Kevin Myers: How can we have let two key war criminals of 20th Century in Dail?

Kevin Myers

January 01 2013 04:46 AM

For anyone to be remotely surprised by the allegation that Dessie Ellis is responsible for 50 deaths is merely proof of how successful that great toxic lie, the peace process, has actually been. Through default, and through artful manipulation, the IRA war that took some 4,000 lives has been transformed into a Civil Rights Campaign, in which the only terrorism was by the beastly Brits, and their loyalist allies; and so the litany effortlessly trips off a Shinner's tongue: Internment Day, Bloody Sunday, Widgery, Shoot To Kill, Collusion.

In this grisly distortion of the truth, the Disappeared are truly Disappeared. No one really doubts that the IRA alone abducted people, murdered and buried them secretly.

Yet that reality has vanished amid the generalised Shinner myth-making: indeed almost no one under the age of 30 today has any concept whatever of the ghastly reality of the IRA's singularly brutal and utterly counter-productive war. At the centre of that war was what is now known as the Improvised Explosive Device. The prime innovator in that IED technology was Dessie Ellis, convicted bomb-maker and today, TD for Dublin North-West.

The claims in British state papers that he was responsible for 50 murders are probably based on a common preference for nice, round figures.

I imagine that even he doesn't know how many people were killed by his bombs, or those assembled by the IRA bomb-makers that he trained, and by the bomb-makers they in turn trained. He was the primary creator of an entire culture: DEI – Dessie Ellis Inspired. And since the IRA gave bomb-making classes to members of the PLO, whose skills then leached into Iraq, and Afghanistan, the toxins he helped unleash are still at work today. Very probably, no one will ever know how many people have been killed, maimed or castrated by DEI IEDs.

This should be no revelation to anyone. Yet Ellis's career as a top bomb-maker didn't feature in any of the campaigns of the rival candidates in Dublin North West last year.

We are allowed to talk about clerical abuse in the 1970s and 1980s, but not about the horrors of the IRA war.

So Dail Eireann has in its midst two notable war criminals of the late 20th Century, Gerry Adams and Dessie Ellis: yet the only time that the Taoiseach refers to the deputy for Louth's terrorist credentials is to mention the name Jean McConville when he can't think of any other way of rebutting anything said by those rather clever TDs, Pearse Doherty or Mary Lou McDonald. And that, frankly, is pathetic.

Moreover, the Provisionals have even been allowed to commandeer the word 'republican' as their monopoly. And so those who now continue the evil war that Adams and Ellis helped start are now called 'dissidents'. But in what way is it 'dissident' for republicans to kill people? Is that not what they have always done, since they inaugurated a century of bloodshed in 1916, during which there has not been a single decade free of republican violence?

Self-styled republicans in Ireland are not defined by their adherence to the concept of the democratic secular state, and the rights of the citizen therein, as in France or the US, but by their adherence to an armed conspiracy, in which they appropriate the right to take life. "We may not kill the right people in the beginning," mused that gibbering fool, Patrick Pearse, and then, aided by that other bloodthirsty half-wit, the Marxist dunderhead James Connolly, they promptly proceeded to kill loads of the wrong people.

But who, precisely, are ever the right people for "republicans" to bump off as a starter-course to the banquet of murder of an IRA campaign? Because killing people has never got republicans what they wanted. It didn't in 1916, or in 1919, or 1921, or 1922 or 1939 or 1956 or 1970, when the Provisionals began their war. And look at that later generation of clever fools, led by the likes of Adams and Ellis. They are now in charge of a so-called republican movement, which is actually helping to administer a Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, while the pillar boxes of South Armagh are as red as ever, tax-bills marked OHMS are delivered by the Royal Mail in Crossmaglen, and hello, with even a royal handshake.

Well that was certainly worth some 4,000 lives, now wasn't it?

The peace process absolved democratic politicians from their duty to speak the truth. Instead, a strange new language was born, based on selective amnesia and Sinn Fein lies, and men who should have been hanging by their thumbs in a dungeon were elected to a democratic forum, where they presume to lecture us about right and wrong.

Meanwhile, they remain profoundly unrepentant over the savage deeds that sullied the good name of Ireland. And as much to blame for this are the generations of political cowards who let Dessie Ellis live as a free man throughout the 1970s, teaching other young men how to make bombs, and who then allowed him to be elected to Dail Eireann without reference to his utterly evil past.