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The
Real IRA's war against whatever enemy it perceives
to be out there continues unabated. A casual look
at the fatalities resulting from Real IRA activity
would lead to a conclusion that topping the target
list are civilians - Irish, Spanish and English. British
soldiers, RUC and loyalists are seemingly safe from
Real IRA activity. I have no problem with that, feeling
that little would be served by killing any out of
the last three categories. I merely wish that the
organisation would extend its protection policy to
civilians as well. But the armed republican body will
doubtless ignore me as it has so many others over
the years. Like the Provisionals before them they
are permeated with a view that our opinions do not
matter when Ireland is to be freed. Our right to freedom
is restricted to only those freedoms that the Real
IRA say we may have. We, therefore, are allowed to
be free from British rule (whether we will it or not)
but are not to be free from the violent methods employed
by the Real IRA to secure something which they alone
want at a particular price.
The
Real IRA's war is the Real IRA's war alone. For the
most part it is not fought on behalf of anybody else
other than those who are in its ranks. And as those
well informed dogs on Belfast streets know the ranks
have had, over the years, more than a smattering of
dubious characters. At one point so seemingly pervasive
was dodgy activity throughout its organisation in
Belfast that some observers with no particular axe
to grind drew comparisons between it and the IPLO.
There is a striking frankness about some of those
associated with the organisation who readily admit
to such a deficiency although they stress that it
has since been rectified. While that seems true the
organisation, nevertheless, remains unrepresentative
and gives off the appearance of being even more unpopular
than the RUC in poorer Belfast communities.
When
I put this last point to someone close to the organisation
but who would go no further than describe himself
as ‘an activist’ he maintained that it holds
good for Belfast exclusively. ‘In other areas
such as Derry, there is growing support for people
who want to carry on with the armed struggle.’
This seemed ironic given that it was always joked
about within the Provisionals in jail that the Derry
IRA had given up the armed struggle even before the
ceasefires.
That
the Real IRA on most occasions lacks the moral fortitude
to claim responsibility for its operations suggests
a furtiveness we have come to associate with its counterpart
the Provisional IRA. Do its members really feel
that 'no claim no blame' will work in a way for them
that it does for the Provisionals? If so they need
to realise that the Provisional IRA is now Britain's
favourite IRA and as such can expect favours from
Britain such as the recent ultimate deadline by infinite
postponement that John Reid announced in response
to unionist demands that he introduce sanctions as
a result of ongoing Provisional IRA activity. The
public (those few amongst it not yet totally indifferent)
still await official comment on what organisation
killed Joe O'Connor almost two years ago. There is
no such wait on official blame being dished out in
relation to the killing of David Caldwell. The British
nor the media will spare the Real IRA in the manner
that is reserved for the Provisionals. Continued silence
on its operations suggests a Real IRA contempt for
the wider population and a lack of conviction. We
are supposed to guess the purpose of their campaign
and the strategic logic behind each operation and
meekly accept that fundamentalists with guns - that
dangerous concoction which a friend, Harry Donaghy,
warns so severely against - know best.
The
killing of David Caldwell was a brutal and futile
waste of life. He didn’t die because he was standing
in the way of the Irish people as they march towards
unification. Nor did he die because his death would
help further facilitate the wishes of those same Irish
people. He died as a calculated snub to those wishes.
He lost his life because he was a working person who
picked up a lunch box containing the so called key
to Irish freedom which when detonated opened nothing
but misery, grief and despair. Many who would rarely
agree with Niall O’Dowd nevertheless find his
logic irrepressible when he objects to some republicans
‘deciding that what it is the people of Ireland
need is the murder of an innocent workman who left
a devastated partner and children behind. Just how
this particular act brings a united Ireland closer
has escaped us.’ Eamonn McCann in Derry got it
right when he hit out at the butchery of a man who
died because he worked in order to live.
