[A-List] Irish Roadmap

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

IRA Disbandment - A new 'roadmap' to stability in Ireland?

John McAnulty

19/05/04



In the aftermath of the Dublin May Day Eurobash celebrating the
accession of ten further countries to the capitalist fold (on a
distinctly second class level, with limits on agricultural support and
rights to free movement).  British prime minister Blair and Irish
leader Bertie Ahern had another top level meeting to try to produce
yet another stabilisation package for Ireland.  The Good Friday
Agreement, meant to bring stability, had collapsed after a revision in
October 2003, where the agreement was massively revised to compel
republicans to decommission weapons and recognise the legitimacy of
the northern Irish colony. The capitulation had been dismissed by the
Unionists and the concessions on offer to republicans withdrawn by the
British. Elections went ahead in February, and the agreement was
finally buried with the election of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist
Party (DUP) as the majority unionist party

The omens appeared to be good at the European celebrations. 'A new
Northern Assembly by September!' boasted Ahern.  However, later in the
week, when he began to expand on his earlier remarks, Ahern used the
rather unfortunate phrase 'Road map'.  This immediately produced a
picture of Sinn Fein cowering in a bunker, corralled in somewhat the
same way that Arafat had been, while British tanks growl outside,
demanding that they do more to placate loyalism.

A sketch of the 'road map' reinforces that view.  The idea is that
Dublin and London will implement some minor concessions that were
initially supposed to be part of the Good Friday process and were then
designated as rewards for the last major decommissioning of weapons by
the IRA, but the price this time is total decommissioning of weapons
and the disbandment of the IRA itself.  The British and Dublin then
promise to go with the defanged Sinn Fein and ask the DUP if they will
now kindly share power with the Catholics.  Fat chance!

The truth is that the whole restoration process in the North of
Ireland has taken one more enormous step to the right that makes it
blindingly obvious that the imperial power and their native
collaborators do not have a strategy that will restore capitalist
stability.

Safe hands

The marker for this further turn in the process was the April report
of the International Monitoring Commission (IMC).  The IMC represents
a standard method of implementing policy by the British - establishing
an 'independent' committee led by a safe pair of hands - a member of
the establishment who can be trusted to come to the 'right'
conclusion.  The same process applied to the area of judicial enquiry
recently led to the farce of the Hutton enquiry.
In this case the safe pair of hands was represented by Lord John
Alderdice.  Alderdice is the former leader of the Alliance Party, the
liberal wing of unionism, and has recently made a career for himself
by making himself available as just such asafe pair of hands, firstly
resigning as leader of the Alliance party to become speaker of the
Stormont Assembly and then resigning that job as the Assembly went
under to take on his new role as the chair of the IMC, alongside
Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence
Agency; Commander John Grieve, former head of the Metropolitan
Police's anti-terrorist squad; and retired Irish civil servant Joe
Brosnan, there to make clear Dublin's solidarity with the British in
punishing the republicans.

The job of Alderdice and his cronies was quite simple.  Under the
guise of monitoring paramilitary activity they were to move the
definition of compliance so that it was contiguous with the demands of
the most extreme fringes of unionism.  The disbandment of the IRA was
to become a precondition for further negotiation, a political demand
of London and Dublin standing alongside Paisley and the Democratic
Unionist Party.

The committee first of all established its absolute independence by
obeying a British order to publish an early report.  Then it got down
to serious business of re-writing the demands on the republicans. The
method was to sit in a room and read warmed over RUC/PSNI special
branch reports, agree that they were the absolute truth, and then seek
to make some minor points about loyalist paramilitaries in order to
balance the attack on the republicans.  This was quite a difficult
job, as the republicans have been capitulating to British pressure
since the start of the process and met all their commitments. Much was
made of a 20th February incident involving republican Bobby Tohill,
described by the republicans as a 'bar brawl' and by their opponents
as attempted kidnap and murder.  Up until now the British have turned
a blind eye to IRA violence, much of which has been directed towards
policing republican groups attempting to relaunch a military campaign
against the British. On the other hand the loyalists have been
involved in every form of criminality, in internal feuds and killing,
in racist intimidation and the ethnic cleansing of areas under their
control and in a full-scale campaign against Catholics, involving
daily incidents up to and including murder.

In the event the various pressures led to a sloppy report, full of
factual inaccuracies. One family heard from the TV summary of the IMC
report that their son, Michael O'Hare, had been the victim of a
sectarian killing by Loyalists.  Neither the police nor the commission
had ever approached them with this information.  As the level of
contradiction grew the RUC/PSNI were forced to publicly disavow some
of the more lurid speculations that they had shared with the
commission privately, further discrediting the commission and their
report.

