WSJ: What a Waste-"[T]he armed struggle was entirely legitimate." -IRA is bloody-minded to the end.

Wall Street Journal ^ | August 1, 2005 | LIONEL SHRIVER

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...Didn't we go through a rabid celebration after 1998's Good Friday Agreement that the Northern Irish "troubles" were over? In the seven years since, haven't we heard more times than we can count that the IRA is making another "historic" commitment to disarmament? Britain's prime minister hailed Thursday's statement as "a step of unparalleled magnitude."... Blair must be running out of new synonyms for amazed admiration of the IRA, much as his predecessors exhausted the language of condemnation after IRA atrocities....

Protestant unionists have demanded a statement that "the war is over" since the IRA's first cease-fire in 1994. Until last week, the organization had refused to oblige....

In the real world, other matters have not. Once again, Mr. Blair could not restrain himself from rewarding a mere verbal concession from Britain's erstwhile nemesis with tangible concessions in return -- promising fugitives amnesty, and releasing from prison an IRA bomber who'd killed nine people in 1993....

Yet if we accept the conceit that they are? Last week, CNN played much retrospective footage of carnage across the province in which I lived for 12 years: explosions in sleepy village centers, body parts strewn through rubble, families still grieving for 3,600 dead. What struck me most was the waste. Like the parallel movement in the U.S., Catholic civil rights could have been secured without any gory "armed struggle." Did it matter that much whether a tiny outpost of 1.5 million people in one democratic European country joined another democratic European country next-door?....

Yet both sides of this obscenely petty conflict got caught up in a raw power contest whose ferocity was grotesquely disproportionate to the trifling border dispute at issue. Looking back on the last 37 years, the Northern Irish of both religions should feel -- even more than sorrowful -- ashamed.

[OESY]

Ms. Shriver, a novelist, is the author of "We Need to Talk About Kevin" (Counterpoint, 2003).

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Finally, a true s/he. It did seem strange, but I played it straight.