The Violence of Truth

This was penned in August 2007 as a companion piece to West Belfast Snores Back which featured on The Blanket. It ended up in the Forgot About Folder which was revisited in the wake of the Truth & Recrimination piece that appeared in Fourthwrite.

Something's telling you
To wake up and salute
The dangers of obedience
The violence of truth
‘The The’ from the album Mind Bomb

At the recent West Belfast Talks Back event a member of the audience asked the panel would they, as a gesture towards accepting that there should be no hierarchy of victims, attend an upcoming march for truth. If the intention of the question’s author was to lay an intellectual trap for the panel it was hardly placed with particular adroitness. A march demanding the truth behind the activities of only one party to any conflict merely prioritises the victims of the particular side marching while at the same time marching roughshod over the victims of another party. It places themselves alone on a lofty perch from which their victimhood towers over all other victims. Not much wrong with batting for your own side were not for the pretence that it is for all sides; which is precisely what the use of a universalism such as ‘truth’ suggests.

There is every good reason for people to march in Belfast and demand that the British government come clean about the history of state terror in Ireland. A dirty history it has most certainly been. That does not mean it is a march for total transparency about the conflict, rather more of a protest against British state cover up of its nefarious behaviour. As a venture calling for the British to own up it is a wholly legitimate exercise. But as a march for truth it hasn’t a leg to stand on if within its ranks are those whose metier has been organised lying and truth suppression.

Any state, because of its ostensible position as the ultimate arbiter and dispenser of justice, should be subject to democratic scrutiny and rigorous accountability to a degree greater than other societal bodies. If the state will not refrain from murdering those its claims are its own citizens why then would others desist? The more scrutiny and accountability applied the cleaner the bill of health the state can legitimately lay claim to. Legitimacy is always an important property for any state to have within its moral armoury. It permits governments the latitude to govern more through consent and less through coercion.

If Desmond Rea of the Policing Board is representative of the thinking of the British state it is not too difficult to discern how the British are going to manage the matter of what has been called truth recovery. At the Feile event Rea played it very shrewdly in claiming that he accepted the Provisional IRA argument that it had been engaged in a war; the war is over and all who were combatants should be treated the same. It parallels an old theme - the on the runs/OTRs - which saw Sinn Fein get its hands burned when it effectively negotiated an amnesty for those responsible for state atrocities.

If the Rea wisdom reflects that of the British state then it is a major victory for that state in Ireland. Having denied that the hunger strikers were part of a war, dismissing their activity as some sort of aggregated and aggravated crime wave, the British state created the circumstances in which the ten men of 1981 lost their lives. Now that it is advantageous to itself, with the Provisional IRA defeated and no longer posing any threat to the British state, it is self-serving to go along with the notion that all were involved in a war which must remain in the past tense along with culpability. Besides, a bit of equivalence will hardly matter after the event if, crucially, it was never conceded on the field of play where official judgement has already been passed on the ‘guilty’ as any perusal of court records will show. Great outcome for the Brits. Not even as much as an apology to this society for the manner in which the British state in military-strategic terms handled the hunger strikes as part of the war, not the fight against crime, it was involved in. The legacy we are living with today, more victims than were ever necessary.

Society will stumble toward something less opaque than it has now but our window on the past will always be a frosted one. There is never going to be a definitive truth emerging from the conflict here. Northern society was a glasshouse of political violence in which all sides threw stones. Too many are intent on dressing up as bouquets the bricks they hurled. One truth triumphs to the degree that it manages to suppress another. It is a society where all parties including the political class as currently constituted do not want universal truth, preferring an account, truthful or not, of a particular event only for its value in inflicting a wound on a political opponent.

As the words of The The song go … The Violence of Truth.

Heil Mary

The censor has been on the prowl again. Cork city for some reason draws the type in a way that publicises their censorial impulses. A bit self-defeating really given that it serves censors best when their censorship goes unreported. The ideal situation is an insidious one where people censor themselves. In that way the topic being suffocated is all the more efficiently smothered for not having been seen.

In 1999 Cork played host to the thought police as they set about silencing the Nazi history falsifier David Irving. Not that what he had to say was worth listening to in the first place. Just that the mob who hounded him out of the city was assaulting the right of all others to make up their own minds about the Irving drivel. The historian Deborah Lipstadt eventually destroyed him without wielding the cudgel of censorship. Irving was later jailed in Austria for denying the holocaust.

It alone as far as I am aware is the one thing we are not allowed to deny in parts of the Western world. Denying one holocaust in the past is a punishable offence but denying others while they happen is a pretty alright sort of thing. Both the US president and the head of the United Nation's peacekeeping office denied the holocaust in Rwanda in its midst. Denying something as it unfolds seems a much worse crime than denying something that happened years ago. In the here and now denials, as they did in Rwanda, can have terrible consequences for living beings. Neither Bill Clinton nor Kofi Annan, unlike Irving, were ever jailed for their genocide denial.

Anyway, back to Cork where, muttering their Hail Marys, the reason-hating faith mob converged on the city’s University Hospital as Professor Len Doyal, a leading figure in the world of medical ethics prepared to give a talk on euthanasia. The Mary mob rushed the stage as the talk was about to begin, causing it to be abandoned after Garda intervention. One of those opposed to Doyal speaking protested, ‘who would hold a meeting on Holy Thursday in Catholic Ireland to murder people?’

Perhaps a read of Malachi O’Doherty’s book Empty Pulpits might have helped him understand that Ireland is becoming much less Catholic and considerably more secular. Then again that type tends to read the bible and find in it only what they want to reinforce their prejudices. That debate on a very important topic should plunge into the depths of nonsense reflects badly not only on the bigots but also on the public authorities who have failed lamentably in protecting freedom of discussion.

The Mary mob shares much in common with the Mohammed mob of three years back. Then it sought to intimidate artists who depicted its prophet in cartoon form. Narrow minded bigots the lot of them who think they can act as a self-appointed filter determined to impose its sound proof paraphernalia on the rest of society lest it might decide for itself on the merits or otherwise of any suggestion.

Euthanasia is a subject that any civilised society should seek to discuss openly and at length. If it is concerned with ensuring that the terminally ill die with the maximum amount of dignity and freedom from pain, then it cannot allow discussion of the matter to be trampled into the ground by religious bigots. Anyone who has followed the work of groups like Dignitas in Zurich or even viewed the film A Short Stay in Switzerland will appreciate that the problem is much more complex than the solution suggested by prayer.

The Mary mob it seems would prefer that people die as they did under the reign of Mother Teresa in Calcutta without the aid of proper palliatives or analgesics before they would consider allowing their fellow human beings to go down the road of assisted dying. All the wretched of Calcutta seem to have got was the offer of a free ticket to Heaven if they converted to Catholicism. The Catholics already had their ticket so presumably they got nothing. Their sole consolation, a sign on the wall of Mother Teresa’s morgue proclaiming ‘I am going to Heaven today.’