Those
sympathetic to the Real IRA will point to the hypocrisy
of those republicans who repudiate killings such as
that of David Caldwell but who remained silent when
the Provisional IRA were doing likewise. They ask
‘if it was not immoral then how can it be so
now?’. In that they have a point. For that reason,
any serious re-evaluation of the Provisional IRA campaign,
instead of claiming legitimacy for it in its entirety,
needs to state that there was no more justification
then for killing someone like David Caldwell than
there is today.
Calls
by Martin McGuinness for those who favour such activity
‘to put their heads above the parapet and defend
their actions’ would carry greater weight if
someone from his own stable was to do likewise and
explain ongoing Provisional IRA activity. In that
way his call would have a genuine ring to it rather
than appearing to be a move to outflank some of his
republican critics. Furthermore, what makes the Real
IRA determined that it has no case to answer in the
court of hypocrites is that the justification used
by the Provisional IRA for its war post-Sunningdale
provides the ostensible rationale that the Real IRA
presumably employ today. To quote Martin McGuinness:
I
can give a commitment on behalf of the leadership
that we have absolutely no intention of going to
Westminster or Stormont … our position is clear
and will never, never, never change. The war against
British rule must continue until freedom is achieved.
That
he should be more privileged than others who possess
a similar logic is a questionable assumption. Is it
all just a matter of dates?
Seemingly
so. Because with minority support we who were in the
Provisional IRA waged an armed campaign to get the
British out of Ireland. Unless the justification for
the bulk of our activity is revisited and unpicked
then the Real IRA will always find within our collective
history substantive justification for continuing as
they are. It is the Provisional leadership’s
acceptance of a power sharing executive and lightweight
cross border bodies coupled with its subsequent condemnation
of anyone who wants to fight on for more that delegitimises
considerably the use of armed struggle after 1974
- and not merely after 1998. The more they praise
their decision to terminate the war the less they
justify it ever having been fought in the first place.
There
would be little in the way of inconsistency on the
part of Sinn Fein if it were to follow through on
the logic that its acceptance of the Good Friday Agreement
has delegitimised the Provisional IRA’s ‘long
war’ and state clearly that the armed struggle
for a British declaration of intent to withdraw post-1974
was a strategic disaster, the residue of which is
to be found in the Real IRA campaign today. That at
least would deny the Real IRA the luxury of shouting
‘hypocrite’ every time a Sinn Fein spokesperson
opens their mouth in condemnation on the basis that
armed struggle was no longer justified after 1998.
It may also begin to chip away within their minds
- where the real work needs to be done - at their
sense of justification.
The
Real IRA are no more criminals than we were. And we
were no more republican then than they are now. Calling
them ‘rejectionist’ is mere pious cant as
they reject only what we rejected for twenty four
years` killing many more innocent in the process than
the Real IRA have managed. But that does not make
them right. Neither are they fanatics who will stop
at nothing. They are people who feel let down by men
who demanded plenty, promised much and delivered little
and who seem to have done quite well out of it all.
Men who would, in the Real IRA view, slot neatly into
the pejorative description used by Captain Seamus
McCall against some of those in the Anti-Partition
League in the 1950s: ‘men to whom removing the
border is simply a euphemism for the transfer of ownership
of the fleshpots of place and patronage.’
Real
IRA volunteers who want to do something for their
communities rather than impose republican diktats
upon them need to consider that there is no functioning
republican alternative to Sinn Fein and its acceptance
of the Good Friday Agreement. There are theoretical
alternatives but they have never become functional
because those who oppose the GFA simply have never
managed to get their act together. Their claims to
offer plausible alternatives have never been tested.
Part of the reason for this is that the the various
physical force IRAs create an ethical, intellectual
and strategic bottleneck through which other ideas
battle vainly. There are undoubtedly many intelligent
Real IRA volunteers who have plenty to offer. But
it shall not be through the Real IRA. The organisation
is an albatross around the neck of a radical republican
alternative. Those still in it should quit and join
the 32 County Sovereignty Movement where they could
retain and proclaim their republicanism rather than
keeping it under a stone from where it fears to speak
its name.
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