At a remand hearing, Stobie insisted that he was a registered informer for the RUC Special Branch at the time of the Finucane murder, and that he had phoned his police handlers twice to tell them an unnamed ‘top Provie’ was going to be shot.
But now they say I've broken it because I was drinking on the street corner and the Provies [the Provisional IRA] said I was being antisocial and now they say I can't come back for six months.
One prison officer tells him: ‘You can say what you like about the Provies, they were willing to die for their principles.’
Given the gaps in Republican timekeeping, there was one less than celebrated occasion in the 1970s when the Provies were marching down the Pike just as the Stickies were marching up.
The real crisis will come when Paisley has to sell the Sinn Fein deal to the ‘no Provies on our patch’ religious fundamentalists.