Conned to the last.

They’re Back

When Sinn Fein decided to abandon its long standing opposition to British policing in the North and give its support to the PSNI, the party claimed that political policing if not already a thing of the past would soon be consigned to the history books. Even the dumbest, whatever their political abode, must now see the paucity of that claim.

Already in some spheres political policing has made its presence felt more intensely than at any point during the days when the PSNI went under the name RUC. The PSNI now has powers of 28 day detention, 4 times as long as it had in its RUC guise. Today in the Irish News it is reported that ‘a purpose built “supergrass” unit is to be constructed inside Maghaberry Prison.’

Over the decades when people detained in British police holding centres were having their human rights abused Sinn Fein could routinely be found protesting outside those centres. The same when the supergrass system was in full flow; Sinn Fein would campaign on the grounds that the system relied on the word of “paid perjurers.” Now because of the bind the party is in, issuing public statements or promising to take it up with their colleagues in the British government is as far as it feels able to go. Protests are too much in your face and in any event would only beg the question of how Sinn Fein ever ended up supporting a police force that can now hold people in its custody for longer than any other force in the democratic world and then use the most tainted evidence available to convict them – that of alleged accomplices.

With Pastor Martin Niemöller’s words echoing from a distant past ringing in our minds the party may yet face the embarrassment of some of its own people, guilty or not, being held for 28 days before being jailed on the evidence of a “supergrass” if the PSNI decide to pursue the Northern Bank robbery investigation. There is absolutely nothing to stop them. Because Sinn Fein said nothing when it happened to others, there might be no one left to say anything when it happens to them.

Many Sinn Fein members underwent interrogation during the Provisional IRA’s own participation in the conflict. Some of them also spent considerable time in prison as the result of “paid perjurer” evidence. It must seem strange to those in the party who have still, in administrative terms at least, not yet gone over to the British body and soul to view the prolonged interrogations that are taken place in Antrim Barracks and the construction of the new Maghaberry unit. Those that did, many years back, sit silent facing down their interrogators must today have a natural sympathy with those in custody and an equally natural antipathy towards the police interrogators. Yet they must publicly stand in solidarity with the raucous police not the silent detainee, limply arguing for detention periods to be pulled back to the old British span of 7 days rather than the current 28. It is hardly a radical position for a party that claims to have achieved major progress in the area of policing to be arguing. Yet it is the logic of where the party finds itself. It is where the DUP has forced it to go.

At the same time there has not been the slightest reciprocation from the DUP. Not one eyebrow raised about police procedure; the opposite is true. Human Rights commissioner Monica McWilliams was condemned by DUP members for visiting the interrogation centre to check on the human rights status of the detained. It shows the power disparity in what is inanely described as a power sharing arrangement.

The extent of the problem is rapidly becoming clear. The British state is increasing its erosion of civil liberties for Irish citizens. As has been said of Argentina, while the state has formally rejected terror it has preserved its tools. Moreover, whereas previously it was faced by an opposition that defined itself as the voice of principled leadership, it no longer has that restraining mechanism breathing down its neck. Sinn Fein may, as it has done in the case of 28 day detention, raise a feeble voice against the use of paid perjurers. But the British will relax certain in the knowledge that the party has no choice but to support those who pay the perjurers.

Voting is a Dead End

The problem with political jokes is they get elected - Henry Cate VII

You would think by now given the length of time the Irish News has been in the business that it would have learned the folly of putting bad ideas into the craniums of the dullards who make up the bulk of our brain dead political class.

Last week the paper unpardonably ran with a headline ‘Deceased candidate re-elected as mayor.’ The story referred to Harry Stonebraker. The surname makes me think he may have come from a family who spent time on one of the many road gangs from the country’s prisons. If so it did him no harm. Harry had been the long time mayor of Winfield, Arizona. Although he succumbed to a fatal coronary in March, ballot papers for the new election had been printed prior to his death and remained in circulation. When the people had their say and hit the polls they returned Harry as mayor with 90% of the vote.

In the North were that to happen no one would notice the difference. Normally it would just be viewed as a case of the dead voting the dead. The graveyard vote has always been pretty high there. Naiveté had for long held me in its grip. I really did believe that Tom Hartley was running graveyard tours of the City Cemetery because he was a secret necromancer, communicating with the dead in the hope of spiritual guidance as he prepared to valiantly unite the city under his mayoralty. And all he was doing was getting the electoral register ready.

Looking at the crowd who populate the benches up at Stormont it is easy to conclude that anyone of them could give Harry Stonebraker a run for his money. When I gaze upon them my reasons for rejecting religion and the belief in an afterlife evaporate. Truly, they confirm beyond all shadow of doubt that there is life after death.

But the notion that, thanks to the Irish News, our political class might go on forever is something most people could not bear contemplating. A president for life could now become president for eternity. Imagine if Willie McCrea could be elected after he had died. We would be deluding ourselves if we were to think for one moment that we would be spared his singing. The Free Presbyterians would flood the place with his CDs. There would be no end to it. There might even be a new album called ‘the Bigot from Beyond.’

No longer can we reassure ourselves with the consolation that ‘they’ll be dead soon.’ No more the cry of 'Eureka' upon discovering their obituaries. Rather than escape coming through them dying we would have to pop our clogs in the hope that there is no afterlife. Singing Willie in the heavenly choir. Forget about it. Hell would be better.

Terrorism in Asymmetric Conflict

As someone who served many years in prison for being a “terrorist,” I incline to bristle when meeting the term in the work of academics. The intense and prolonged Irish prison protests of three decades ago, in which I took part, were as much a rejection of the terrorist label as they were a refusal to accept the status of criminal. The need to attach the label “terrorist” onto an opponent, so that it is displayed everywhere like a car number plate, is a crucial weapon employed by ensembles including states who use the same violent methods for which they have dismissed their enemies as terrorists.

In this most probing of examinations, Ekaterina Stepanova approaches the vexing issue of terrorism with subtlety of mind and a penetrating intellect. She employs the term “terrorist” only after much thought and then avoids the moral haughtiness so often adopted by those most persistent in its usage. She is not blind to the widespread existence of state violence against civilian populations nor does she seek to excuse states when they engage in it. She finds an academic utility value in her management of the term and it is through that prism that her work should be read.

Her definition of terrorism is “the form of violence that most closely integrates one-sided violence against civilians with asymmetrical violent confrontation against a stronger opponent, be it a state or a group of states.”1 This locates terrorism exclusively within the armoury of the weak as a weapon against the strong. Terrorism is strategically directed violence against civilians as a means of redressing a power disparity. By way of example, she illustrates Palestine, where she argues that an asymmetry between high nationalist mobilisation and a low possibility of that nationalism achieving its goals increases the likelihood of terrorism being deployed.

