Futile Contempt

By AM Thursday, January 14, 2010

Share Tweet Share Share Email

Despite repeated assurances by the Provisional IRA that it would never surrender, would never quit, would never give up one bullet or one ounce of explosive, would never be defeated, and that the armed struggle would continue so long as the goal of a united independent Ireland remain unrealised, it finally capitulated – Timothy Shanahan

A week ago today in a gratuitous act of political violence a member of the British Police Service of Northern Ireland was targeted by Irish republicans. A booby trap device was attached to his car and he was critically injured when it exploded near Randalstown in County Antrim. Today it was revealed that he had a leg amputated and has yet to regain consciousness. That violence might have a political motivation makes it no less brutal.

The bomb attack employed the type of modus operandi that the latest IRA has inherited from the former IRA which specialised in such operations. Indeed it was the type of attack that paid the best dividends on the Semtex explosive shipped into the country by the former IRA at the height of its campaign. Rather than explosives shipments adding a qualitative new dimension to the campaign they merely allowed an old tactic to be upgraded which delivered in terms of operational results without in anyway offsetting the eventual defeat that the former IRA would sustain.

Unfortunately there are some who cannot come to terms with that defeat and will continue trying to reverse the irreversible by resorting to the methods of the defeated IRA, a consequence of failing to realise that those methods could never lead to success. The former IRA targeted and on occasion killed Catholic police officers and achieved nothing for it.

The type of operation that critically injured Peadar Heffron, an Irish speaking GAA player, is what the IRA does and will continue to do. It is unlikely to change as a result of people who at one time directed operations against Catholic police officers in pursuit of a united Ireland, screaming traitors at those who have opted to continue with the same operations in pursuit of a united Ireland. It at the same time demonstrates both the durability and futility of republican political violence.

It is an exercise which will do nothing to lessen the resolve of the British state to remain in Ireland. It has brutally maimed another human being who did not see his role as one of beating the nationalist community into submission. In fact he seriously promoted Irish nationalist culture. There may be no shortage of good reasons for criticising Peadar Heffron for joining the British police but not one for trying to kill him. This is what designating people as enemies rather than opponents tends to lead to.

The leader of the Alliance Party, David Ford, professed outrage ‘that a very small number of people still believe that using violence will achieve anything.’ Yet it is not necessary for the people who carry out these attacks to think that they can achieve anything. The tradition they belong to places emphasis on the right to resist British rule militarily. That action alone is achievement enough for many of its adherents. Theirs is a tradition violently fuelled for years by those who now call them traitors and who continued to wage a campaign ostensibly for a united Ireland long after they realised there were no prospects of that goal being achieved.

When the former IRA formally announced the capitulation mentioned by Timothy Shanahan in his probing book The Provisional Irish Republican Army And The Morality Of Terrorism, it stated that ‘we reiterate our view that the armed struggle was entirely legitimate.’ Yet its armed struggle was supported only by a minority of northern nationalists, themselves a minority within the north and an even smaller minority within Ireland. Much like today’s IRAs; the real difference between them and the former IRA boils down to one being supported by a bigger minority than the other. Not really the type of thing ‘entire legitimacy’ is grounded in.

Wars are things to be avoided just short of all costs. The right of the Irish people not to wage war is a right they value and are currently exercising. Their right not to wage war is stronger than the supposed right of any group to wage war in their name. The right of the Irish people to choose to avoid war is a right others do not want them to have and in monarchical fashion – monarchies are so antithetical to republicanism – are trying to usurp that right by imposing war upon them. The very contempt for the rights of Irish people that physical force republicans accuse the British state of displaying is itself a property of that brand of republicanism. The claim that they are fighting to prevent the British usurping the rights of the Irish people is made a nonsense of by armed campaigning. Whatever the raison d’etre of their political violence defending the rights of the Irish people hardly figures within it.