Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison

An Impossible Demand

In 1953 when Tony Blair was born Joe Cahill was still serving a life sentence, and in England IRA Volunteers were carrying out the arms raid on Felstead barracks in preparation for the next campaign. When Blair’s father was born in 1923 Ireland had just been partitioned. In the twenty-six counties eleven thousand IRA Volunteers were in jail, hundreds of republicans on all sides had been killed in the civil war and seventy seven prisoners had been executed by the Free State government. In the six counties thousands of IRA Volunteers, whose main role (the Republic having been lost) was the defence of vulnerable nationalist areas, were interned without trial by the unionist government.

When Blair’s grandparents were born the Fenian Brotherhood was active, and, before them, the Young Irelanders, and, before them, the United Irishmen.
Irish republicanism is over two hundred years old.

Only a fool could fail to see the link between the recurrence of physical force republicanism and Britain’s continued interference in Ireland.

Only a British prime minister, who is all-out for war with impoverished Iraq, could stand in Belfast and tell the IRA that it can’t be half-in on peace, has to disband, and is to blame for the impasse.

For close on a century it has been illegal to be in the IRA. It has been a prison sentence or a death sentence to be in the IRA. Prisoners have faced firing squads or been hanged for being in the IRA. Republicans have died long and agonising deaths on hunger strike upholding their political status, refusing to bow to Britain’s harsh prison regimes.

If the British couldn’t defeat the IRA in a quarter of a century of armed conflict, if they couldn’t break the blanket men - couldn’t get them to ‘disband’ - why in heaven’s name would the IRA disband in the current circumstances at the behest of a British prime minister?

This is the issue: is the IRA chiefly responsible for the attitude of unionists towards the Belfast Agreement or has unionism as part of its legacy an ingrained resistance to change and reform?

IRA meetings, reviews, discussions, are private activities which do not impact on the peace or political process. IRA mediation in disputes in nationalist areas causes little or no damage. Because of the absence of an acceptable police service there is a degree of tolerance for IRA actions against local criminals. But these and any other IRA activities which are of an overt or more serious nature are obviously going to be viewed as a challenge to authority and to the state or states on a sliding scale of outrage.

Sinn Fein has no control over the IRA but the two governments punish the party for the discovery of IRA activity (though the nationalist electorate views this punishment as yet another injustice).

For a large section of the British security and intelligence services, and for most unionist politicians, the war has never been over. They know that IRA disbandment is synonymous with IRA surrender. The double advantage for the unionists is that after all the hurdles the republicans have unexpectedly jumped through, here, at last, is a demand they cannot meet, and an excuse for unionists to halt political progress without being blamed.

On the same day that Blair flew in to Belfast to make his speech the BBC locally published a survey which showed that 58% of unionists did not want to share power with either the SDLP or Sinn Fein. One did not need a poll to know that. It is a historic fact but a fact that Tony Blair did not focus on.

But he knows it and he chose to ignore it, just as he chooses to ignore the history of British rule in Ireland and how fresh in nationalist memory is their suffering, just as the devastation wreaked on the unionist community by the IRA has created bitter memories.

Tony Blair concedes that republicans fear that if the IRA disappears, nationalists would lose leverage, British interest in the treatment of nationalists would wane and that they would be ignored. On the one hand, Blair gives a guarantee that he is committed to the implementation of the Agreement, and, on the other, he contradicts himself by making its implementation conditional on IRA disbandment (“it makes it harder for us to respond to nationalist concerns”, were his exact words).

Blair himself created distrust, reneged on promises he made at Weston Park, and destroyed a major opportunity for republicans to support a new police service - and for the IRA to move away from the past - when he gutted the Patten proposals on policing in order to appease unionists.

There will always be a republican response to British interference in Ireland. Currently, it is not in the form of armed struggle. Few believe that the IRA is preparing for a return to armed struggle, nor do republican supporters want it to, nor do unionists think it shall (which means their present stance is a sham). Fewer still believe the IRA will disband.

Linking the rights of the nationalist community to a demand on Sinn Fein that the IRA must dissolve is counter-productive. The IRA will retire from the scene and disappear through time but will do so speedier if Britain stops interfering in the affairs of the Irish people or gives a credible commitment to that end.

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