Dreadful Lesson

By AM Tuesday, April 14, 2009

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Last week a letter appeared in the Irish News. It was signed by a raft of community and political groups from West Belfast. It hit out at an earlier spate of hijackings and burnings carried out by republicans hostile to the current political consensus in the North. Although a show of supposed strength, the actions of the republicans involved demonstrated their weakness and a bankruptcy of ideas. Apart from those who carried it out there are few who viewed it as anything other than gratuitous violence. The people most inconvenienced by it all were working class communities like Ballymurphy which according to researchers and letter writers to newspapers already suffer from high levels of poverty and deprivation.

The hijackers and burners in their application of force so much resembled the Provisional IRA in its frequent campaigns of disruption right up to the end of its armed struggle. City wide bomb hoaxes were every bit as disruptive of working class daily life as the recent violence. That it all ended in failure is ignored by those intent on trying it all again. Nevertheless, while a show of weakness, it seems the physical force advocates derive some degree of satisfaction from aping the Provisionals in copying their actions and then regurgitating their dismissive responses towards expressions of community concern. They are never slow to remind their critics that in their condemnation they focus on only one type of violence and turn a blind eye to others.

The exclusive concentration of the letter writers on the republican violence gave the letter the feel of something the peace train activists would get up to in response to the frequent Provisional IRA disruption of the cross border service between Belfast and Dublin. Those concerned with securing an uninterrupted train journey would ignore state repression. Perhaps because they were largely middle class types who lived outside the ring of steel within which the state practiced its repression they never actually had any experience of the phenomenon and saw only the train tormentors. This is hardly an excuse that the signatories to the Irish News letter can claim. They have seen it all yet strangely never once in their letter referred to the draconian 28 day detention legislation that now stalks the streets of the North where political policing is supposed to be a thing of the past and which helps to convince hijackers and anybody else with a gun or a petrol bomb that the British state in Ireland is still something that needs to be resisted militarily. Perhaps that particular letter was not the place to raise the issue. But the suspicion remains that no place will be considered suitable by the bulk of the signatories to raise the issue. When it was reportedly put to those behind the letter that the 28 day detention should also be addressed the request was ignored.

The sentiment expressed in the letter is nevertheless right. The violence and disruption inflicted on the communities is futile, nihilistic and depicts those who inflict it as little different from the people behind the many forms of anti-social behaviour that have long plagued communities. It is hard for those suffering it to make the distinction between violence for pleasure and violence for Ireland.

But the letter loses more than a smidgen of its moral authority when the inconsistency of many of the signatories is so evident. When we see Alex Atwood and Margaret Walsh adding their names we can say that they at least never advocated violence against the community at any time. It would be hard for some of the others who lent their name to the appeal to make the same claim. Some of them prompted mobs to the homes of people in Andersonstown and Springhill because the occupants had spoken out against the killing in Ballymurphy of West Belfast man Joe O’Connor.

Had it been made clear from the moment of O’Connor’s slaying two and a half years after the Good Friday Agreement that the use of political violence in Ballymurphy was without justification rather than hounding those who were explicit in their rejection of the political violence then being employed, the moral force wielded against the latest practitioners of burning and hijacking might have been considerably stronger. The lesson that violence in the community was justified after the Good Friday Agreement was an dreadful one to teach people opposed to the agreement. If those who endorsed the agreement could treat it with such contempt why expect others to behave any more respectfully toward it?