|
Last
weekend’s killing of Danny McGurk by the Real
IRA was an incident as predictable as it was fatal.
As an Irish News editorial pointed out ‘it
is worth remembering that three other young men were
shot in the legs in nationalist parts of Belfast and
Co Tyrone’ on the same weekend that Danny McGurk
died. This increase in punishment attacks during the
Stormont institutional hiatus always carried with
it the potential to see the Andy Kearney murder revisited
on some other misfortunate. Andy Kearney died at the
hands of a Provisional IRA punishment squad just over
5 years ago. His death prompted considerable public
disquiet. The lesson is simple: corporal punishment
administered by any of the various IRA’s can
on occasion, despite the intent, become capital punishment.
This
is to assume of course that the attack was in fact
a punishment designed to maim rather than kill. The
record of the Real IRA is that it kills civilians
rather than administers non-lethal punishments to
them. A member of the renamed RUC commented: ‘because
he was shot in the ankle it may have been one that
went wrong or just got out of control.’ This
interpretation is not one shared by the dead man’s
mother. She said the men who murdered him were ‘drunk
and that the attack wasn't even a punishment shooting.
They shot him in the back and they shot him in the
legs.’
Whatever
the facts, it is mere rhetoric to indulge in the usual
game of condemnology, issue the same pious diatribes,
and then keep stum when the IRA you agree with is
responsible for a punishment attack. John Morley once
observed that ‘where it is a duty to worship
the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine
the laws of heat’. Worshipping at the altar of
the assumed right of republicans to maim those they
find socially obnoxious within their own communities
and then attack those who ask awkward questions about
the hot laws of consequence means that any subsequent
critique of deaths like that of Andy Kearney or Danny
McGurk will always come accompanied by the whiff of
self-serving attitudinising.
This
holds true for the Sinn Fein president who proclaims
shock and outrage at the killing. But such sentiments
only have substantive ethical weight if those who
hold them are wholly sans ambivalence about their
rejection of murder. Mr Adams credentials here are
suspect. He covered up for the organisation which,
in the constituency for which he serves as a member
of the British parliament, murdered Joe O'Connor in
October 2000, and then supported his party members
when they mounted a campaign of intimidation against
those opposed to the killing.
If
no IRA has the right to maim those - no matter how
abhorrent their behaviour is - within the community,
then it is a relatively simple matter to make a credible
and consistent stand against those who murdered Danny
McGurk. But if his killers only lack justification
because they were members of the wrong IRA then an
end to killing is not what is sought but rather a
moral cataract behind which the community can fumble
and feign blindness when ‘legitimate’ killings
occur. And while nothing legitimises any of the murders
West Belfast has played host to over the past five
years, the fact that the constituency elects a MP
who is ambivalent on these matters suggests a certain
level of social tolerance for some degree of maiming
and murder.
It
is against this backdrop which heavily favours Provisional
republicanism that the Real IRA should give serious
consideration to its future. In communities where
the power to create ‘truth’ is deferred
to rather than truth itself, an ever deepening hostility
towards the Real IRA is taking root. Even prior to
the McGurk murder, Denis Bradley, the vice chairman
of the Policing Board, warned that ‘the political
vacuum is dangerous for everybody, including the Real
IRA.’ The organisation is frequently compared
to the IPLO of the 1980s and ‘90s. The language
used by the mother of Danny McGurk to describe her
son‘s killers - "thugs and drug dealers"
- and that employed by the local MP - “gangsterism
and thuggery" - finds resonance with those who
remember the IPLO. Some republicans, who can not be
labelled 'Shinners' by those sympathetic to the Real
IRA, have expressed severe dismay at the McGurk murder
and point to the likely negative consequences that
the murder will have on community support for republican
prisoners in Maghaberry. One went further and predicted
a Provisional IRA move against the Real IRA - he accompanied
his prediction with the words 'and no one will care.'
Whatever
the Real IRA may think of itself most in these communities
would be glad to see the back of it. It is not that
the organisation pursues its futile campaign without
approval or even with indifference in the community,
it actually faces outright opposition and resentment.
Conscious of its pariah status the Real IRA now gives
off the appearance of skulking as it seeks to evade
telling the public why exactly it targeted Danny McGurk.
Its moral courage seemingly existing in inverse proportion
to its incompetence.
Danny
McGurk leaves a widow and six fatherless children.
It is not the first time the Real IRA has unleashed
its violence on members of the civilian population.
The only people seemingly safe from the organisation
are British state security personnel to whom the group
appears to pose no threat. That the physical force
tradition would want to remain on the scene after
what it perpetrated at Omagh suggests it is now a
pathological political disorder rather than a serious
contemplative and rational choice body of opinion
determined to bring any positive change to the country.
Its attitude of functioning with absolute contempt
for the wider public will produce a response in kind.
Does
the Real IRA accept that people have more right to
exist than it does? And does it further realise that
people may choose to protect their right to exist
by taking whatever appropriate measures they deem
necessary to render the threat posed by the Real IRA
to the civilian population negligible? The Real IRA
needs to think long and hard on why so many of its
members are in prison, why so many of its operations
are compromised, and why the campaign to secure public
support for its protesting prisoners is sluggish.
Is this an indication that we are approaching that
decisive break, once unthinkable, where people are
prepared to turn self-proclaimed republican activists
over to the state rather than allow them to inflict
their lethal incompetence on the communities from
which they hail? If Real IRA members are seen as little
more than gangsters and thugs - in a way that Provisional
IRA volunteers were never perceived within their own
communities during their war - and reinforce that
perception through their actions and civilian kills,
the community will feel no loyalty to the organisation
to which they belong and may become less inhibited
about turning them in.
32
County sovereignty is a myth if the people are not
party to it. They alone are sovereign. The Real IRA
should get off their backs.
Index: Current Articles + Latest News and Views + Book Reviews +
Letters + Archives
|