If the factual details of the report were thrown into question, that
paled into the background in comparison with their proposals for
restabilising the situation in the North. The commission found that
all the paramilitary organisations were involved in military activity
but proposed fining only those whose political representatives had
seats in the suspended assembly by removing administrative grants.
These grants are used to pay researchers and are a way in which the
British state now funds the apparatus of Sinn Fein by providing wages
for a team of full-time workers.  This is a direct attack on Sinn
Fein. The inclusion of the PUP is neither here nor there - the attempt
by the UVF to build a political movement has failed and only one PUP
MLA remains.  As if to underline the nature of the attack both the IMC
and Paul Murphy, British secretary of state and the actual ruler of
the northern statelet, announced on the day following the report's
publication that if the assembly had been sitting Sinn Fein would have
been excluded!

British policy is now a mass of contradictions.  All the military
organisations maintain a structure, but only the Loyalist
organisations continue a sectarian campaign which is extremely vicious
and extremely visible.  They now plan to heap punishment after
punishment on Sinn Fein while continuing to supply massive public
subsidies to the main band of loyalist killers, the Ulster Defence
Association (UDA). As if to underline this contradiction senior
officers in the RUC/PSNI met with the Ulster Political Research Group
(UPRG), the nearest the UDA thugs can come to a political
organisation, for a 'very useful' meeting on the day following the IMC
report.  This meeting was so useful that the UDA felt free to publicly
intimidate Catholic residents in an apartment complex in Belfast city
centre within a week of the meeting.  The police response to visible
preparation for a sectarian frenzy in July is an announcement by RUC
leader Hugh Orde that they will be unable to do anything about the
massive bonfires being assembled and the increasing intimidation as
these are community relations issues.

This pleases no-one.  The unionists complain that the proposals are 'a
tax on terror' and argue that if Sinn Fein are criminals then they
should be excluded from the political process - an impossible demand
given the electoral base of Sinn Fein as the North's largest
nationalist party.  Republican supporters are all too aware of the
policy of killing the Loyalist organisations with kindness, that they
clearly have state immunity from prosecution for their deeds and that
criminal intimidation is being redefined by the state as community
difference, where the victims have to engage with and conciliate the
sectarian aggressor or face the condemnation of police, equality
boards and all the other organs of the state.

End of the road?

One might think that this is the end.  The immediate result of the
commission report was that the next set of talks on restoring Stormont
were abandoned. The unionists became enraged and demanded more
concessions. Even if Sinn Fein surrender absolutely they have no
guarantee from the British that they will be allowed to return to
their ministerial positions in Stormont.

Yet there is still one dynamic that has yet to run into the ground.
The process has been driven for some time on wave after wave of
republican capitulation. The definition of revolution for the
republicans themselves has always been a militarist one, so in their
own terms the capitulation will be complete with the surrender of arms
and disbandment of the IRA.

It is quite clear that this is on the cards.  The Sinn Fein leadership
have made a number of statements since this demand became central, but
they have been about the failure of their opponents to keep their
promises rather than about the issue of disbandment itself.

The fact is that when the British call for disarmament Sinn Fein
agree.  They always call for the British and Loyalists to disarm also,
but as the IRA have staged a number of decommissioning episodes
without a single round of British or Loyalist weaponry (outside of a
comedy show with some unusable rifles and the Loyalist Volunteer
Force) this is hardly a precondition for IRA disbandment.

The process of decommissioning can be regarded as a bargaining session
where the republicans gradually sell off their ability to pose a
military threat in return for concessions.  The IRA and the arms
become worth less and less as a commodity because they have already
politically conceded to imperialism and they carried that process to
completion in the last round, where Adams unambiguously recognised the
British colony and expressed a willingness to support the local state
forces.  Just how little bargaining power Sinn Fein have was recently
shown around the issue of the RUC/PSNI.  For several years Sinn Fein
have been hesitating over joining the police boards as it became clear
that even their limited expectations from the RUC face lift would not
be met. Now RUC chief Hugh Orde has indicated that they are not
sufficiently housebroken to be admitted on to the boards.

The fact is that Sinn Fein need to lose their armed wing in any case.
They are now under savage attack by the Dublin government for their
links to the IRA.  They have no political counterblast.  Their project
is not to build a political opposition to Irish capital but to become
absorbed into it, and that means conceding to accepted definitions of
what is regarded as legitimate force and what as terror.  They cannot
expect to translate electoral gain into seats in a coalition
government until they take the final step.

There is one gain that Sinn Fein can hold to itself - the recreation
of the 'nationalist family' stretching from the Falls Road in Belfast
to Dublin, London and the lawns of the White House.  Mind you it will
now be united around all the things that republicanism has repudiated,
but it can always be hoped that by holding to the narrow ground of
some amelioration of Unionist sectarianism that it can be got to work
on this occasion.

The ground for such a shift has been prepared by Catholic primate Sean
Brady in two recent statements.  In the first he indicated that
Catholic Ireland stood with Sinn Fein in unhappiness about the failure
to complete the supposed reforms of the RUC promised in the GFA.  This
comfort letter was followed by a stinging rebuke on the 9th of May,
when he indicated that unity on this issue was dependent on IRA
disbandment.

Sinn Fein can live in hope.  Maybe this time unity of Irish
nationalism will work.  All we need to do is to wipe from our mind the
long history of nationalist supplication of the British and their
equally long history of failure.