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The Wall Street Journal March 9, 2005 COMMENTARY Northern Ireland Fails The 'Town Square Test' By DEAN GODSON March 9, 2005; Page A20 LONDON -- Is the Irish republican movement becoming the Hezbollah of Ireland, a state within a state? The southern Irish mainstream fears as much, which explains why it is turning on the movement -- consisting of the Irish Republican Army and its political Siamese twin, Sinn Fein -- with a vengeance. Having afforded Gerry Adams and his cohorts the space in which to mend their ways after 30 years of "armed struggle" against British rule, Middle Ireland has finally lost patience with the burgeoning criminal empire of the Provisionals. It all started to go wrong after the abortive attempt to revive Northern Ireland's peace process last November. The talks faltered, in part, because of Gerry Adams's refusal to sign up to a form of words crafted by the Irish and British governments which would have obliged his organization to foreswear criminality. Then came the robbery in Belfast in late December, when nearly $50 million disappeared from the vaults of the Northern Bank -- the largest heist in the history of these islands. Despite Sinn Fein/IRA denials, the Irish and British police rapidly fingered the republican movement as the malefactor. Of particular significance was the response of the Irish premier, Bertie Ahern. Mr. Ahern did not indulge in the abiding fiction of the peace process that Mr. Adams -- as Sinn Fein's political talking-head -- knew nothing about what the hard men of the IRA were doing. Instead, Mr. Ahern expressed his profound sense of "betrayal" that Mr. Adams and his main confederate, Martin McGuinness, knew all along about the preparations for the raid -- even as they were supposedly negotiating an end to paramilitarism. Worse was yet to come. In January, a Belfast man, Robert McCartney, was murdered following a dispute with a senior republican in a bar. Although a Catholic and Sinn Fein supporter, Mr. McCartney was set upon by a gang of senior Provisionals. He was held down; his abdomen was slit from navel to breast-bone; his jugular vein was severed; and an eye was gouged out. But although there were nearly 70 witnesses, such is the code of IRA-enforced omert� in Northern Ireland's Catholic ghettoes that no one initially came forward to talk. A defensive IRA yesterday compounded their error by offering to shoot the perpetrators. This was followed by the largest police raids ever in the Irish Republic. They were directed at the financiers, accountants and lawyers of "IRA PLC" -- a vast multinational conglomerate for laundering the republican movement's �200 million annual turnover. Security sources also revealed that the IRA and its fronts had become the largest single owner of pubs in the South. Such an empire goes vastly beyond what any "ordinary, decent criminal" needs for his or her personal enrichment. According to the Irish police, its purpose is even more sinister. Far from being evidence of having been effectively sidelined into apolitical corruption, the IRA's parallel society and economy is in fact also a critical adjunct of the republican movement's drive to power in the Republic. Partly employing the methods of intelligence gathering they honed during the long years of terrorism, they are now spying on legislators from the South's constitutional parties, for the purpose of compromising them in seats that Sinn Fein wants to win at the next Irish election. * * * Who created this Frankenstein's monster? The British and Irish governments bear much of the responsibility for repeatedly turning a blind eye to criminality for the sake of the peace process. Mr. Ahern admitted as much to the Irish Parliament on Jan. 26. Messrs. Adams and McGuinness had to be given time to sort out their hard-liners, or so the reasoning ran. It has turned out to be a delusion. Sinn Fein/IRA has been able to have the best of both worlds -- the respectability of participation in the political process as a down-payment for a carefully cultivated image as a good-faith actor, while retaining the means of coercion. But a key responsibility for this disastrous fudge lies with Bill Clinton and figures in his administration such as Anthony Lake, Nancy Soderberg, Sandy Berger and Jim Steinberg. These "enablers" bought into the Adams myth and failed properly to call the republicans to account: too much carrot and too little stick. Indeed, when his close friend Tony Blair suspended Ulster's provincial parliament in February 2000 in order to punish the republicans for their failure to disarm -- as they had promised to do in George Mitchell's review of late 1999 -- Mr. Clinton conspicuously did not back the British prime minister. Even now, prominent figures in the foreign-policy establishment accord these provincial hoods unwarranted respectability: Richard Haass's Council on Foreign Relations is soon to host "A Conversation With Gerry Adams," who is billed in highly sanitized fashion as "President, Sinn Fein." It is no wonder, therefore, that Messrs. Adams and McGuinness have assumed that they could get away with anything. Yet even after September 11, they have been largely exempted from the full rigors of the anti-terrorism consensus. This anomaly must be rectified: Sinn Fein/IRA is a viciously anti-American movement whose closest foreign collaborators include the PLO (Arafat is a particular hero to republicans); the Colombian FARC (to whom it has supplied urban warfare techniques in exchange for cash to fund its rise to power in the Irish Republic); Castro's Cuba; and Hugo Ch�vez's Venezuela (where many IRA men, including a close relative of Gerry Adams, hang out). Significantly, one of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's lieutenants gave an interview recently to Time magazine in which he cited Sinn Fein/IRA's success as the model for the Iraqi insurgents' admixture of political and military action. Sinn Fein/IRA was in the vanguard of opposition to giving U.S. military aircraft landing rights at Shannon International Airport during the Iraq war -- a privilege that would end if it entered an Irish coalition. Its policy documents have historically been hostile to private property and now advocate an increased capital-gains tax on owners of multiple properties and a 50% tax band for those who earn over �100,000. They also want a rethink of the role of multinationals in Ireland. U.S. investors beware: The combination of official and unofficial Mafia-style taxes will make a Sinn Fein/IRA-run Ireland a profoundly bad return on your money. The second Bush administration is increasingly sensitive to the shift in Irish opinion. It now seems certain that Mr. Adams will not come within a hundred miles of the White House for the annual St. Patrick's Day party. Instead, invitations have gone out to the sisters of Robert McCartney, who have launched a campaign for justice that has already won the heart of southern Ireland. But an even more public rebuff is now required for republicans. One of the most popular women in Ireland today is Ann McCabe, widow of a southern Catholic police officer slain by the IRA in County Limerick in 1996. She has been determined that the killers do not benefit from the early release schemes of the peace process. She is no less deserving of an invitation to the White House. And at a political level, Sinn Fein/IRA should go back on the State Department's list of proscribed terrorist organizations. Why do these cases matter so much? Because the nationalist heartlands of Northern Ireland are still one of the few places in Western Europe that do not pass Natan Sharansky's "Town Square Test" of being able to say what you think of your rulers without fear of retribution. After years of cynical Realpolitik, Northern Ireland desperately needs a bit of Lebanese-style "people power" to loosen the grip of the thugs. Mr. Clinton's legacy to Ulster is a set of paramilitarized ethno-religious Bantustans; Mr. Bush's could yet be true freedom. Mr. Godson is the author of "Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism" (HarperCollins, 2004). -- ----------------- R. A. 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