In the post-9/11 world, Stepanova, without losing sight of the fact that local acts of terrorism produce more fatalities, posits a quasi-religious armed force as the major form of terrorism and her focus is on the brand that gives the greatest “bang for the buck”— superterrorism. Stepanova with considerable persuasiveness explains how global Islamic terrorism has evolved using a combination of the vanguardist ideas recommended by the martyred thinker generally identified as having spawned Islamic terror, Sayid Qutb, and the Brazilian communist Carlos Marighela’s prescripts for networking terrorism. These new networks of terrorists are more difficult to contain than the old localized hierarchical structures.

For Stepanova, this highly toxic blend in the hands of bellicose Islamic global terrorism poses a major threat to civilian populations. But rather than argue that the objective of those trying to eradicate the phenomenon should be utter obliteration, she calls for a radical reorientation toward inserting a strategic wedge between the nationalistic and the religious components that constitute the overall terrorist grid.

Her logic is stunningly simple: the international system of modern states is in no position to compete with the extremists in terms of ideological mobilzation. Since the collapse of Marxism, Islamicism offers an alternative global ideological vision. Against it the Western state system stands little chance of providing an alternative ideological centre of gravity that can draw masses away from violent Islam. “It is self-delusional to think that quasireligious extremism can be neutralized by using modern western style democratic secularism.”2 For Stepanova the only alternative is to encourage the nationalisms and the combination of forces in their orbits that the West once sought to suppress.

Underpinning this radical assertion is a contention that the state has “something in common with even the most violent and radical ethnoseparatists, including those that employ terrorist means, the central focus on the state itself as the main point of reference.”3 If those fighting the state merely seek to achieve an improved upon copy of what they are battling the opportunity opens up for the in situ state to “identify, deal with, and transform” the insurgents.4 In a recent work by the Liverpool academic Kevin Bean this was made demonstrably obvious in the case of the defeat of the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland. There that defeat was secured by the British state manoeuvring, cajoling, flattering, and squeezing the IRA leadership into a position where it too could poke its snout into the state gravy train. By contrast, religious terrorism operating outside the state framework shares no common ground which the state could fertilize, and out of which could sprout an accommodation with its violent adversary.

Stepanova believes that because scholars and academics do not come up with a thorough understanding of Islamic terrorism then public comprehension of the matter is shaped in the main through the much distorted filters of the security experts. Just how damaging, not to mention useless, this corpus has been in helping society better understand Northern Ireland is not for discussion here. It is enough to say that were its perspectives to have held sway over the past two decades Northern Ireland would still be in the grip of armed conflict. Scholars and academics need to be reinforced by a wider perspective which looks at the quasi religious phenomenon which Stepanova so firmly believes Islamism is.

The broader religious terrorist phenomenon is not rooted solely in matters of “pure” theology. It is constitutive of wider ranging societal concerns such as politics, economics, culture, and identity. Most groups that operate locally and are Islamist based are also subject to strong nationalist influences. Examples illustrated are Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq.

In particular Stepanova seems to develop her perspective from her observations of the Hamas experience. In it she sees a group that, whatever the theological leanings of its key figures, is very much tempered and constrained by its need to keep public support in the areas where it is most representative. This “resort to nationalism” has a moderating affect on their violence.5 In the application of this to Iraq Stepanova argues for a move away from a security based policy of suppressing nationalist elements towards one which is more supportive of such elements. It has the ring of rather than unite and conquer the US forces should divide and conquer. But there is nothing new under the sun here. The decision is as always who to side with. Then when the excesses of the supported side can no longer be hidden from public view, as it occurred in Argentina, the US ends up in the dock of world opinion and its reputation excoriated.

One anomaly in Stepanova’s perspective is where she labours somewhat to argue that the end goal of Islamic terrorism, the establishment of the Caliphate, is “by no means an analogue of the theocratic state in its Western interpretation.”6 She claims that rather than have a ruling clergy the Caliphate is ruled directly by god. How useful a distinction this is remains dubious. What makes clerics of all varieties powerful and influential is their ability to sell themselves as specialized or privileged interpreters of the thought of God.

Nevertheless, this is a refreshing work. Rarely are so few pages as tightly packed with ideas, reasoned argument, and skilful presentation as Ekaterina Stepanova has managed here.

Notes
1. E. A. Stepanova, Terrorism in Asymmetric Conflict: Ideological and Structural
Aspects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
2. Ibid., 153.
3. Ibid., 53.
4. Ibid., 125.
5. Ibid., 115.
6. Ibid., 73.

Ekaterina A. Stepanova: Terrorism in Asymmetric Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Review first published in Democracy and Security, 5:100–102, 2009.

Justice 96

What began as a day out in the spring sunshine 20 years ago ended as the darkest hour in the history of British football - Peter Went

I think I have a good memory of events from twenty years ago today. It was a Saturday and I had been listening to the radio most of the day in my H-Block cell. Liverpool would be playing in the FA Cup semi final cup in the afternoon and their opponents were Nottingham Forest. Liverpool had been in such form throughout the season and were sufficiently smarting from the previous year’s defeat at the hands of Wimbledon in the final of the same competition that Forest could not conceivably stand in their way.

I had another reason for listening to the radio long before the match was due to kick off. Earlier in the week two IRA volunteers had been arrested on active service in West Belfast just after they had attached a booby trap bomb to the gate of a RUC barrack. One, Pat Sheehan, was a close friend and a former hunger striker from the protest that had taken the lives of ten of his comrades. He had visited me on a number of occasions in the jail after he had been released. The roles would be soon reversed. The other, Marie Wright, now deceased, was also a former prisoner.

On hearing of their appearance in court I was devastated, particularly for Pat given that I had known him so well. As determined as both of them were, knuckling down for the long haul would be no easy challenge. I had no thoughts for their intended victims. We were at war with them and they with us. That’s how it was then. Compassion was a finite resource, limited to our own side and denied to the other. With thoughts of Pat and Marie still in my mind I settled down to listen to the game. Like everybody else 6 minutes was as far as I got before disaster struck. My thoughts of what had happened in a Belfast courtroom were soon to be displaced by trauma from a Hillsborough football stadium, the pangs of which still tug at my emotions to this day.

As a Liverpool fan I had always wanted to stand amongst that multitudinous throng of moving, swaying, chanting bodies. There was a deep affinity with the souls who populated the Kop. Many years earlier on black and white television after Liverpool had pulled back from a two goal deficit to beat derby rivals Everton, the camera stayed on the moving mass in the Kop for what seemed like an eternity. It looked like heaven on earth. It wasn’t live. Outside of FA cup finals which were televised as they were happening we had to wait to that evening or the following day to watch English soccer. Years later I would make it to the Kop. But the experience has become indivisible from the tragedy of twenty year ago. Today 25, 000 people gathered throughout Anfield to remember the dead.

96 fans lost their lives that day, men and women, boys and girls. So rapid was death that only two fans died in hospital. The oldest was 67 and the youngest 10. Their names are etched on a monument outside Anfield. Whenever I am in Liverpool for a game or not I make a point of visiting the shrine. The emotion is powerful. I can only compare it to visiting the resting places of republican hunger strikers. That says a lot about its potency.

