Enniskillen

Peter Taylor’s second documentary in a four part series on ‘terrorism’ made uneasy viewing. It dealt with the 1987 IRA bombing of the cenotaph in Enniskillen which saw the loss of numerous civilian lives. It left a bad taste in the mouth. Shift and sway as we might in the mists of republican theology the anchor of reason pulls us back to a stark conclusion: someone deliberately targeted non combatants for mass slaughter. The sole mitigating factor is that it induced in some of us the type of anger that was normally caused by events like Bloody Sunday.

With that we are denied the comfort zone of flaying the Brits or loyalists for bearing the unwanted distinction of having inflicted mass murder on an unsuspecting civilian population. We are also reminded of Gerry Adams’ lucid 2001 view that terrorism is ethically indefensible because it wilfully targets civilians. While the events at Enniskillen do not disprove Adams’ assertion that the IRA was something other than a terrorist organisation, they point firmly to one conclusion: there were some within the IRA who did not share Adams’ view of terrorism as unethical.

The reconstruction of the attack also ruptures another comfort zone; that there is a moral chasm which separates the Omagh and Enniskillen bombs. The immediate difference is one of dates. In fact, it may well be argued that the Omagh bombers killed the innocent through incompetence whereas the Enniskillen bombers killed them through design which makes the 1987 bombing more reprehensible than the 1998 one. Terms such as ‘massacre’ when used to describe Omagh depreciate in value if not applied to Enniskillen.

Prior to the documentary going out there were suggestions that Martin McGuinness would have the finger pointed at him as the person responsible for giving the go ahead for an operation certain to kill innocent people. In the event the programme was not as strong on this point as had been suggested. However, McGuinness badly erred in crying ‘securocrat’ before the programme was aired. In the semaphore of the peace process securocrat invariably reads as ‘guilty.’ It hobbled any credible defence he might have made. The evidence presented against him by Peter Taylor was arguably less damaging than the plea of ‘securocrat.’

Moreover, his dismissal of the case against him was not reinforced by his assertion that he did not serve on the Northern Command at the time of the bombing. The matter has been fairly well documented in a myriad of credible publications. The late Brendan Hughes, for example, in interviews given to the Spanish academic Rogelio Alonso firmly places McGuinness at the heart of operational decision making in the period after Hughes was released from prison. Hughes left Long Kesh a mere year before the Enniskillen bombing. Consequently, McGuinness’s role at senior levels within the IRA now seems a commonplace belief. If he says in the same breath that he had no foreknowledge of the bomb nor was he on the IRA’s Northern Command at the time it was carried out he actually invites people to treat both assertions with equal scepticism.

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More incongruity for Sinn Fein came when those the party so readily endorses as the only legitimate forces of law and order north and south lent their weight to allegations that some of its key leaders had foreknowledge of an operation that would certainly result in civilian fatalities. If political policing was ended by Sinn Fein’s decision to support the PSNI why is Martin McGuinness accusing a figure as senior as Norman Baxter of blatantly engaging in overt political policing?

As he did in an earlier documentary on the Brighton bomb Danny Morrison argued the case for the defence but without the passion of old. It is not enough to kick for touch in exchanges where the opposition is scoring points. While Morrison scored no own goals his pedestrian performance signalled, ‘Houston we have a problem.’

And the problem was not alloyed even by the PSNI commentator demonstrating a deranged perspective with his claim that another operation aborted on Poppy Day was aimed at children in the Boys and Girls Brigade who were legitimate targets in the eyes of the IRA. Such eagerness to believe the worst displayed a prejudiced rather than an analytical mind. Yet such prejudice breezed through effectively unchallenged in this documentary.

1987 had been a trying year for the IRA. It had sustained the heaviest casualties of its campaign with the SAS ambush at Loughall which led to 8 IRA funerals in a week. This occurred against a ‘battle of the funerals’ backdrop in which the RUC attacked mourners and disrupted corteges, on one occasion delaying the burial of a North Belfast IRA volunteer for days. With this in the background it is possible that someone may have decided that like must be met with like, a message transmitted to the RUC that the measure you give is the measure you get. Certainly some Belfast volunteers at the time admit to having felt that this was a response to the funeral attacks. But, perhaps of more significance, they were quickly disabused of the notion by senior figures; an indication that that grassroots volunteers were not as restrained as their leaders.

