The IRA: What went wrong?

Toronto Star ^ | Mar. 14, 2005 | Gwynne Dyer

[elhombrelibre]

The IRA: What went wrong?

Bloodshed likely if Sinn Fein splits over murderous acts of `hard men,' says Gwynne Dyer

The implosion of the Irish Republican Army has been so sudden and complete that it seems to defy explanation.

For 30 years, the banned IRA commanded the loyalty of a large part of Northern Ireland's Catholic population and had significant support in the Republic of Ireland as well.

Only months ago its legal political wing, Sinn Fein, was still seen as a necessary partner in a power-sharing government that would finally restore self-government to Northern Ireland.

And now, in a matter of weeks, the IRA has dwindled in most people's eyes to a mere criminal organization.

It was real crimes that precipitated this dramatic change in the IRA's public image.

The first was a huge bank robbery in Northern Ireland last Dec. 19 that netted $40 million — an incident that would have been celebrated by IRA supporters in the days when it was waging a guerrilla war against British rule in the province, but was hard to defend 11 years after a ceasefire.

Then came a pub brawl on Jan. 30 in a Catholic area of Belfast in which 10 IRA members visiting from Derry for the Bloody Sunday commemoration, including a very senior officer, knifed Robert McCartney, an innocent fork-lift driver and Sinn Fein supporter, to death.

The killers then wiped the pub clean of their fingerprints, took the tape out of the security cameras, warned the 70 witnesses not to say anything on pain of death, and left.

That was standard operating procedure in the old days, when the IRA was seen as the Catholic community's only defence against the Protestants and the British authorities.

But seven years after Sinn Fein committed itself to a peaceful political process, it is just murder and intimidation and McCartney's five sisters, all lifelong IRA supporters themselves, refused to abide by the traditional code of silence. They publicly demanded the IRA hand their brother's killers over to the authorities.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams invited the sisters to the party's 100th anniversary convention in Dublin last week in an attempt to heal the rift. It didn't work: The sisters continued to demand the IRA hand over the killers and public opinion was with them.

Incredibly, the IRA then offered to inflict "punishment shootings" on the guilty men: bullets through their knees, wrists and/or elbows, designed to cripple and cause a lifetime of pain but not to kill.

The sisters refused, but the message was clear: The IRA is still above the law and it will punish its erring members itself.

The IRA stopped attacking the local police and British soldiers after the ceasefire of 1994, but it never abandoned violence in its own Catholic areas. Dozens of people were killed over the years for "transgressions" ranging from drug trafficking to winning fistfights against IRA members in bars.

It didn't abandon its "fund-raising" activities, either: smuggling, extortion, money-laundering and occasional robberies.

Just last year, it carried out a $2 million supermarket robbery in May, a bank heist in September and a $4 million cigarette robbery in October. The British government had long turned a blind eye to the IRA's involvement in these crimes in order not to damage the "peace process," but that crashed in December when Ian Paisley, leader of the main Protestant party in Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist party demanded that there be at least photographic proof that the IRA was really "decommissioning" its weapons and the IRA refused.

(Adams explained that the IRA would "not submit to a process of humiliation.") Then came the bank robbery, followed by the murder of McCartney and the extraordinary arrogance of the IRA's response. It has evolved into a primarily criminal organization with a paramilitary veneer.

That evolution was almost inevitable during the long years of the ceasefire. IRA active-service units are populated by "hard men" for whom violence is a normal tool. For the past 11 years the IRA has been operating exclusively against soft and often highly profitable targets. . They have turned into a kind of mafia, and Sinn Fein must break its ties with the IRA or face a bleak political future.

Sinn Fein has split five times in the past 100 years, and three times the split ended in bloodshed.

Now it has to split again and the possibility of bloodshed cannot be excluded this time either. But the chance of a lasting peace in Northern Ireland will be better if it takes the leap than if it does not.

[MacDorcha]

Celtic Ping list!

Dunno what to say here really... I guess aside from the wisdom about the Irish when no-one's around to fight...

[TapTheSource]

Also see:

IRA Launches a New Offensive

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1347347/posts