One thing that annoyed me deeply after it was when some fool called Albert phoned up the popular BBC Talkback show to suggest that because the Anglo Irish Agreement had been signed at a place called Hillsborough the horror visited on the Liverpool fans in a Sheffield stadium of the same name might be God’s revenge. There is no bigot like a religious bigot. His hateful comment prompted me to write a piece called ‘Albert the Imbecile’ which I sent out to a local Sinn Fein newssheet in South Belfast. The editor declined to carry it on the grounds that it might have sounded sectarian.

Immediately after the disaster the police and gutter press between them began lying with the intention of putting the blame for the disaster onto the Liverpool fans alleging they were drunken hooligans. Professor Phil Scraton describes how the cops got together to falsify their accounts and realign their stories. Lord Justice Taylor who carried out the inquiry into the disaster in his report rubbished the notion that ‘hooliganism’ played any part in the events of the day. He placed the blame on bad police management and was scathing of the police officer in charge for being ‘untruthful’ in his account. He also rubbished the Sun for its reporting which showed that the paper had attacked Liverpool fans with a venom usually reserved for Irish people.

The disgraceful inquest verdict of two years later recording ‘accidental death’ infuriated and depressed the families of the dead. The path that Taylor had blazed through the fog of cover-up had been rerouted back into a marsh where truth was sucked down. With the approval of the coroner the police through a coordinated legal strategy fought an action aimed at discrediting the Taylor finding.

Undeterred, those who want justice for the 96 continue to this day, determined that they shall never walk alone.

Dreadful Lesson

Last week a letter appeared in the Irish News. It was signed by a raft of community and political groups from West Belfast. It hit out at an earlier spate of hijackings and burnings carried out by republicans hostile to the current political consensus in the North. Although a show of supposed strength, the actions of the republicans involved demonstrated their weakness and a bankruptcy of ideas. Apart from those who carried it out there are few who viewed it as anything other than gratuitous violence. The people most inconvenienced by it all were working class communities like Ballymurphy which according to researchers and letter writers to newspapers already suffer from high levels of poverty and deprivation.

The hijackers and burners in their application of force so much resembled the Provisional IRA in its frequent campaigns of disruption right up to the end of its armed struggle. City wide bomb hoaxes were every bit as disruptive of working class daily life as the recent violence. That it all ended in failure is ignored by those intent on trying it all again. Nevertheless, while a show of weakness, it seems the physical force advocates derive some degree of satisfaction from aping the Provisionals in copying their actions and then regurgitating their dismissive responses towards expressions of community concern. They are never slow to remind their critics that in their condemnation they focus on only one type of violence and turn a blind eye to others.

The exclusive concentration of the letter writers on the republican violence gave the letter the feel of something the peace train activists would get up to in response to the frequent Provisional IRA disruption of the cross border service between Belfast and Dublin. Those concerned with securing an uninterrupted train journey would ignore state repression. Perhaps because they were largely middle class types who lived outside the ring of steel within which the state practiced its repression they never actually had any experience of the phenomenon and saw only the train tormentors. This is hardly an excuse that the signatories to the Irish News letter can claim. They have seen it all yet strangely never once in their letter referred to the draconian 28 day detention legislation that now stalks the streets of the North where political policing is supposed to be a thing of the past and which helps to convince hijackers and anybody else with a gun or a petrol bomb that the British state in Ireland is still something that needs to be resisted militarily. Perhaps that particular letter was not the place to raise the issue. But the suspicion remains that no place will be considered suitable by the bulk of the signatories to raise the issue. When it was reportedly put to those behind the letter that the 28 day detention should also be addressed the request was ignored.

The sentiment expressed in the letter is nevertheless right. The violence and disruption inflicted on the communities is futile, nihilistic and depicts those who inflict it as little different from the people behind the many forms of anti-social behaviour that have long plagued communities. It is hard for those suffering it to make the distinction between violence for pleasure and violence for Ireland.

But the letter loses more than a smidgen of its moral authority when the inconsistency of many of the signatories is so evident. When we see Alex Atwood and Margaret Walsh adding their names we can say that they at least never advocated violence against the community at any time. It would be hard for some of the others who lent their name to the appeal to make the same claim. Some of them prompted mobs to the homes of people in Andersonstown and Springhill because the occupants had spoken out against the killing in Ballymurphy of West Belfast man Joe O’Connor.

Had it been made clear from the moment of O’Connor’s slaying two and a half years after the Good Friday Agreement that the use of political violence in Ballymurphy was without justification rather than hounding those who were explicit in their rejection of the political violence then being employed, the moral force wielded against the latest practitioners of burning and hijacking might have been considerably stronger. The lesson that violence in the community was justified after the Good Friday Agreement was an dreadful one to teach people opposed to the agreement. If those who endorsed the agreement could treat it with such contempt why expect others to behave any more respectfully toward it?

Easter Sunday in Duleek

I don’t often go to Duleek. There is little in the course of my daily life that would take me to the neat little village in County Meath. On the previous occasion I had been there it was for the unveiling of the hunger strike monument last June. It is a work of considerable craftsmanship situated less than half a kilometre from the main street. It is the property of the Duleek 1916-1981 Monument Committee. Today it was the site of the Easter commemoration. The Monument Committee, organisers of today’s event, is an independent republican cultural body which dedicates itself to the politics of memory with a specific focus on all Irish hunger strikers who lost their lives in the course of struggling against the British.

Every Easter Sunday I try to attend one of the events. On occasion I end up at commemorations organised by groups I have little in common with other than a shared desire to pay tribute to fallen comrades plus the fact that we are republicans not traitors. I don’t mind who organises it. It would be dishonest of me to say I would attend a Sinn Fein event; for the same reason that when Sinn Fein was still a republican body and I was a member it would never have occurred to me to attend an Easter commemoration organised by the Workers Party or Fianna Fail. Now that it is in name a republican bank, but with absolutely no republican assets, coupled with the party openly calling on people to become touts the gap between me and it is 180 degrees.

This afternoon, I travelled with my wife and two children over to Duleek village green. It was a beautiful day and the children joined with others of their age in romping around the green. Playing not politics is what captures their imaginations; although they do like the noise of the band. That reminded me of the wisdom of the old Chinese proverb ‘if your neighbour annoys you buy each of his children a drum.’ By the time we arrived the band had already assembled and it wasn’t long before we moved off along the main street then turning left to make our way up to the monument. I estimated the crowd to be about 200 strong. The ubiquitous Garda presence prowled on the fringes without ever becoming intrusive.

What I liked about it was that there was no standing on ceremony. As soon as we arrived at the monument it was down to business. The wreaths were laid, the proclamation read, and flags lowered as a minute’s silence was observed. The one dissenting voice from the silence was the noisy howling of my three year old. He had either lost his toy car or had been upset by his sister in some way so he decided to protest in the way that three year olds do. No one other than me seemed bothered. The main speech was delivered and with the playing of the national anthem complete the assembly began to disperse.

