Truth is the crucial component of any peace process. In order to build a future based on trust and mutual respect, truth of what really happened in the past and who bears responsibility for each and every action is a millar stone of the new comprehensive and just society to be build after a conflict. 

The Irish peace process continues meticolously to work on disclosing truth. So news of a secret MI5 report that resulted in the RUC (now PSNI) police protecting its agents and informers regardless of their role in the conflict being made public after 38 years, is very much welcomed.

The author of the report, Patrick Walker, was a former colonial administrator in Uganda. He went on to become head of 'counter-terrorism' at MI5 and served as the head of MI5 between 1987 and 1992. 

The Committee for the Administration of Justice (CAJ), a Belfast-based human rights organisation, is understood to have obtained a copy under the Freedom of Information Act after going before an information tribunal.

Daniel Holder, the deputy director of CAJ, told the Guardian newspaper: "In our view the Walker report was the blueprint for making RUC special branch a 'force within a force'. It radically altered the structures of the RUC, centralising enormous power within special branch which controlled everything from forensics to who was arrested and charged."

Walker's report in 1980 resulted in Crown force police being ordered never to arrest a loyalist or republican without consulting Special Branch (police intelligence). Detectives were told that anyone who was arrested could be recruited as a British agent.

As a consequence, a number of loyalists were given free reign to kill Catholics to terrorise the nationalist population into submission, while IRA informers such as 'Stake Knife' were allowed to kill genuine republicans.

News of the release of the report today is extraordinary and came just when it was announced by the Fine Gael government in Dublin that it is appointing PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Drew Harris, a former head of Special Branch, as Commissioner of the 26 County police.