No Easy Answers

By AM Sunday, March 15, 2009

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Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things - Russell Baker

Yesterday in Banbridge a member of the PSNI, Stephen Carroll, was laid to rest. During those times when I regarded members of the force, then called the RUC, as enemies, my attitude toward their deaths was philosophical. ‘Its war, they know the score and, like other combatants, take their chances.’ When they attacked IRA funerals, the IRA bombed the route of theirs. Watching the battle of the funerals from the confinement of jail surrounds our thinking was no less boxed in than our bodies. Flame throwers liberally applied to their massed ranks seemed an effective dispersal agent. They could experience the fires of hell before getting there. It now looks like a vortex of irrationality from which we have been plucked back onto the terra firma of reason.

Today, I may be no fan of the force, remain opposed to its political character, but at worst regard its members as political opponents rather than enemies. And with a republican mindset which has over the years become increasingly tempered by a democratic sentiment reinforced by a deep suspicion of revolutionaries, I harbour no notion that opponents should be killed. Passions and emotions from the politically violent past float around for sure, but they are invariably filtered out before they enter my cognitive processes.

Nor am I any longer in the grip of that one-dimensional thinking which reduces policing to a political essence and nothing else. The PSNI is a political police force but it is also a body that deals with a wide range of non-political issues. It is hard to imagine that Stephen Carroll, when travelling to Craigavon in response to a call for assistance, had only one thing in his mind: to make it clear to the woman who had summoned him that neither she nor the Irish people had the right to national self determination. He was doing what cops in every country in the world do if worth their salt; answering a distress call. If we complain from a democratic point of view that the PSNI are often tardy in their response time when those most vulnerable call for their help, then it seems incomprehensible that we can condone killing them when they do come out, even if their status as a British police force does rile our republican sentiment.

Coming from a Provisional republican background where the normal societal moral constraints on killing members of the police become dissipated by a combination of ideology and numbing palliatives liberally massaged into the conscience by the leadership, not to forget police repression, I am immediately confronted by an uncomfortable awareness that if police were fair game then why should it be any different today? The reason the Provisionals killed police was because they were police operating in the service of the British state. That aspect of policing remains as pronounced today as it was then. So how can the legitimacy we conferred on our attacks on police be withheld from those attacking police today?

There are no easy answers that avoid inconsistencies and strained logic. The current Sinn Fein rationale is as disingenuous as it is self serving. Stephen Carroll had Sinn Fein representation at his funeral. But for much of his career the same party thought it necessary and morally correct to kill him. Whatever the difference between the Stephen Carroll of 1989 and the Stephen Carroll of 2009, it hardly justifies the massive differential in the means used to address his wearing of a police uniform. If it was alright for ‘patriots’ to kill him twenty years ago then killing him last week was also the work of patriots, not ‘traitors.’ If it was wrong to kill him last week then it was wrong to kill him 20 years ago. And for people like me who do see it as wrong to kill him last week only one logical conclusion flows from that.

While I refuse to disown it or dismiss it, I no longer seek to justify the Provisional IRA campaign. Too many of its leaders, as we have seen this week, were absolutely unscrupulous. Too many of its members were willing to kill for no other reason than the leadership told them to. Both leadership and led at the drop of a hat all too easily abandoned positions which when held had terrible consequences for people on the receiving end of them. We are entitled to expect that if killing people was not some frivolous exercise, then the steady abandonment of the goals their deaths were meant help achieve would at the very least be questioned rigorously. But rarely were they.

Writing in the Irish News a couple of years ago about a different conflict I argued that mitigation rather than justification is a more helpful concept to be employed when defending armed actions. There were many mitigating circumstances pertaining to the use of force by the Provisional IRA that no longer apply today, none of which related to the privileged position the republican physical force tradition assumes for itself. But as the conflict progressed from long war to wrong war the greatest mitigating factor appears to have been locked-in syndrome. Republicans today can hardly cite that by way of mitigation.

Locked-in syndrome increases the likelihood that a conflict can be become self-contained yet self perpetuating. The players lose sight of external factors such as the rights of others and seek to foreclose ideas that increase the potential for a respite in which the necessary space might emerge that will permit a step outside the box. There was certainly no need for ‘the peace process’ to unlock matters but a ceasefire was an essential requirement.

Without the mitigating factor of locked-in syndrome what is there left that can be said in defence of the killing of Stephen Carroll? Certainly the threadbare cloaks of legitimacy from the ramshackle wardrobe of the republican physical force tradition are so tattered and torn that they offer no cover whatsoever. White stick republicanism alone can find guidance in that. For me the considerations of the physical force tradition will never be permitted to form part of my deliberations. As the left activist and former republican prisoner Tommy McKearney argued many years ago republicanism must be uncompromisingly democratic or not at all.

If protecting a version of the past lends itself to violating the future then it is better to lay it to rest altogether and walk away reverentially but firmly. Like a dead comrade it should undergo neither desecration nor resurrection. However it is dealt with, preserving life in the future seems ultimately a more worthwhile republican objective than preserving the right to have taken it in the past.