‘Traitors’ featured in much of the discourse both from the speakers and amongst the crowd. The redoubtable Breandan Mac Cionnaith of Garvaghy Road prominence was the main speaker and he hit out at Martin McGuinness’s use of the term against republicans who refuse to back him in his political career as a British micro minister. Some in the crowd including myself would jokingly address each other as ‘fellow traitor.’ Breandan Mac Cionnaith delivered a radical address which left little room for misinterpretation. Those operating partitionist institutions north and south had failed the people of the country, the ideals of the 1916 proclamation had not been achieved anywhere and no matter how dispirited people were republicanism would come again.

I try not to be an emotional republican. Emotion always distorts reason which ultimately is what should guide us through life. But it is difficult not to feel a surge of emotion racing through the veins when reflecting in those situations on what the men and women of 1916 gave up in order to make a stand against a malign foreign power which had long subverted Irish independence for no end other than its own.

After proceedings had come to a close we spent a few moments chatting to Breandan Mac Cionnaith and some of those behind the event. Mac Cionnaith has battled long and hard in his adult political life and we wished him well for the future as he tries to salvage something from the wreckage of republicanism. The organisers thanked us for coming. We in turn thanked them for having built a monument so fine that it made the visit an honour; we felt privileged to stand beside it. Before making the journey back to our home we had some family photos taken at the monument. Whether our children grow up to acquire republican perspectives is a matter for them. As their parents we are just glad that that they can share moments that are special for us.

Spy Wednesday

To wake up a man from a nightmare is compassion. - Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I remember drifting off to sleep and then it was an alternative universe. Like a flip between worlds I had once read about in a novel by Peter Straub and Stephen King. I was back in Sinn Fein as the party gathered at the assembly point for the Easter commemoration. In my dream it was at Divis Tower and not the usual venue, Beechmount. I didn’t feel comfortable being back in the fold but like many dreams, breaching the walls of sleep was the only exit. I couldn’t reach the elusive escape hatch and was condemned to march the Falls Road until wakefulness released me. My attempts to run away were accompanied by the slow motion that always holds you in a dream despite your best efforts to pull away from it.

The Easter Parade had been moved from Sunday to the Wednesday before. When I asked the man beside me why this was so, he looked at me with horror as if a question was a contagious illness which might infect him and then he might go around asking questions too. He shuffled off dragging his partner by the hand. I saw someone I took to be an official or marshal. His overbearing demeanour suggested he could be nothing else. I put the question to him. For my troubles I received a look which suggested I was plain stupid. When I let my tongue hang out and turned my palms upward he concluded that I was pretty much that and proceeded to give me a ‘mo chara’ lecture in tones that were insultingly paternalistic; the party had to be flexible, Sunday was not the only day the actual fighting in Dublin had taken place. Did it take place on Sunday at all I inquired only to be ignored. He continued by explaining that other days had to be taken into consideration as well if we were to avoid having a hierarchy of days. I explained as best I could that if we were marching the Wednesday after Easter I could buy into this but the Wednesday before, no fighting happened that day. ‘But they were planning it,’ he assured me. ‘You don’t think it came out of thin air. And you would not want to be looking down your nose at those who laid the ground work and valuing only those who took to the field. Read your history mo chara.’ He mumbled something about old habits dying hard, a thinly veiled reference to my long running differences with the party. It was clear he felt I should be grateful at being back among the true believers even though I did not truly believe. Penance should have been my lot.

My persistence wouldn’t surrender as easily as some other things in life so I pointed out that it wasn’t just any Wednesday, this was Spy Wednesday. ‘That’s a negative way of describing it. We look at it as Patriot Wednesday.’ Not quite ready to buy into that I pressed on. ‘What about marching on Good Friday then?’ Politically and ideologically we might have drawn back a bit from Easter Sunday but only by two days not four. The SDLP, I was informed, march on that day. Besides, ‘they made that agreement on Good Friday not us. Fair’s fair and all that.’ I argued that the SDLP never march. He told me it was April so there was little point in us discussing March.

Fair enough. While there was something not just right about it, I couldn’t think of a way of dealing with it and fell into line, just like everybody else, and felt the most compelling urge to nod my head and walk in a somnambulant state. I was handed a little bannerette with a photo of Caoimhin O Caolain on it and told to wave it at the crowds as I was passing. Mindful that there might be children watching who I did not want to frighten I thrust it into my pocket as soon as the marshal had turned his back.

Having fallen in we slowly shuffled up the road. Try as I might it was hard to keep step, not being good at these things. Besides, the road had changed. Whereas during my waking hours, there was no SDLP office on the Falls Road near the Falls swimming centre, in my dream road the first building we approached after the pool was called Alex Atwood House. As we passed we let out a collective roar of ‘Stoops.’ It just came up from the pit of my stomach. Involuntarily it was racing from my lips before I knew it. Those inside the premise stuck their tongues out at us and laughed derisorily.

Next in line was the Workers’ Party headquarters which seem to have been uprooted from the Springfield Road and placed on its new founds. I was amazed to see what I thought was a photo of Gerry Adams hanging on it but as we got closer I realised it was Des O’Hagan. The beard and glasses had momentarily deceived me. When we reached it we howled ‘Sticks’. They screamed ‘Stormont forever’ back at us. The stewards instructed us to shout ‘up Stormont’, it being more transitional sounding than ‘Stormont forever.’ The logic was what goes up must come down; nothing lasts forever, just a phase in the struggle.

At the Sinn Fein office at the comer of Thiepval Street a crowd had gathered to wave at us. As we approached they seemed to be shouting something about caps. I had none on so I took it to be the berets that the colour party members were wearing. As we pulled up level with them I began to wave and shout ‘friends.’ I didn’t recognise them as any friends that I knew but they were there for us. They were waving at us and I could now make out what they were shouting: ‘up the Scaps.’ That was it; in the S hierarchy we were at the bottom, the Scaps, lower placed than even the Sticks or the Stoops. My face was red. What would my kids think? How could I sing them ballads of ‘brave Scappaticci’? Sticks, Stoops and Scaps. This was as good as it got.

At Northumberland Street, which was now positioned up the road rather than closer to the bottom, there was a wall mural of Iris the Virus Robinson. She was partially concealed in undergrowth and surrounded by gravestones upon which she seemed to sneer. Emblazoned above her image were the words ‘First Squaw - Walking Eagle.’ On the headstones at her feet were inscribed the words ‘God sent me to hell for being gay.’ On her head was Native American head dress.

