- Many republicans opposed to the peace process and the 1998 Belfast Agreement have unfortunately simplistic explanations. According to the ‘traitors thesis’, it is because Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were British agents or corruptible individuals. This is unsatisfactory – it is like explaining Perestroika by claiming that Gorbachev was a CIA agent. –Liam O’Ruaric
Well maybe Gorbachev was! After all procuring double agents are what CIA and MI6 (and KGB) Officers do all the time everywhere. So that explanation, however simple and perhaps even unlikely, cannot ever be ruled out. Moreover Occam’s razor states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but—in the absence of certainty—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.
For instance, the Provisional IRA/Sinn Fein use to kill people they merely suspected of holding the same views the Provos hold now. Thanks to their current Pax Britannica, they now harass and have killed (and will continue to kill) traditional Irish Republicans much like the Vichy French harassed and killed the French Resistance, much like the South Vietnamese harassed and killed the Viet Cong, and much like the Pro-Treaty IRA harassed and killed the Anti-Treaty IRA. This isn’t complicated.
Just look at the recent Provo graffiti “Boston College Touts”.
Clearly the speck is in the eye of the Provo.
However this isn’t the first time in history that a national insurrectionist movement was co-opted and compromised by a foreign occupying power and it won’t be the last.
But to disparage the logical explanation of treason or sell out because it’s “…unfortunately simplistic” is to upend the obvious with unnecessary complication. After all this is political science, not rocket science.
If Adams & McGuiness aren’t on MI6’s payroll then they should be billing them for their services rendered. Because unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, who never sold out Russian independence and sovereignty but merely looked at ways to restructure (Perestroika) the old Soviet economy and make it more open (Glasnost) and transparent, Adams & McGuiness and company behave no differently than the rest of the long line of Irish Resistance-cum-Vichy Irish in accommodating and supporting British power and rule.
And Liam O’Ruaric’s unnecessarily more complicated solution (that “…it is not a matter of individual betrayal or sell-out, but of the existence of a social layer whose objective interests within existing social relations of production lead them towards accommodation with the status quo.”) is really at best a distinction without a difference, and at worst a denial of the obvious with euphemism.
The Vichy French like the South Vietnamese like the Pro-Treaty IRA also rationalized their treason and accommodation like this and denied being sell outs or traitors.
But they were!
Brendan Hughes said it best: “Belfast was rotten.” That is the Provos were rotten with rats. And given their long line of well known rats, it does not take a quantum leap in reason or unnecessarily complicated explanations to conclude that Hughes was (ahem) simply right then and now. Read him and weep:
“Gerry Adams was a major, major player in the war and yet he’s standing there denying it,” Mr Hughes says.
“After I got out of jail I lived with Gerry in his house in the Glen Road.
“I trusted the man at that time.”
Mr Hughes says that on leaving prison in 1986 he found the IRA in disarray.
It was full of informers and was being “purposely run down”, he says.
“Belfast was rotten. I sat and talked to Gerry. He said I was paranoid, it wasn’t that bad, I was exaggerating,” Mr Hughes says.
As such treason is accommodation and accommodation is treason.
Even Gerry Adams himself said of OIRA Frank Ross: “Poacher turned gamekeeper.”
Well then, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
To say otherwise is to beat around the bush putting bow ties on treachery.
"unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, who never sold out Russian independence and sovereignty but merely looked at ways to restructure (Perestroika) the old Soviet economy and make it more open (Glasnost) and transparent..." (end quote). After this, I did not need to read the rest. Mo chairde, you know just absolutely nothing about history or reality of other countries, be it USSR, Ukraine, North Korea, you name it. Yet, you think you are entitled so arrogantly talk about the realities of which you do not have a clue. Please stick to what you know - if you don't want to look ridiculous in the eyes of people in other countries.
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