The Disappearance of Captain Nairac (1080p, soft English subtitle...

The Disappearance of Captain Nairac (1080p, soft English subtitles)

Contains some upsetting scenes.

On the night of Saturday 14 May 1977, a British soldier, Captain Robert Nairac, walked into a crowded bar near the Irish border. He was undercover, dressed in a donkey jacket and jeans, hoping for a breakthrough in the intelligence war against the IRA.
Decades later, it’s still not known who he expected to meet in the Three Steps pub in the Republican heartland of south Armagh. But it is known what happened next. He sang two rousing rebel anthems, which he may have thought established his credentials as a visiting Belfast Republican. If that was the plan, it didn’t work. A group of local men had already decided this newcomer was up to no good. They overpowered him in the car park, beating him up and driving him across the border to a rendezvous with an IRA gunman. Nairac, a key player in British intelligence, revealed nothing. When he was later shot dead, his killers didn’t know who, or what, he was. Captain Robert Nairac’s body was then secretly buried. Over the decades, appeals for information have been met mostly by silence or rumour. But finally, in 2024, the first official search for his remains began. And this was chiefly down to information provided by a former IRA man Martin McAllister, who only knew the Grenadier Guards officer as his sworn enemy. With unique archive footage, exclusive interviews, cinematic landscapes and a haunting soundtrack, the film - made by the Bafta-winning team of director Alison Millar and journalist Darragh MacIntyre – details the story of McAllister’s obsessional search for Captain Nairac. It reveals how the life and death of this unconventional and complex British soldier echoes the often violent and always tangled history of relations between the UK and Ireland.

First broadcast: 10 November 2025  
Duration:  90 minutes