While we looked on it lovingly a car pulled up with two former blanket men in it. Someone shouted ‘traitors’ and we tried pulling them from the vehicle. I wanted to run away but couldn’t. My legs had a dream powered life of their own.‘Take them up to Casement and drop them from the wall’ a voice howled. The car the men were in was attacked by the crowd wielding car braces and poles. Then from her mural Iris the Virus floated into our midst, wagged a disapproving finger, and said ‘not in this town, you don’t. Second class citizens shall show each other mutual respect. It is our job to humiliate you. ’ My instinct was to rebel against this insult. ‘Hush,’ came a voice. ‘That’s the boss’s wife. Do as she says.’ So used was everyone to behaving deferentially and with blind obedience to authority that emanated from the house on the hill that we immediately ceased our attack on the two former blanket men and fell back into the ranks. The Virus drifted back in amongst the tombstones. With her out of earshot some in the parade grew rebellious. An American tourist walking in the parade asked ‘why is she called Walking Eagle?’ A woman to my rear said in a broad Belfast accent, ‘because she is so full of crap she can’t fly.’

Up the Falls and at the bottom of the Whiterock Road we turned right and into the City Cemetery. But we didn’t end up here on any previous occasion I thought. Still, we pressed on until we stopped at the grave of Denis Donaldson. We had been told a famous actor who had played the role of an Irish hero would be giving the oration. Unusual, but for that reason, novel. Brad Pitt or Liam Neeson, perhaps. Both had played senior roles in films about Irish resistance icons. At the graveside, Jim Sturgess was announced as the guest speaker. ‘But it can’t be’ I protested, ‘he is acting Marty McGartland in Fifty Dead Men Walking.’ As if that wasn’t difficult enough, when he began reading the role of honour I wanted to join Walking Eagle behind one of her headstones.

Patriot Franko Hegarty
Patriot Maurice Gilvary
Patriot Peter Valente
Patriot Joe Fenton …

And on it went. When the colour party lowered its flags I heard one of those flag bearers say ‘too fast Freddie.’ Whoever Freddie happened to be, his reply was ‘alright Sandy.’ A steward noticing my concern said ‘ah, Scappaticci and Lynch; they are only water-carriers.’ But they were carrying the national flag. ‘Everybody can change Anthony. One man’s traitor is another man’s patriot.’

Unsure I could continue with this I nevertheless was sucked back into position and marched out of the cemetery. Someone said we were now for Milltown. At last I thought, the escape from this nightmare. It would all fall into place and this madness would be behind us. As we approached the front of the cemetery I could see the colour party slowing down but instead of turning into Milltown it wheeled to the right to begin the journey back down the Falls Road. By this time those in front of us had begun rhythmically hoisting their left hands and pointing with index fingers towards the republican plot, chanting ‘they’re all traitors over there.’ Like a Mexican wave it spread right down to where I was. My hand jerked up in spite of myself and I too began screaming. The anonymous pressure of the group had done its work.

As we passed the Falls Park on our journey back down a PSNI landrover pulled out in front of us. Two cops alighted, and took position at either side of the road, butts of their automatic rifles resting firmly in the crook of their arms. Spontaneously the parade gave a clench fist salute and as one roared ‘victory to the peelers.’

That was it. I pushed my feet hard against the ground and launched myself as far into the air as I could, coming up through the layers of sleep and making my way to consciousness, my heart racing and breath panting.

A dream. Nothing like that could ever happen in real life. Sinn Fein would never encourage touts and label republicans traitors. A dream, that’s all it was. Now, back to the real word where Ireland will be united by 2014.

Truth And Recrimination

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It is not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past - Milan Kundera

It seems they have made an ‘eames’ of it. Not that it had to be that way. The legacy report put together by Robin Eames and Denis Bradley might in different circumstances have served as the first stitch in a process of knitting together diverse, often irreconcilable, perspectives were it not for a brace of built-in self destruct mechanisms. Rather than knitting together, we were delivered a stitch up courtesy of a crude attempt to buy 12 000 quid's worth of acquiescence from the families of people who were the ‘lost lives’ of the North's bloody conflict.

In one of life’s strange paradoxes the sole act of reconciliation to have emerged from Eames/Bradley is that by annoying almost everyone the bulk of people now seem reconciled to scowling at the authors of the report. In a rare display of unity most in the North appeared to have been upset at the same time about the same thing. Their indecent haste to begin finger pointing could not even wait until they had stepped outside the venue where the report was being launched. In what could only be described as an undignified bout of shroud waving some took almost gleefully to screaming at each other ‘our shroud is more sacred than yours.’ Typical for the North where each seeks to out-howl the other with anguished cries of ‘my hurt is greater than yours and we stand ready to hurt you badly if you disagree.’ TV producers watching it all might yet be tempted to screen Ireland’s Top Victim in a parody of the Tyra Banks hosted US model show.

Eames/Bradley recommends a Legacy Commission of three to replace the effectively redundant PSNI Historical Enquiries Team. Whatever else the Commission might produce reconciliation hardly figures. It cannot reconcile precisely because in its remit it can only reproduce the one mechanism that bedevils and blocks any reconciliation process. Broadly speaking this amounts to a unionist belief that there is no one size fits all model. For unionists the people killed by republicans were innocent and republicans the guilty perps. For nationalists the problem with this is that it absolves the state and unionist politicians of their role in the conflict. Nationalists want equivalence based on the professed opposition to a hierarchy of victims. From a unionist point of view even if there were to be some equivalence it would be a biased equivalence evidenced by the inability of the suggested future commission to compel non state actors to release information but paradoxically to have the power to obtain such information from state bodies. This is supposedly to be redressed by eliciting from individuals, through inducements of promises of immunity from prosecution, information about cases unlikely ever to result in prosecutions to begin with. Information is to be bought with a completely worthless currency.

Ultimately it takes on the appearance of a one side bares all model. Reconciliation does not emerge from one party feeling it was shafted. Nor can it be purchased with ‘blood money.’ A deadly brace that truthfully sinks the good ship Reconciliation before it can even leave port.

The Brits as usual, courtesy of the internal solution they were able to secure in the North, have effectively narrated a neat little fiction. They have managed to stand back, waiting to consider the recommendations made for two warring tribes to whom their stance was neutral over the years of conflict.

The entire process from the British perspective was designed to project an image of a religious divide. That was the unmistakable message sent out. The report was even prefaced with a quote from a Christian writer. A cleric from the Protestant tradition and a former cleric from its Catholic counterpart and hey presto the model of two sides involved in a sectarian squabble took shape. The Brits themselves cleverly thought not to send one of their own military chaplains to take part despite having lost about 700 of their own troops not to mention hundreds more of their indigenous allies. But to send their cleric would have brought them down from their plateau of moral haughtiness to the level of the tribes.

So, the calculating old Brits, given that they had won the war, decided that they would wax magnanimous and forego victim status. Just let the tribes carry on with their sectarian squabble. Besides in the melee of the howlers shaking their fists at each other while they profess their devotion to peace all Brit culpability will be lost.

