Omagh March

By AM Sunday, April 10, 2011

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It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility – Joseph Conrad.

This afternoon thousands took to the streets of Omagh in protest at last week’s republican killing of PSNI constable Ronan Kerr. Like the funeral of the dead man I saw it only on television. But it seemed to have less of an ersatz feel to it than the funeral. The celebrity cortege in attendance just didn’t cut the emotional mustard.

The funeral was as natural as the on the ground welcome given to Tony Blair in 1997 on the first steps of his journey into a British prime ministerial career. It turned out that ‘the ordinary people of London’ were in fact members of the Labour Party put in place for media effect.

When a certain naturalness is usurped by stage management the effect tends to be lost. Everybody knows their roles and their lines, the scenes are wooden and the movement stiff. That’s why there was so much sceptical commentary about the funeral and the carefully worked choreography.

Today’s event however looked something else. There is always some degree of organisation to these things. Photos of the dead man accompanied by the stencilled caption ‘not in my name’ do not make and distribute themselves. Yet today’s gathering did not appear manufactured for the cameras and for that reason had more of an impact when the cameras rolled. That’s how it looked from this living room.

A very large body of Irish people took to the streets demanding that a very small body of Irish people desist from using political violence. It is as stark as that. At its heart is a question of rights. Who are rights with? Are they with the vast majority who want freedom from republican political violence or the small minority who want to deny them that freedom? It is a question that armed republicans should consider contemplating if not for ethical reasons then surely for strategic ones.

Armed republicanism has been totally outmanoeuvred by the British state. The British have found a mechanism which allows them to facilitate the wishes of the Irish people while at the same time positioning armed republicanism as the major impediment to those wishes. Strategically alone it makes no sense for armed republicans to continue on their present course and be depicted as the Phelps family of Irish political life. This particular family under the directives of Pastor Fred Phelps pickets the funerals of dead US troops on the basis that their deaths were ordained by god because the US permits homosexuality. They appear bereft of any strategic understanding of how US society perceives them.

Failing a strategic reappraisal, those republicans who are determined to thwart the very people they insist on violently freeing against their expressed wishes send a Phelps-like message that they are impervious to reason by virtue of being trapped, or even willingly wrapped, in a history-propelled irrationality. When people are deemed to be beyond reason alternative measures are found to deal with them. Those alternatives are always made easier when the general public is alienated from those subject to the measures.

The response is certain to be more draconian measures and political policing. We can see this under way already with the PSNI planning to dig into some past cases not in the interests of justice – otherwise all cases would be looked at - but on political grounds; the expediency of, in the terms once expressed by British counter insurgency strategist Brigadier Frank Kitson, disposing of unwanted members of the public.

In spite of this the likelihood is that armed republicans will opt for the deleterious course. We know from experience that marches like today’s can all too easily be ignored. It is likely that the current crop of armed republicans will simply copy their predecessors of 1976 who launched an angry discourse, and on occasion low level violence and intimidation, against the Peace People. They might well dig up some of Gerry Adams’ old writings in which he took the Peace People to task for trying to impede the progress of the armed struggle.

If so it will amount to nothing other than a rearguard action. A much weaker armed republicanism repeating the tactics of their Provisional antecedents stand to achieve even less. Why copy failure?