Furthermore, while there is a viewpoint circulating that operations such as the Enniskillen bombing were allowed to happen by some IRA leaders as a means to making the armed struggle appear indefensible, thus giving legs to the peace process as an alternative, much more evidence would be needed before this perspective takes hold. The then republican leadership’s response to the killing of Harry Keyes not long after the Poppy Day massacre by a Fermanagh unit of the IRA suggests that such operations were an embarrassment to the peace process lobby rather than an aid. A number of years earlier the leadership had ruled out bombing the Droppin’ Well Inn, later targeted by the INLA. The reasoning was simple: in order to kill large numbers of British troops an unacceptable risk would be posed to civilians.

In 1976 the notion that the IRA would deliberately massacre a civilian population was not all that challenging to the Provisional common sense of the day. Whitecross is a case in point. 11 years later however, it would fly in the face of where the leadership then stood. While those who planted the bomb knew exactly what would be the outcome, for now botched and bungling seem more appropriate terms than deliberate when applied to the leadership’s role in the Enniskillen bomb. The leadership would almost certainly have approved a coordinated series of operations on the day. It seems unlikely that it gave the go ahead to kill civilians in those operations.

This documentary has raised difficult questions for Sinn Fein leaders. In a sense it carries the imprimatur of a yellow card for the Deputy First Minister. With Ian Paisley having being shown the red one it must be dawning on Martin McGuinness that if the past is to be truly put behind then more people are concluding that so too must its relics.

Countdown to When?

The Chuckle Brothers become the Brothers Grim.

As Ian Paisley, the theocratic leader of the North, shuffles his way to a side pew, there seems little apprehension anywhere about the future of the right of centre rubber stamp executive and its folks on the hill who like to tell us that it is they rather than the British chancellor who are charged with determining our collective future. The DUP loves being top dog. Sinn Fein would prefer it were not so but as the DUP dismissively says of it, there is nowhere else for it to go. Even Jeremiah would be hard pressed to think up a crisis cataclysmic enough to cause a volcanic eruption on Mount Stormont that would see gangs of northern politicians spewed out of office.

Apart from Free Presbyterian devotees who probably felt Paisley would live another three hundred years before being raptured into Heaven others were aware of the bawling bigot’s political and physical mortality. British officials have in the past year detected a nervousness within the echelons of Sinn Fein that rises and falls in direct proportion to the ebb and flow of Paisley’s strength vis a vis his party advisors who for some time have been offering him only advice to go. The party that once stood for the armed destabilisation of the Northern state now craves stability within it.

Sinn Fein’s anxiety is not rooted in any expectation that the executive will collapse but that big Chuckle will not be around to grin at wee Chuckle any more. The nationalist party, reportedly, has been pleasantly surprised that Paisley was affable in his dealings with it and did not demand that its MLAs sing the Sash in public. A Sinn Fein audience having to silently stomach someone address the Ard Fheis wearing an orange sash was most likely considered obeisance enough.

Not that affability could ever be equated with magnanimity. Whatever its internal dynamics, when the executive finally got up and running in May last year the body language between the dominant dealers suggested not a partnership of equals but a hierarchical structure where both top dog and lap dog knew their station and stuck to it. Big Paisley for all his garrulous banter, in the words of one long term observer, had the measure of Sinn Fein and has outmanoeuvred the party on the issues of Irish language, the Maze Stadium and most crucially devolution of policing and justice. He chuckled as he pushed the blade in. Doubtless, his boast that he smashed Sinn Fein was grossly inflated. He just pulverised its republicanism. As good as, some will think.