Truth is there is no real appetite in the North for truth as reconciliation. It is invariably sought for recrimination. The type of truth that is required is ‘our truth’, one that we can poke you in the eye with for the purposes of tarnishing you; hoping that you will be provoked into paroxysms of rage which we will use as evidence that you hate our hand of friendship. We want the revealed truth about what you did to us and as little truth as possible about what we did to you. When hurt is used to inflict even more wounds for the purposes of political advantage then the chasm between truth and reconciliation grows even wider.

So why do committees, commissions and interest groups persist in linking truth to reconciliation? In sectarian Belfast ‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ There is no pot of truth and reconciliation at the end of this orange and green rainbow that Britain from the splendour of its benign neutrality has projected onto the screen of our collective consciousness. That is the one truth that society sorely needs to reconcile itself to.

Fourthwrite 2009

The Thatcher Intervention

Two weeks ago I commented on an interview that appeared on the website of the Bobby Sands Trust. The view of the Trust, my own also, was that the document was valuable in that it purported to shed light on some of the issues associated with the hunger strike era. All such documents, flawed as they may be, are coveted nuggets; the building blocks of historical reconstruction, which whether challenging to or supportive of our pre-existing perspectives, should be welcomed for their ability to enlighten us.

The interviewee was John Blelloch, a key NIO official and alleged MI5 operative. The Trust rightly felt that this placed him on the inside track from where he was pivotally placed to fully understand the governmental processes at play. It would also enable him, were he so inclined, to misrepresent the same processes. At no point did the Trust issue a health warning to indicate that Blelloch’s account, because he was what Sinn Fein had longed termed a securocrat, should be treated with some scepticism. It was sold as a fixed proof of an equally fixed British state position in 1981. No allowance was made for the possibility that it might have been a self-serving fiction aimed to conceal rather than reveal.

For the Trust, Blelloch was presented as confirming that there was no hint of flexibility on the part of the British government during the strike and in particular in and around the time of the death of Joe McDonnell, the fifth striker to die. For my part, I felt the Blelloch document was an important addition to our understanding of how the British five years after the strike were still intent on withholding the truth from us.

Because I had serious reservations about the purpose of Blelloch’s interview and had solid reason to believe that in terms of documents it was not the most important one available to researchers, I concluded my article with the comment that ‘it will hardy even make the 7 day wonder category. 7 days is a long time in politics, long enough to see perspectives turned completely on their head.’

Today, 14 days later rather than the magical 7, the Blelloch perspective would indeed seem to have been turned on its head. The Sunday Times ran with a feature article in its prestigious Focus section which purported to show that the British prime minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, had made serious overtures to elements within the leadership of the IRA aimed at ending the hunger strike. When informed by those IRA elements that the tone rather than the substance was the obstacle to a resolution Thatcher worked on more appropriate wording.

The Sunday Times based its findings on documentation supplied by the NIO to the journalist Liam Clarke. Because it is contemporaneous it has more weight than the Blelloch interview given five years after the event. Gerard Hodgins, an IRA hunger striker and the INLA leadership of the day both claim not to have been informed that such a settlement was on offer. Had they been aware of it the INLA would have intervened and ordered their volunteers, two of whom later died on hunger strike, to end their fast. Hodgins, for his part, armed with the same knowledge would not have embarked on hunger strike.

Today I looked at the Trust website in the hope that the documents featuring in the Sunday Times would have appeared there. They did not. Perhaps in time they will otherwise the Trust will leave itself open to the same allegation that, like Blelloch, it used his interview with a self-serving motive in mind. The documents available to the Sunday Times might not correspond to the Trust’s reading of events but deliberation on the era they address can not be definitively shaped by any one party with a dog in the fight, neither the Trust nor republicans such as Richard O’Rawe who challenge the official Sinn Fen narrative on the hunger strikes. If public understanding is to grow it needs to be informed - not managed and manipulated to produce stupification in the place of understanding - and all documents of relevance should be made available. There is no need for the Trust to remove the Blelloch document even though its value has rapidly diminished as a result of today’s revelations. It should stay there as a historical trace from one of the most difficult and contentious issues in modern Irish history. But the Trust should add the NIO documents so that people can weigh up for themselves the strengths and weaknesses of two distinct accounts.

The NIO documents reinforce the contention of Richard O’Rawe, author of Blanketmen, that just before the death of Joe McDonnell the British government made an offer which was acceptable to the prisoners. O’Rawe’s claims that the army council figure responsible for the day to day management of the hunger strike overruled the prisoners is now even more weighty than before. For his efforts O’Rawe was maligned, harangued, vilified, and described as having penned a scurrilous book. Par for the course in the suffocating world of Sinn Fein wherever an alternative voice is raised.

Prior to O’Rawe’s book there was one republican narrative of the hunger strike. Thatcher was vindictive and vengeful, alone bearing responsibility for the ten deaths. When the book emerged, the hostile way in which O’Rawe’s critics tried to neutralise him and denigrate his account, caused the pixellation in their own narrative to look a bit blurred. Nevertheless, if somewhat tarnished, it remained the dominant account. O’Rawe was out there but the picture he offered was far from focussed. It would take a lot of time before the mind’s eye could sufficiently adjust itself to take in what was being shown. With each passing gambit in the struggle for interpretation the narrative of the hunger strike has gradually slipped from Sinn Fein’s control and into the hands of O’Rawe. The hunger strike is no longer mentioned without O’Rawe being introduced as an alternative voice; one that increasingly draws more listeners. His critics have sought to depict him as pissing in the well. Others saw him as an anti-pollutant dispersing the mud that had gathered in the well, allowing us to peer into it even more deeply than before.

The hunger strike is now a sharply contested event in the history of republicanism giving rise to sharply divided opinions. Ten men died and the only thing we can be sure of is that Thatcher bears culpability for the deaths of the first four.

Wrong Measure

Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable – Hosea Ballou

A recurring feature of much peace process commentary has been to ignore what sits in front of it in favour of something which demonstrably does not. Although Sinn Fein has been the most persistent offender it has never had the field to itself. However, while others show some sense of unease about calling a spade a shovel Sinn Fein doesn’t even blush. Jonathan Powell in his memoirs wittily recounts an interesting exchange in this regard between the British and Sinn Fein. Gerry Adams stated that what he liked about Powell was that he always blushed when he told a lie. ‘Unlike you Gerry’ was the instant retort from Bill Jeffrey of the NIO. Sinn Fein leaders may not feel they are personally dishonest when they are spoofing, just a matter of engaging in strategic lying. Terry Eagleton once described how those who employ this type of lying actually feel they are promulgating revolutionary truths. The rest of us who are not revolutionaries have a somewhat different take.

Sinn Fein’s need to overlook all the evidence is shaped by the fact that the political project it has embarked on is so far removed from anything identifiably republican, in fact is arguably treasonous to republicanism, that every effort must be made to mask it. This does not mean that individual members are incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, black and white, truth and falsehood, or would be deceitful in their personal dealings with others; just that the abandoned political ground is so huge that it has no equal in terms of what other bodies have vacated apart from the Workers Party, and consequently more flannel is needed to camouflage it.

