A PROTESTANT father who spent 10 years fighting to show his son's killers were Special Branch agents is to break further new ground this month by becoming the first working-class loyalist to address a Sinn Fein Ard Fheis (convention).Raymond McCord has spent more than a decade trying to expose the fact that his son's killers were being protected by police because they were working as Special Branch agents.In 1997 his son, also called Raymond, was beaten to death by a Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gang at a quarry on the outskirts of Belfast.Shortly after the murder Mr. McCord discovered that the killer gang were being protected because they were police agents. Throughout the last decade he received countless death threats from the UVF as he continued to try to expose his son's killers.Throughout the Troubles many Nationalist families had publicly claimed their loved ones had been murdered as a result of collusion between the security forces and Loyalist paramilitaries.Mr. McCord became the first working-class Loyalist to identify security force collusion in his son's murder.He was heavily criticized by Unionist politicians for identifying with Nationalists and traveling to the White House with the family of murdered solicitor Pat Finucane to meet President George W. Bush last year.He has been criticized in the past for meeting with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and accepting Sinn Fein's assistance to promote his campaign at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.Finally last January, after more than 10 years of tireless campaigning, Mr. McCord was vindicated when Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan identified UVF leader Mark Haddock and his gang as having been protected by police from prosecution for involvement in up to 16 murders because they were working as Special Branch agents.Mr. McCord will now break new ground later this month when he speaks at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis.While Mr. McCord accepts that his attendance at a Republican rally will be criticized by some in the Loyalist community, he refuses to apologize for his efforts to bring his message to the "old enemy.""I'm certainly not going to pull any punches when I deliver my speech to Sinn Fein," he said."The security forces had high-profile informers working not only in organizations like the UVF and UDA, but also within the ranks of the IRA. I know for a fact there are cases where policemen and soldiers were killed at the hands of IRA informers. They were allowed to die in order to protect the identity of the informants."At the end of the day the British government were the people responsible for the murders."The paramilitaries were the puppets, it was the British government who were pulling the strings and playing God with other people's lives."There needs to be a proper investigation as to what they allowed to go on in Northern Ireland."