Majorityrights Central > Category: Irish Politics

Sinn Fein/IRA’s long-awaited step towards peace has been taken.  It is not all it might have been, even for Blair and Hain - though there are plenty of positives for them to spin.  Unionists, ever wary, will say it is not enough, and they will feel fully justified.  The IRA continues in existence - it has not quite transmogrified overnight into a dewy-eyed Old Boys’ Club.  It is not decommissioning.  Its statement merely says:-

... our decisions have been taken to advance our republican and democratic objectives, including our goal of a united Ireland.

We believe there is now an alternative way to achieve this and to end British rule in our country.

It is the responsibility of all (IRA) volunteers to show leadership, determination and courage.”

... There is a compelling imperative on all sides to build a just and lasting peace.

A “just and lasting” peace, one might add, at the close finally ... perhaps ... of an unnecessary and monumentally unjust war of racial hatred.

The aggressor has declared peace without entirely, irrevocably removing the threat of future violence.  Its victims, such as those of the Claudy Massacre of 31st July, 1972 - commemorated in the bronze statue to grief featured in our banner today - know another peace.  Or, as survivors, they have had all prospect of peace taken from them.

If you are not an Ulsterman please take some time to study this website, and this one, and this.  They are educational.  Sinn Fein/IRA will doubtless go down in Irish Catholic history as partisan heroes, as if they had battled Nazi Germany these thirty-six years.  The reality of what they have done is profoundly different and as many of us as possible should strive to remember that.

IRA/Sinn Fein is in trouble.  Its supporters in America have finally understood that the Peace Process was not a peace process in quite the sense they thought it was.

In his 1995 book, Rebel Hearts, journalist Kevin Toolis explained …

Since the late eighties the IRA has been involved in a complex political process to align the Dublin Government and their electoral rivals, the SDLP, in a pan-nationalist front to negotiate a British withdrawal. By politically dissolving the border so that the mass of nationalists in Ireland can be consolidated into one powerful negotiating bloc, Republicans hope to reorder the political stalemate that has marooned them as a minority within the Catholic minority inside the boundaries of a hostile Protestant majority-dominated state.

The aim of the current republican leadership’s pan-nationalist strategy is to achieve a ‘historic handshake’ with the Crown, like that between South African President De Klerk and Nelson Mandela before his release from prison in 1989 which indicated an intention to negotiate political change The ANC did not overthrow the apartheid regime overnight or map out an exact plan for the transfer of authority but from that moment on power flowed steadily De Klerk to the future President Mandela. Similarly in Ireland power would at first trickle, then flow from the Crown into nationalist Ireland until the balance of power was so weighted in the nationalist/republican’s favour that a section of the Unionist community would break away and strike a political deal with the ancient enemy.

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Can it really be true that IRA/Sinn Fein has reached the end of its bloody road?  Normally, it would be unwise to entertain the slightest suspicion that history is leaving it behind, so irreducible are the communal divisions in the North.  But there really does appear to be a fork in the road for IRA/Sinn Fein.  It can transform itself into a regular political party of the mainstream or it can cling to its thuggery, its criminality and its arms and lose its broad base of support.  Since the Northern Bank robbery, the money laundering affair in the Republic and now, most tellingly, the brutal murder of Robert McCartney it can no longer do both.

Yesterday’s news that in talks with the dead man’s family it offered to shoot the killers for them only underscores its profound detachment from the public mind.  There seems to be no way back from this position.  It is arguably the most hopeful moment in the last four painful decades in Northern Ireland.