Nevertheless, Sinn Fein is said to feel gratitude toward Paisley but to harbour serious trepidations about his ambitious prince and heir apparent, the Machiavellian Peter Robinson. The acidulous East Belfast MP and key DUP strategist was the person most eager in the Paisley party to do the deal that would end the central debate within unionism which amounted to whether Sinn Fein should be permitted to administer the only rule in town – British. In the months after the Northern Bank robbery and the killing of Robert McCartney, Robinson, although initially forced onto the back foot by these events, steadily regained his composure and persuaded the bulk of his colleagues that the time was ripe for encircling Sinn Fein. He argued that the best approach would be to take the Adams party for all it was worth in negotiations: force it into supporting the British Police Service of Northern Ireland, compel it to buckle to British stipulations that Belfast would host a greater MI5 presence than ever before, have it emasculate the IRA. Then, having demonstrated how weak the former republican party had become, use Sinn Fein’s prostrate body as a stepping stone into the new British administration.

Bad as it was, it was as good as it got for Sinn Fein. Now the party barometers accurately sense that the chill factor is about to intensify. In anticipation the party has visited its dusty vaults and pulled out a few republican garments for display in the hope that the Robinson DUP might pull its horns in a little if it still thinks there is some republican sentiment left in the party that might rebel if squeezed too tightly. As The Sunday Business Post put it, ‘get your Brits out for the boys.’

All of which serves to underscore the era of the Chuckle brothers being at an end. The North stands poised to enter a new dispensation - the Brothers Grim. Robinson will continue with the substance of the Paisley regime minus the jingles which so harmed the old theocrat in the eyes of those who believed him more than he had ever really believed himself.

The new abrasive style will prove irritating but it is hard to see what Sinn Fein can now do other than get over it. It may try to go down the negotiation route but the balance of forces and current political juncture deny it a strong hand. The party ultimately flattered to deceive. It is clear from Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, that the peace process is now stamped ‘finished business.’ There is no longer any need for the British state to remain on stand-by with its bag of goodies. It has secured its long standing objective of rendering ineffectual the military capacity of the IRA to effect political change. The approach of Gordon Brown towards the political process here will be more laissez-faire. Sinn Fein, denied the ability to plead special circumstance, will just have to mix it with the DUP and fight for whatever crumbs fall its way.

For the electorate, its return will be an ever expanding right ward drift, depreciation in the quality of public services coupled with social assets being flogged off to the private sector, increasing erosion of the already limited fiscal wellbeing of the economically vulnerable, attacks on those elements of the workforce least able to resist such as classroom assistants: all against a right wing backcloth of strengthened police powers over working class communities.

In a decade’s time where shall it all be? 2016 is just around the corner. That year the commemorations of the 1916 Easter rising will likely be met with indifference in the unionist community. Those inclined to march will do so under the watchful eye of the British PSNI, reporting back to MI5 that there were no disturbances. The unionists will have other things on their minds; like thinking four years ahead on how best to celebrate 100 years of partition.



First published in Fourthwrite, Spring 2008

No Thinking Here

Written for Index on Censorship, this article looks at the recent stifling of the Andersonstown News' "Squinter" column.

Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin is the current Westminster MP for West Belfast. For decades he rightly campaigned against censorship policies crafted by successive British and Irish governments for the purposes of undermining his party. British readers may recall him as the only member of the House of Commons they could see but not hear. On each occasion that he appeared on TV over a six-year period from 1988, an actor’s voice was used to dub his words. On radio he was neither seen nor heard, the dubbing procedure again in play. It was only one of a range of draconian measures applied to silence him and his party. Former Irish Journalist of the Year Ed Moloney has repeatedly asserted that such censorship prohibited dialogue and consequently prolonged Northern Ireland’s violent conflict.

Although a victim of harsh political censorship, Adams’ disinclination to use this invidious tool of political repression has been less than salutary. Never a figure at ease with even the mildest form of political criticism, he has persistently sought to undermine those who do not see the world through his eyes and who are prepared to voice their misgivings publicly. Virtually everyone who has left Sinn Féin since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement a decade ago has highlighted the suppression of debate among their reasons for quitting. Adams has no record of speaking out against those murdered, kidnapped or beaten by his party’s military wing simply because they chose to dissent from his political project. On occasion Adams has hit out at those daring enough to have a public ‘poke’ at his leadership. Elsewhere he has been on record saying that people should not be allowed to even think that there is any alternative to the Good Friday Agreement. There is no concession to the idea that without audacious thinking, West Belfast intellectual life would be even more restricted than it currently is.

