‘These men were trained liars’ – women duped into relationships with undercover police call for Irish inquiry

Activist “Lisa” was in a six-year relationship with undercover UK police officer Mark Kennedy before she exposed him in 2011.

A NUMBER OF women who discovered that they were in relationships with undercover British policemen have called for a public inquiry in Ireland to determine whether the gardaí had a working understanding in place with those undercover agents when they were present here.

Several of those British agents have been exposed as having embarked on long-term relationships with female protesters and activists – women who were involved in activist actions on Irish soil like the Mayo Shell-to-Sea protests between 2004 and 2006 or the 2004 Dublin May Day demonstrations, women who had no idea who their partners really were.

Seven such officers have been exposed, men who were deployed over at least a 20-year-period, often in Ireland, returning home to their wives and families when they were not called upon to infiltrate social and environmental activist causes.

The exposure of the undercover police officers led to eight women taking human rights and common law claims against the London Metropolitan Police in the UK High Court. That action eventually saw the Met delivering an unqualified apology, as well as admitting full liability regarding the relationships, to four of those women.

Meanwhile, on foot of the revelations, the Pitchford Inquiry was launched in 2015 to investigate the circumstances whereby women in protest movements were allegedly tricked into relationships in England and Wales.

13 British men and women, under the banner Police Spies Out Of Lives, are now campaigning for full inquiries to be launched in other countries across Europe in which they and the undercover agents were present on multiple occasions during their relationships – including Ireland.

At present, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and Germany have all been excluded from inquiries into the nature of the undercover assignments. The most recent movement on the subject saw Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan raising his “concerns” regarding the issue with UK Secretary for Northern Ireland James Brokenshire in February.

Targeted

The four women who have thus far received apologies from the Met recently wrote to Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald to ask “why they were targeted in Ireland for abusive relationships by UK undercover officers”.

They are also asking: who authorised the undercover operations in Ireland; whether or not gardaí hold files on them and if so why can’t they access them; how the Irish state might justify such undercover officers having “intimate relationships” with those women “in violation of their human rights”; and how many other UK agents operated in Ireland.

One of the four, ‘Lisa’ (a pseudonym – her anonymity has been guaranteed by the UK courts), was in a relationship with possibly the best known of the now-exposed officers, Mark Kennedy, for six years between 2004 and 2010.

It was Lisa who eventually established not only that Kennedy (who she knew as Mark Stone) was secretly a police officer, but also that he was married with two children. And it was she who exposed his true nature.

“When I found out what he was, I let it be known in the activist community, where it quickly became public knowledge. From there it suddenly became massive news,” she told TheJournal.ie this week.

“He was my partner for six years. We were as close as anyone in such a relationship could have been.”

He was at my father’s funeral. He’d met my family. We did everything together, or so I thought. He ‘worked away a lot’. I now know that he was married with a family, who lived in Ireland, and that he travelled there every time he was on leave.

It feels more like the plot of a film when I tell it.

Activist Lisa was already in a relationship with Kennedy before she first came to Ireland for the Rossport demonstrations against the Corrib gas (Shell-to-Sea) pipeline in Co Mayo in late 2006. He had already embarked on one previous tryst in the protesting community with another activist, Kate Wilson. On the way back from Rossport, Lisa met Kennedy “for a holiday, what I thought was a social visit”. “Possibly his handlers didn’t know he was meeting me. But the key is he had already been arrested in Ireland before (in 2004 at the May Day riots in Dublin). So the authorities certainly knew who he was.”

BBC

Kennedy was tall and lean and charming, heavily tattooed with long hair. He claimed to be a climber. He certainly didn’t look like a police officer. Yet police officer he was.

Over the next six years he lived the quintessential double life, travelling with the activist community and his partner from place to place and country to country, participating in protests (the building of the Karahnjukar Dam in Iceland; the Drax power station in Yorkshire, England; anarchist movements in Germany), and all the while remaining in contact multiple times daily with his 24-hour handling officer in the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) of the Metropolitan Police, giving away strategic details of what the protesters were up to.

He claimed to Channel Four News in 2012 that he had saved the UK taxpayer “millions of pounds” via his actions, “working nearly 24 hours a day for years”.

Asked whether or not he had ever “gone native”, his response was simple: “No I didn’t.”

Looking back on things, Lisa says that perhaps the evidence was hiding in plain sight.

“I was at my fair share of demonstrations that didn’t go according to plan because the police knew what we were about to do and were ready,” she says. “Even surprise demos at power stations and the like, and they would have been there before us.”

But that’s hindsight. At the time I found out about his double life I had absolutely no idea who he really was. It came as a total shock.

Acting strangely

She first began to suspect that something was awry with Kennedy/Stone in 2010, when he returned from a prolonged absence and “started acting a bit strangely”.

“He seemed depressed, a lot less stable, more unpredictable. Now talking to other women who’ve been through the same I know it’s a classic sign that an agent is to end their deployment. They come to just before they leave,” she says.

Then we were on holiday together and I found his passport, and I realised I hadn’t ever really seen it before. It had a different surname and it said he had a dependent. I had no idea he had kids.

That led Lisa to start doing some rooting of her own. She investigated Kennedy’s emails and his phone. She found another phone with texts addressing him as ‘Dad’. At first Kennedy denied everything, and had an explanation ready to go, something Lisa suspects is probably part of an undercover agent’s cover.

At the time you don’t believe that you can be caught up in something like that. You know these guys exist, but it was like a movie. It was just too dramatic. So it’s easier to give him the benefit of the doubt. But then his lies started to fall apart a bit, and he kept changing his story. So I looked harder, I looked deeper.

What she found were a series of official certificates, and not in the name of Mark Stone, but under the title of the stranger whose passport she had found. She found a marriage certificate, and then a birth certificate for one of Kennedy’s children, whose father’s occupation was listed as ‘police officer’