘Republican Party’ saying there’ll be no constitutional referendum on my watch; insisting there has to be reconciliation before there can be a chance of unity,” he says.
“That is so tempting to loyalist paramilitaries, it’s actually dangerous and could lead to violence.
“If there’s talk of a referendum in six years’ time, they [loyalist paramilitaries] can turn around and start bombing, shooting and causing mayhem to try and stop it. They did it before when they planted bombs in Dublin and Monaghan during the power-sharing executive in May ’74.
“It’s also given loyalists an incentive not to be involved in reconciliation.”
He is similarly dismissive of the late Seamus Mallon’s suggestion of parallel consent in a referendum, believing it’s “shifting the goalposts”.
“You can’t tell the people to lay down their arms based on an agreement that includes criteria and then think 20 years later: ‘Ah f*** that there, rip that up.
“It’s really dangerous stuff, you want to tell people they were sold a pup? But aside from that, we’re in an agreement here – the ground rules were set.”
In 2016, Morrison is reported to have received a “six-figure sum” as a settlement for his wrongful conviction on charges relating to the 1990 abduction of IRA informer Alexander ‘Sandy’ Lynch.
According to the then Sinn Féin director of publicity, he had gone to a house in Lenadoon in west Belfast to speak to Lynch, who it’s claimed had agreed to out himself as an informer at a press conference.
Morrison, who says he’d previously organised similar press conferences, wanted to establish whether Lynch, who had been interrogated at the house over a number of days by Freddie Scappaticci and others on behalf of the IRA’s internal security unit, “was for real or a Walter Mitty character”.
Soon after arriving, the house was raided and Morrison arrested, in what he believes was a set-up with the aim of discrediting him and Sinn Féin by demonstrating a direct link to the IRA.
It’s now widely acknowledged that the British Army and RUC personnel were directed to the house by Scappaticci, who 13 years later would be unmasked as Stakeknife, the highest ranking agent in the IRA.
While Morrison maintains that “everyone in that house was a suspect”, the episode that led to his conviction aroused suspicion in the IRA and marked the end of Scappaticci’s involvement with the organisation’s so-called nutting squad.
The former Sinn Féin director of publicity accepts Scappaticci is Stakeknife but describes as “nonsense” the suggestion that he or any British agent’s actions were instrumental in bringing an end to the IRA’s campaign.
He suggests that as well as the British and unionists, who wish to downplay the efficacy of the IRA campaign, there are a number of authors and commentators, including former comrades, whose work is designed to discredit mainstream republicanism.
He says the argument that the IRA was widely infiltrated “suits their agenda”.
“Their agenda is that the peace process was manipulated by British intelligence and that the republicans really didn’t know what they were doing,” he says.
“It’s such a nonsense because it disregards the rest of us. What about the prison population? What about the activist population? Are we so stupid?
“When it comes from the Brits it’s a very racist, Paddy Irishman approach, suggesting republicans couldn’t independently come to this view themselves.”
He says he’s read claims that Freddie Scappaticci “vetted everybody that was joining the IRA” and dismisses them as “total, absolute b***s”.
“How could that be? How is it even possible?
“Scap didn’t catch informers. It was the IRA on the ground, who identified suspects and then went to the leadership.”
He rhymes off past IRA operations, many of which were carried out in England, including the Brighton bomb, 10 Downing Street mortar bomb attack, Deal Barracks, and the 1990 killing of Conservative MP Ian Gow TD by a car bomb planted outside his East Sussex home.
“So where’s all the agents if the IRA’s so heavily infiltrated? How come all these operations took place?
“They even go as far as to claim that the British government let those people die to cover up for Scap.
“The worst thing about it is, and I have no love for informers because two times out of the four that I was put in jail, it’s been a result of informers, but people who became informers for whatever reason, their handlers had a duty of care towards them,” he says.
He argues that on many occasions when Freddie Scappaticci let his handlers know that the IRA had identified and interrogated an informer, the response of the authorities was to let them die.
“The effect of the death all played out within the nationalist community. The family would obviously deny that their son was an informer, all of their relatives, if there were sympathisers of the republican movement, would shun it. It’s very demoralising within the own community, seen as a betrayal.
“So they were killing people who were working for them. Where’s the morality in that?
“These people were just expendable because it would produce a problem for the nationalist community. It was all about the propaganda value.”