On occasion the lie is not resorted to. But the outcome is no more accurate for that. Presentation of the issues is performed in so lopsided a fashion that the outcome is as straight as a corkscrew. A recent example of this was when the Belfast writer Danny Morrison in a letter to the Irish News challenged the basis of criticisms made of Sinn Fein by the former IRA prisoner Padraic Mac Coitir.

Mac Coitir had earlier in the same outlet publicly vented his annoyance at comments by Martin McGuinness accusing physical force republicans of being traitors. In his rejoinder to Mac Coiter, Morrison spoke of how measured the Provisionals have been in their response to the jibes, actions or provocations from their republican critics. The obvious question here is what measure was Morrison using?

A brief recall of some of the ‘measured’ Provisional responses should suffice to make the point. The following claims have never been seriously refuted:

• Joe O’Connor, shot dead
• Brendan Shannon, kidnapped
• Brendan Rice, kidnapped and beaten
• Mickey Donnelly, limbs broken
• Bobby Tohill, kidnapped and badly beaten
• Paddy Fox, kidnapped
• Stephen Moore, kidnapped
• Geordie McCall, shot and injured
• Kevin Perry, shot and injured

In addition to this there have been house visitations, threats, smear campaigns, bugging of homes, censorship and marginalisation.

Can it really be the case that killing Joe O’Connor is a more measured response than calling Gerry Adams a modern day De Valera? Are any of the above attacks more measured? The playing of the victim role for so long has so distorted logic and proportion that this is what we end up with. It is the sort of self-pitying perspective that would lead someone with a sore finger to trample cancer patients and pull people out of intensive care beds to get themselves to the front of the hospital queue. The total collapse of all sense of proportion is as startling as it is instructive.

99 per cent of propagandists it seems give the rest a bad name. They fall victim to forgetting that, as Friedrich Nietzsche so lucidly put it, 'the most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.'

Be Honest, Mr Adams: You no longer have a strategy for a United Ireland

Parliamentary Brief. April 2009

Political violence has returned to the streets of Northern Ireland with a bang, or a series of them, with three members of the British military and policing forces being shot dead in two separate incidents over a 48 hour period.

The groups who claim to have carried out the attacks are the Real IRA, which killed the soldiers, and the Continuity IRA which took the life of the police officer. The Real IRA is best remembered for its bomb attack on the town of Omagh in August 1998 which resulted in the deaths of 31 innocent civilians including many children. Alongside similar atrocities, simply remembered as Bloody Friday, Enniskillen, the Shankill, La Mon House, Claudy, and Coleraine, Omagh joined the long list of disaster sites where unspeakable acts were perpetrated by IRAs on unsuspecting civilian populations going about their daily lives. Enniskillen apart, the casualties were largely due to the incompetence of the organising minds behind the attacks rather than what the Sinn Fein boss Gerry Adams has termed ‘ethically indefensible terrorism.’

The Continuity IRA is remembered for being the Continuity IRA. There is little from its history that would distinguish it one way or the other. With the killing of PSNI member Stephen Carroll in Craigavon last week it achieved for republicans the first police fatality in almost 12 years; an achievement most people regard as an unmitigated disgrace.

Both groups hail from the republican physical force tradition which has a long history in Ireland, proving from one century to the next a bane for British political and security figures. That tradition holds that while there is a British presence in any part of Ireland republicans will have an inalienable right to carry out armed attacks on Britain’s forces and its interests. Hiving out from their initial home in the Provisional IRA at different junctures because of a sense that the Sinn Fein leadership was betraying hallowed principles both groups were earlier nurtured on the ideology of physical force by the leadership of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Both men insisted that armed struggle, which involved the killing of policemen and British soldiers, was a necessary and morally correct form of resistance. This logic continues to govern the Continuity and Real IRAs’ actions to this day. So when they hear McGuinness and Adams putting on their best Finchley accents, so that Sinn Fein may echo Margaret Thatcher from the days when she was labelling Bobby Sands a criminal, to criminalise last weekend’s actions, they become even more entrenched in their belief system.

It seems clear that a large factor in the motivation of armed forced republicans is a feeling that they were cheated rather than defeated. They take the view that the Sinn Fein leadership lied to them from the outset, the evidence for which is overwhelmingly in favour of the physical force school’s claims.

An essential difference between the Provisional IRA and the recent crop hardly comes down to prospects for success. The Real and Continuity IRAs will be as comprehensively defeated as the Provisionals. The difference lies in the size of the minorities willing to lend support to their campaigns against both the British state and the democratically expressed will of the Irish people. The minority support for the Provisionals was considerably larger than anything so far mustered for today’s rivals.

Furthermore, they look with disdain on the Sinn Fein leadership of Adams-McGuinness when it tells anybody willing to listen that the party has a strategy for a united Ireland. It told them the same thing for holding onto IRA guns and this has led to a firm conviction that the united Ireland objective has been sold off in the same way that the guns were. It is virtually impossible to find anybody outside Sinn Fein itself willing to claim that a united Ireland is on the cards. The rhetoric of a united Ireland ‘always in the process of becoming but never in the state of being’ does not gel with the increasing drift of Sinn Fein into the orbit of British state strategies for the management of Northern Ireland. Adams and McGuinness, should they live the long lives of octogenarians or more, will die British citizens in a British run Northern Ireland. From listening to Martin McGuinness it seems he will be happy enough with that.

Sinn Fein really needs to tell its armed critics that the struggle for a united Ireland was abandoned because there was no strategy either armed or otherwise to secure it. Moreover, that the activities the party is now involved in are designed to gain a better deal for Northern Irish Catholics under British rule. That way the armed critics might be content enough to wear the republican mantle as a means to express their uncontested republicanism rather than wave their guns.

Can the armed republican groups expand? There is an interesting divergence of opinions on the matter being expressed by knowledgeable commentators. Brian Feeney, author of a history on Sinn Fein, has expressed misgivings about the ease with which the physical force groups might be expected to fade away. He draws attention to areas where Sinn Fein has lost both support and control, ceding the republican ground to the armed IRAs. The recession he argues is expanding the size of the recruitment pool. But he predicts no campaign on the scale of that waged by the Provisional IRA.

Tommy McKearney, a left republican with vast activist experience, and who was once approvingly quoted by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern when he said republicanism must be uncompromisingly democratic, takes a view that would give less cause for confidence amongst the advocates of an armed foray. Having lost three brothers to the conflict he monitors events with the eye of a seasoned observer and sees no popular support whatsoever for a return to republican political violence.

The safe money would be with McKearney on this one. Any armed republican confrontation with a government housing Sinn Fein is likely to run aground on the rock of popular sentiment. It would be akin to an armed assault on a government in Dublin firmly rooted in the people the insurgents need to win over if they are to make any impact.

Northern Ireland will have its politically violent moments that explode in a blaze of publicity. But the hours, days, weeks and years will tick past as unobtrusively as they do peacefully.