Yet even this track record ill prepared a wider audience for his and his party’s response to an admittedly blistering critique launched against him by Robin Livingstone, editor of a twice-weekly paper in his own constituency, the Andersonstown News. Livingstone, writing under his publicly known pen name ‘Squinter’, was scathing of Adams’ record as MP. He traced the economic decline of the constituency and the onset of its social decay to Adams first taking the Westminster seat in 1983.

The immediate backdrop to the Livingstone piece was the vicious murder of a popular former republican prisoner, Frank McGreevy, savagely bludgeoned to death in his own home. Livingstone, obviously incensed at the brutality of the killing, called upon Gerry Adams to accept responsibility for the problems blighting West Belfast, including criminality, rather than continuously resort to type and blame everybody else.

Despite a lengthy career as a journalist, Robin Livingstone had not been associated with criticisms of the Sinn Féin leadership either in public or private. It was the first cut he had ever made. The first, they say, is always the deepest. The depth to which he had penetrated was evident in the response, for which he was seemingly unprepared.

Sources with some knowledge of the dispute claim that shortly after the paper hit the streets Gerry Adams rang the Andersonstown News and berated Livingstone for 30 minutes, thus flouting his own public pronouncement on the BBC that he would not respond to ‘anonymous scribes’. At a vigil for the murder victim the former Sinn Féin mayor of Belfast, Alex Maskey, hit out at people who hid behind their computers writing. At the subsequent funeral Gerry Adams fulminated against the ‘quite perverted logic’ of the piece in question. It was then reported that business interests in West Belfast with links to Sinn Féin threatened to withdraw advertising from the Andersonstown News in response to the criticism of Adams. A leading figure in a West Belfast Sinn Féin branch told Livingstone in print: ‘How dare you? … you will no doubt be challenged on these ill-conceived remarks in coming weeks by a very angry community.’

All of this mounted to a standard totalitarian attempt to subvert public commentary. It is entirely consistent with authoritarian regimes throughout the globe which prefer to impose silence out of public view rather than stage debate within it.

Within a week of the article appearing, the Andersonstown News carried a front page apology from the editor to Adams for the ‘hurt’ caused. The psychological pressure applied to secure a front page apology, a rarity in the world of media, must have been considerable. Since then the ‘offending’ column has been removed from the paper’s website and from Livingstone’s own newspaper-affiliated blog, along with all readers’ comments. It is far from clear that Livingstone, apparently out of the country at the time of the printed apology, assented to it appearing. The famous dogs of the West Belfast streets opine that Livingstone was overruled in a managerial act of sycophantic subservience.

Gerry Adams had the opportunity to kick start a serious dialogue about the Livingstone claims. Rather he has sought to impose the Sinn Féin monologue as the only approved element of political discourse that the constituency is to host. Adams could easily have acquired a two-page right to reply in which he would have been free to address in a detailed manner the points raised. Whether right in his assertions or not, Livingstone had merely given vent to views in the constituency. But rather than challenge Livingstone, Sinn Féin opted for his public humiliation, forcing an editorial apology for an article so finely crafted that it is beyond belief that it was rush of blood to the head for which public expiation is the sole cure.

In a society already subjected to government minus any official opposition, what has happened to the editor of the Andersonstown News is deeply alarming. It is a censorious assault on free inquiry.

One irony in the affair is that Robin Livingstone for long did to others what is now being done to him. He incessantly waged invective against those who criticised the Sinn Féin leadership and denied a right to reply to those maligned in the paper he edited. Many people felt intimidated to the point of silence by the power of the Andersonstown News under the editorship of Livingstone. Nevertheless, it would be churlish to deny the remarkable courage he displayed in a constituency where Mugabe rather than Mandela would appear to be the current icon. Furthermore it would be dangerous to indulge in schadenfreude at Livingstone’s current predicament. He did what journalists are supposed to do — asked the awkward questions, and in so doing performed a valuable act of public service. For that reason alone his action in writing the column deserves the support of everyone who thinks society should know more rather than less about how it is governed.

Sinn Féin’s assault on a fundamental civil liberty demands a response that must be unyielding in the face of totalitarian sentiment.

Originally published for Index on Censorship, April 2008.