By Jenny McCartney, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 28/01/2007

A frightening little study from Finland last week rang an old-fashioned alarm bell among those of us who are naturally suspicious of technology. It found that people with a particular type of brain tumour who have regularly used mobile phones for more than 10 years are 39 per cent more likely to have the tumour on the side where they hold their phones.

This study, however qualified its findings might be, simply confirms my long-standing misgivings about the safety of the mobile. By nature, I instinctively identify with Mickey Sachs, the hypochondriac New Yorker played by Woody Allen in Hannah and her Sisters, who spends much of the film fretfully believing himself to be suffering from "a brain toomah". In his case the "toomah" turns out to be a false alarm, but if anything seems guaranteed to trigger the dreaded toomah in earnest, it is perpetually pressing a small radiation-emitting device next to one's head.

Prof Lawrie Challis, of the Government-funded Mobile Telecommunications Health Research unit, has said that while he believes mobiles are safe in the short term, the new study indicates an ominous "hint of something" for long-term users. Since most triggers for cancer (such as smoking, asbestos and excessive sunlight) take at least a decade to make their effects felt, Prof Challis is currently investigating the proposition that the mobile phone may be "the cigarette of the 21st century".
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One might imagine that, in the light of this uncertainty, Britain would suspend its love affair with the mobile: on the contrary, mobile mania intensifies apace. The vast majority of adults now own a mobile, and the number of children aged between five and nine who have one has risen five-fold since 2000, even though experts are concerned about the possible long-term impact on child users.

Ever since I overcame my initial reluctance to use one at all, my usage has soared: the malevolent little thing is irresistible. The mobile is such a handy and comforting device that it pours its irradiating balm on almost every situation, whether by permitting one to warn a friend of a late arrival or to text an instant thank you.

And yet, the more I consider it, the more similar the mobile really is to the cigarette. Where once a woman waiting alone in a café might have lit up to kill time and add poise, now she is likely to fiddle ostentatiously with her phone in a gesture which proclaims: "I'm busy, so please don't bother me."

Now that smoking appears to be banned almost everywhere, and non-smokers no longer have to quietly absorb clouds of unwanted cigarette smoke, the fug of mobile chatter has replaced it as the social irritant du jour.

Although the link between cigarettes, heart disease and cancer was definitively proved only in the 1950s, physicians and the general public strongly suspected a link between smoking and ill-health many decades before that. Tobacco manufacturers sought to outdo their rivals by claiming that their products were the least injurious to health, as with Chesterfield's breezy slogan: "Not a cough in a carload", and Old Gold's: "Why risk sore throats?"

Even so, smoking persisted because it filled an immediate social need, punctuating hard times and lives with little hits of nicotine-riddled pleasure.

The lesson of the cigarette is that human beings are predisposed to keep doing something that is highly convenient and pleasurable in the short term, regardless of what it might inflict upon them in the long term. But the day may arrive when we regard a seven-year-old talking on a mobile with the same degree of horror as we would a toddler puffing on a cigarette.

A report last week from the Northern Ireland police omb-ud-sman found that there had been "collusion" during the 1990s between a small number of Special Branch detectives and informers within a loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force unit in North Belfast that was responsible for multiple murders and other crimes. The ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan, said that Special Branch had allowed these killers to operate with impunity and shielded them from RUC investigations.

Her findings have triggered an outcry. Martin McGuinness, of Sinn Fein, has loudly called for the former RUC chief Sir Ronnie Flanagan to be sacked from his current post as Chief Inspector of Constabulary. Let us leave to one side the fact that it is rather ironic to see a leading member of the IRA, which brought untold sectarian murder and misery to Northern Ireland, posing as the retrospective arbiter of good police practice.

The obvious point, which goes unmentioned by McGuinness, is that if the accusation of collusion is abroad, then members of the Special Branch also practised a variety of collusion with their Republican informants. Freddie Scappaticci, the high-ranking police informer known as "Stakeknife", was simultaneously head of the IRA's infamous "nutting squad", tasked with detecting and punishing informers within the IRA's ranks. He, too, was passing invaluable information to the authorities at the same time as enthusiastically engaging in the sadistic punishment of fellow-IRA men and other highly illegal activities.

It is an unpleasant reality of intelligence-gathering that the best informers are often those who move in the thick of terrorist violence, and are therefore deemed trustworthy by their colleagues. This fact should not be used to provide police informants with an effective licence to murder and intimidate, nor will it be of any comfort to the victims of those killer-informants. But it does mean that, as British police will soon discover in their dealings with Islamist terrorism, the practical and moral equations involved in running informers are often murkier and more complicated than many of us would prefer to acknowledge.