Operation Banner soldiers deserve grateful cheers, not our ungracious jeers

KEVIN MYERS

August 02 2007 04:46 AM

And so Operation Banner, the 38-year long presence of the British army on the streets of Northern Ireland, has come to an end.

No one in the Republic's media has so far acknowledged the steadfastness, decency and patience of the vast majority of British soldiers during Banner, through often appalling provocation, so allow me to do so. Yes of course, there were mistakes and excesses and some murders, which others have been happy to exult over. Let them. Without the British army, the North would have collapsed into civil war, many times over. We should be thanking it, not jeering it, as so many have been.

The following figures have been compiled by Colonel John Wilson, editor of the 'British Army Review', and former British military attache to Dublin (and, I am happy to add, a good friend of mine), using David McKittrick's magisterial death-list of the Troubles, 'Lost Lives'. During Operation Banner, 697 soldiers were killed by terrorist action. Yet only 93 of these killings resulted in a conviction for murder, with another 28 resulting in convictions on lesser offences. Which means that for 87pc of the killings of British soldiers, the killers effectively got off scot-free.

This is a shocking statistic, for British soldiers do not cease to be human the moment they don the queen's uniform, or forfeit their human rights as British citizens. Yet the political priorities which prevailed over Operation Banner quite clearly ruled that it was less important to protect British soldiers, or to punish their killers, than it was to conciliate Irish nationalism, in all its forms.

To get some perspective on those British army losses of nearly 700 soldiers, in the 38 years of Operation Banner, the British army killed 301 people. These break down as -- republican terrorists, 121; loyalist terrorists, 10; Catholic civilians, 138; Protestant civilians, 20; other civilians, 2; security force killing security force, 10.

But contrast and compare. For republican terrorists killed 2,148 people -- seven times as many as the British army -- of whom 162 were themselves republican terrorists. So, the British army was responsible for only 40pc of republican terrorist deaths, other republicans being largely responsible for the rest. (I italicise the term to indicate the barbarous misuse of it by Irish nationalist terrorists).

God alone knows what people will make of the Troubles in 20 years' time: but even at this short remove, it is clear that they were an imbecilic indulgence in aggressive nationalist self-pity which brought catastrophe on the communities it was supposed to liberate. This futile war lasted from 1970 to 1996, resulting in an incomprehensible political settlement a decade later. But had this Republic chosen to confront the IRA in its den, the Troubles could have been ended as early as the late 1970s. Instead, the liberties of terrorists were more preciously guarded than the lives of their potential victims. The most spectacular example of petty legalisms triumphing over the rule of order was in the acquittal of the already well-known terrorist Dessie O'Hare for the attempted murder of Lieutenant Garry Cass, in Trim, despite the fact that he was positively identified by two witnesses. He went on to carry out a campaign of terror. Indeed, one reason for the Troubles lasting so long was the failure of the Special Criminal Court to impose order on a vibrant and self-confident terrorist community.

And that in turn was a reflection of the central failure of political will in this Republic to end the IRA campaign by main force, as previous campaigns had been terminated in the 1920s, the 1940s and the 1950s. The most egregious failure of all, one which stands as permanent indictment on this state, was in the policy towards the South Armagh salient. Instead of access routes from the Republic into the most active terrorist zone in all of Europe being tightly controlled, every minute of every day in the year, security on the Republic's side was intermittent, inept, and profoundly compromised by IRA agents in Dundalk garda barracks. Failure to control the salient cost perhaps hundreds of lives.

Some questions are almost surreal. How was it possible that Slab Murphy remained a free man throughout the Troubles? And what diseased definition of statehood was it that caused gardai to arrest two British soldiers who strayed onto Slab Murphy's Border property 20 years ago, leaving unmolested two terrorist suspects who had fled there after a mortar attack on an army base? No doubt the same one that led to the overthrow of Jack Lynch as Taoiseach, after the Warrenpoint massacre, for agreeing to British hot-pursuit over-flights in Border areas.

Failure

This was a state which failed in its primary duty to ensure the sovereignty of central government over the entirety of its territory.

The effective refusal to close down the IRA prolonged the Troubles by decades, and caused perhaps a thousand people to die unnecessarily. We should not be celebrating the end of Operation Banner this week so much as deploring the fact that it didn't occur over 20 years ago. It could have done, had we so wished it. We didn't.

Operation Banner soldiers deserve grateful cheers, not our ungracious jeers

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