Until a few weeks ago the armed campaigns by the dissident Republican groups were reminiscent of those tours of seaside towns by groups that were big in the 1980s. Both were reviving something that wasn’t such a great idea in the first place when the public demand for it has receded. The killing of Kieran Doherty by the Real IRA appears to mark a change in the organisation’s capacity. Its tempo of operations is starting to match that of the IRA 1.0. Just as significantly it appears to be developing a counter-intelligence section which is willing to use the same ruthlessness when dealing with alleged informers among its own members. In this case the suspect was stripped naked and shot on a country road.

Not much sleuthing would have been required to identify Doherty as a potential informer. He had given an interview to the Derry Journal claiming that MI5 had been continuously harassing him to give them information, a claim his family repeated after the killing. The family also say that he had been receiving hospital treatment for depression, a fact that certainly would have been known to his attempted recruiters. An illness like that would have given the spooks considerable leverage over a vulnerable man who, by some accounts, was also involved in the drug trade.

One of the less edifying sights on British television this week has been New Labour circling the wagons to protect MI5 since a judge effectively called them a bunch of liars who were complicit in the torture of Binyam Mohamed. The bottom of the barrel was scraped when the increasingly dreadful David Miliband felt unable to say whether or not Mohamed’s treatment, which included having his penis sliced with a razor blade, constituted torture. He’d need to get a legal opinion. Despite having been told by a judge that his spies had provided him with false information Miliband still stuck up for him and former union official, now Home Secretary, Alan Johnson showed the grip the secret state has over the British labour movement with his eulogies to the spies’ probity and high ethical standards.

MI5’s second largest facility is at Palace Barracks, Holywood. The barracks which is just outside Belfast once had quite a reputation as a torture centre. Peace process or not the British state still feels that it’s worth keeping a heavy presence in the north of Ireland and the death of Kieran Doherty blows away the smokescreen of lies from Johnson, Miliband and Margaret Beckett about the way it operates. A child of ten in Derry would be able to say what the likely fate of an identified or suspected informer would be. Targeting a man with mental health issues who felt so desperate that he felt obliged to go to the press was as good as writing his death warrant.