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Every
year in Scarvagh on the 13th of July, a clown dressed
up as King Billy wages imaginary war against his enemies
and wins. You don't need to be a genius to know that
if you were to video record the sham fight and watch
it to the close of time the ending will always be
the same as will every thing else about it. It is
no different up at Hillsborough with our latest final
ever negotiations. No matter what the suits do, what
posture they take, what principle they vow to uphold,
all roads lead inexorably to the entrenchment of the
internal solution called the Good Friday Agreement.
So fed up are we by the self-righteous absurdity of
our political class that it is an effort to overcome
the ennui they generate simply to turn the TV on to
look at them. How many times can we watch the same
old crap opera? It is hardly as if we can sit with
bated breath anticipating the climatic denouement
- one that we have never seen before. Republicans
are perhaps more culpable than the others - they used
to pour scorn on the waffle merchants of the political
class. Now they are at the centre of it. In years
to come people will go up to republican plots to see
tombstones on the graves of some Sinn Fein politicians
proclaiming 'he died talking bollix for Ireland.'
It
was therefore something of a relief to view BBC Spotlight
a couple of nights ago which concerned itself with
the threat posed by republican dissidents. Not that
their arguments are anymore persuasive but the different
discourse as well as being consistent stimulates by
mere virtue of being different. Spotlight interviewed
many activists, including the Sinn Fein chairperson
Mitchel McLaughlin, who the party appear to have put
at the crease to bat sixes in the direction of those
who still believe what the Sinn Fein leadership used
to tell them - it is alright to kill in pursuit of
your goal and listen to no one who tells you otherwise.
Sitting watching these suits scurrying into some site
of British administration, you would almost be forgiven
for doubting that any of them ever called for the
physical elimination of enemy soldiers.
Talking
today with a Provisional republican, I listened to
him disclose his view that the most revealing item
of the evening came not from the dissidents but from
Mitchel McLaughlin, who pointed out that not only
were the methods of the physical force IRAs hopeless,
but their cause was also. A case of McLaughlin merely
putting words on what has been a leadership position
for a decade at any rate. The cause of a united Ireland
to be achieved through expelling the British has been
consigned to the scrap heap by Sinn Fein. There is
no problem with that in itself - the balance of forces
simply does not allow it. What makes it problematic
is the pretence that the cause was somehow not hopeless
when the Sinn Fein leadership was directing the armed
struggle against the British. Someone reflecting on
matters might conclude that the hopelessness of the
Provisional IRA campaign has been underlined and the
logic that drove it wholly eroded by how little Sinn
Fein were prepared to settle for.
There
is a tendency within Sinn Fein these days to chant
mantra-like their disdain for the physical force republicans.
This is to remain faithful to the edict of the party
president who informs the world that 'obviously, part
of the Sinn Fein peace strategy is about bringing
an end to physical force republicanism.' Big Brother
No 1 leads the way and the rest of them, microchip
seemingly inserted into the back of their heads, dutifully
follow echoing their master's voice. Watch how it
goes.
Gerry
Adams: 'they have no popular support … a small
unrepresentative micro-group'.
Martin
McGuinness: 'tiny micro-group who thought they
should attack the peace process.'
RM Distribution: 'a breakaway micro-group of republican
dissidents.'
Alex Maskey: 'Sinn Féin have long called
for these micro-groups to desist from this sort of
activity and disband.'
Michelle Gildernew: 'Sinn Féin have consistently
called upon these micro-groups to end this sort of
activity and disband.'
Mary Nellis: 'they have little or no support and
operate without a strategy to achieve political change.'
Gerry Kelly: 'They don't have a cohesive or coherent
strategy.'
Fra McCann: 'they have no strategy to achieve a
united Ireland and operate with little support or
mandate.'
Mick Murphy: 'they have little or no support and
operate without either a mandate or indeed a strategy
to achieve political change.'
Discursive
diversity is hardly a flourishing industry within
Sinn Fein. Listening to them is like being addressed
by an obedient crowd displaying all the symptoms of
dalak disease chanting 'we obey, we obey, we obey'.
None
of this, of course, is to take away from the deficiency
of the physical force position. Those republicans
of a dissident persuasion who featured on Spotlight
seemed plagued by strategic inertia. Their discourse
is steeped in the supposed rights of any group who
so chooses to use whatever methods it deems appropriate
to get rid of the British without reference to the
views, rights and lives of the rest of us. Tommy McKearney
in the same programme highlighted all the shortcomings
and indicated how the physical force tradition now
aids Sinn Fein in so far as it attracts energies that
might otherwise be deployed in a counter strategy
to the party's partitionist strategy. Nevertheless,
within their make up is a disobedient rather than
a state republicanism. If only they could extend that
disobedience to the primordial call of physical force,
a anti-systemic radical republicanism could emerge
from the laager of marginalisation.
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