Cameras could be the best protection against crime of abuse

Back in the days when I was a junior reporter with RTÉ and the Troubles were going on north of the Border, a mad young producer got the idea that someone should go Up There and capture covert recordings of just how difficult the British Army and the RUC were to people from the Republic. 

I was picked, mainly, I suspect, for two reasons, the first being that I was a gormless-looking young one. The second reason would have been my inability to refuse based on the week-to-week contracts on which virtually all of the women in radio were kept subservient at the time.

A technician nobody had ever seen before arrived to fit me with a wire. These days, a sweep of a hand over an iPhone would do it. Back then, it required that a yoke the size of a thick paperback be secured to my person and an attached microphone threaded up through my clothing to just under my polo-neck jumper. I was uncomfortable and terrified. The technician shrugged at the first and seemed puzzled by the second. He didn’t think, he told me kindly, that an RUC officer was going to order me out of the car in Strabane and make me strip on the side of the road. I agreed, but only because nobody was planning to send me to Strabane in the first place and when you’re a fat teenager, the very word ‘strip’ is infinitely more upsetting than the prospect of a life sentence in a Northern Ireland prison for bugging an officer of the law.