http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/03/13/do1301.xml
At last the light is shone on the IRA
Kevin Myers
(Filed: 13/03/2005)
No event in Northern Ireland in recent years has distilled the
abominable and corrupted reality of life under the peace process as
the murder of Robert McCartney. Half beaten to death, one eye gouged
out, his throat cut, and then gutted like a fish, he was left to die
while his IRA killers returned to the pub from which they had flushed
him, to warn the customers there of the fate awaiting them if they
informed. Then making off with the cassette from the CCTV, they
proceeded to destroy all the forensic evidence associated with the
killing.
This was an exception to recent IRA activity only in the steadfastness
of the victim's family, for the IRA has been murdering the
inconvenient and the awkward throughout the decade of the so-called
peace process. It now rules nationalist ghettoes with a
kneecap-breaking rod of gun-metal.
Violence is turned on and off at will. The green gestapo of one day
become emerald-coloured community workers the next. Everyone knows
this, and almost everyone - the two governments in Dublin and London
in particular - has turned a blind eye to it. Denial of the criminal
regime governing nationalist areas was the price to be paid for
keeping Sinn Fein-IRA in the peace process.
So the two governments are probably bitterly regretting the dogged
persistence and courage of Robert McCartney's five sisters and his
girlfriend Bridgeen: if only they had been the passive and acquiescent
kin of the nearly four dozen other victims of IRA murder gangs of
recent years, who meekly buried their dead and stoically concealed
their grief and anger.
This was the world according to P O'Neill, the mythic signatory of all
IRA statements, in which at the IRA's insistence, the old RUC was
dismantled, its Special Branch destroyed, and in return, the British
Government was given precisely nothing by Sinn Fein.
This was deal-making at its most supinely inept, for IRA authority in
nationalist areas is now effectively absolute, as became clear after
the McCartney murder. While the Police Service of Northern Ireland
investigation floundered, in part because of the street-opposition
organised by Sinn Fein, the IRA was able to assemble a clear picture
of the events of the night from witness statements gathered by its own
investigations team. This might almost be entertaining if it wasn't so
utterly appalling, not merely for what it has meant in the past, but
what it inescapably means for the future.
You cannot civilise or tame Sinn Fein-IRA. It is not possible. For
bred in their bone and blood is a uniquely barbaric ethos. Of all
European political parties, perhaps only the Nazis so successfully
wove tribal myth, ancient heroes, victimhood, violence and utter
immunity from civil and criminal law into an integral part of their
identity. The peace process didn't draw the Sinn Fein movement away
from these defining toxins: quite the reverse.
In the agreeable culture of appeasement, the political antibodies that
should have been combating the spread of the republican virus failed
to respond.
So, far from being banned from the airwaves, republicans inhabited
them almost full-time, and the Sinn Fein malignancy spread through
nationalist Ireland, north and south of the border. In the past
decade, the political map of Ireland has been utterly transformed, and
for thousands of young people across the island, Sinn Fein is the future.
Thus, reassured by the governments of Dublin and London that separate
rules applied to them, IRA men felt free to butcher poor Robert
McCartney, confident they could get away with it. And indeed they
would have done but for the five McCartney sisters who in their
resolution were more than a match for the IRA. Mesmerised by such
principled opposition, of a kind it that it had never met before, it
made the public announcement that it had offered to shoot the
murderers of their brother Robert. Thus spoke the authentic, visceral
voice of Irish republicanism, finally and no longer emptily miming the
meaningless patois of democracy.
For poor Robert McCartney was not some entirely unprecedented and
unexpected victim of the deranged morality of the peace process, but
merely the latest.
Again, only the grotesqueness of this wretched business prevents it
from being thoroughly farcical. His killers had, with exquisite
sensitivity, spent the day in Londonderry, at a march commemorating
the dead of Bloody Sunday. The chief steward there, an IRA-man called
Bart Fisher, was awaiting sentencing for the knife-killing of a fellow
working class Catholic man, Jimmy McGinley. Here again, all witnesses
had been intimidated by the IRA into silence, and what might have been
a murder charge was reduced to manslaughter. And now, this killer was
an honoured leader on what has become a feast-day in the republican
calendar: thus the peace process, thus the peace.
No doubt Sinn Fein-IRA are expecting that the routine denunciations of
the IRA by both governments will soon be forgotten, as so much else
has been in the past 10 years. After all, the extraordinary
anti-terrorist measures just passed by Parliament were not framed to
deal with the most active and lethal terrorists in the United Kingdom.
However, such republican optimism does not take into account the
feelings of Unionists, who will not allow any of their representatives
to get within shouting distance of the peace process.
More importantly, it neglects the shift in policy creation towards
Northern Ireland within the US away from the State Department and
towards the CIA. It is clear to the US administration that Gerry Adams
is no more than an Irish Yasser Arafat - and no more reliable.
Moreover, US intelligence is no longer prepared to tolerate either a
potentially lethal terrorist enclave, a little Tora Bora in the South
Armagh triangle, or the unfettered authority of its local warlord,
Slab Murphy.
So Washington is now taking a more unforgiving look at Northern
Ireland than are Dublin or London. Moreover, the Colombia Three, the
Northern Bank robbery, and Robert McCartney are a reminder of the old
CIA adage: the first time is happenstance, the second time is
coincidence, but a third time is enemy action. US officials are now
demanding that Sinn Fein disband the IRA.
The IRA's brutal arrogance has finally won it a new and truly
formidable enemy. His name is Bush.
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