War rhetoric, fragile peace
Sunday March 04 2001
FOR months now, Sínn Fein has been warning that the current round of brutal gun and pipe bomb attacks by loyalists on the homes of Catholics in parts of the North would inevitably end in murder; and, with the shooting dead of Bobby McGuigan in Lurgan, Co Armagh last Tuesday, they would seem to have been proved right.
Unfortunately, what they didn't point out is that it would be republicans who were doing the murdering. How remiss of them.
Police have so far refused to speculate on a motive for the murder of McGuigan, but they have ruled out a sectarian connection. Suffice to say that the gunning down of a criminal known to have crossed the Provisional IRA in recent years was probably not the work of the armed wing of the tooth fairies.
And if this latest killing was the work of the IRA, there would be nothing unusual about that. Latest figures confirm republicans have been responsible for more killings than loyalists since the signing of the Agreement. There's not much in it (37 deaths to 26, respectively) but it makes a mockery of any notion of IRA guns being silent.
Not that one would know it. Again, republicans have always argued that, in the hierarchy of death, the murder of a Catholic is invariably downplayed, and here indeed was an example of a Catholic's murder being spectacularly downplayed. It scraped into the News in Brief columns of late editions of the Irish Times on Wednesday; precisely nothing appeared on Thursday.
The same was true even in the local Nationalist press in Northern Ireland. The same glorious inattention was lavished on senior IRA leader Brian Keenan's comments to republicans in South Armagh last weekend, first reported in Monday's Boston Herald, that the "war" was not over and, what's more, that "the revolution can never be over until we have British imperialism where it belongs in the dustbin of history."
The Irish Times squeezed a report about this intriguing speech down the side of Page 9 under the heading, "Call for unity at republican rally in Armagh." And it really doesn't sound too bad, when you put it like that. "I think it's silly," said Gerry Adams when asked about the ensuing row subsequently. "I think it's stupid." The Irish Times appeared to agree.
It may have been Keenan's comments which were really "stupid"; it may even have been that nobody least of all the South Armagh homeboys whose "give war a chance" spirits were being thus soothed was fooled. But the IRA's enemies could hardly be expected to just ignore the whole thing like the Times.
And why should they? This was a dangerous audience to be mollifying with what can only be interpreted as promises of future bloodshed if the compromises of peace prove unenticing. It looks suspiciously like trying to douse a smouldering fire by pouring petrol on it. Still, Sínn Fein and the IRA may know their own business, and they certainly ought to know their own people. Perhaps we should, as Adams advised, "put all of this into context".
But if rhetorical belligerence is a legitimate tactical manoeuvre from republicans, if it buys time for an ailing peace process, then one can hardly complain if David Trimble, seeking to pacify his own unruly fringe, adopts a little equivalent rhetorical belligerence of his own, especially with July looming.
That's not how it goes, of course. Such language from Unionists would be called a breach of the Belfast Agreement, and news of it wouldn't be squeezed into the edges on Page 9 of the Irish Times either. Such selfish concerns are for Sínn Fein alone because, so they earnestly believe, it's their peace process and they'll cry havoc/wolf/into their Guinness (delete as appropriate) if they want to. They don't even think it matters what they say, however ill-timed, intemperate and anachronistic, because they are not the problem.
Gerry Adams inadvertently revealed as much in the aftermath of the Boston Herald mini-spat. "If it wasn't for the likes of Keenan," he said airily, "there wouldn't be a peace process."
The fact is that, if it wasn't for the likes of Brian Keenan, there wouldn't need to be a peace process at all. Alas, IRA/Sínn Fein still seems to expect thanks for not killing as many of their neighbours as they would, under ideal circumstances, like. The heart bleeds for them, it really does.
Someone else's heart, usually.
