"A little masterpiece of ambiguity"

Jenny McCartney in The Sunday Telegraph makes some commonsensical observations about the IRA’s pronouncements.

It has always been necessary to trawl through IRA statements with the suspicious eye of a Hollywood divorce lawyer, because each sentence is a little masterpiece of ambiguity, mined with get-out clauses. The politicians - such as the former Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble - who in the past have taken great leaps of faith, while clinging to loose interpretations of IRA statements, have ended up floundering in the political bog.

Take, for example, that sentence in last Thursday's statement: "All IRA units have been instructed to dump arms." It does not say "dump all their arms." All IRA units have therefore been instructed to dump some arms - how many, precisely? - and "put them beyond use" in a process overseen solely by the decommissioning head General John de Chastelain, and two independent witnesses.

This isn't new: it is what the IRA offered on August 9, 2001, and promptly withdrew, again in pique, on August 14, 2001. Even last week's statement that "all Volunteers" are instructed "to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means" is both familiar and tortuous in its construction.

The IRA’s strategy of calculated ambiguity has been an integral part of the ‘peace process’ since the organisation’s declared ceasefire in 1994. In the summer of that year, the republican leadership issued a document known as ‘TUAS’ (it can be found in Eamon Mallie and David McKittrick, The Fight for Peace: The Inside Story of the Irish Peace Process (London: Mandarin, 1997), pp. 421-4), which was widely interpreted at the time as standing for ‘Totally Unarmed Strategy’. Those who interpreted it instead as ‘Tactical Use of Armed Struggle’ were nearer the mark. The document maintained that the state of opinion among nationalists – the SDLP, the Irish Government, the Irish-American lobby and Provisional Sinn Fein – was reasonably homogeneous, all of them ‘rowing in roughly the same direction’. This was the outcome – intended and actual - of the Hume-Adams talks between John Hume, then leader of the SDLP, and Gerry Adams: the creation of ‘an Irish nationalist consensus’ in which the Unionists and the British Government would be depicted as the obdurate parties and the obstacles to political advance.

In short, the ceasefire was declared not because violence was rejected in principle and for all time, but because the state of politics in the province and in Ireland was seen as conducive to a different approach. Constitutional politics has always been treated as a second front, not as the definitive abandonment of the original front. The only things that have changed since the start of the peace process have been, as it were, exogenous variables, notably the toughening of American attitudes towards terror since 9/11. Nothing internal to the republican movement has shifted; there has been no reassessment of its ideology, let alone any critical rethinking of its history.

Should that ever take place, there would have to be an understanding that the ideology of republicanism is not, and has never been, progressive. Its invocation of the blood sacrifice has disturbing parallels in other anti-rationalist movements. As Kevin Toolis, whose argument ought to have been recalled last week, wrote in The Times a couple of years ago:

The Easter Proclamation [of 1916] was, and is, a chilling semifascistic rant that is heavy on the power of arms, blood sacrifice and dead children to bring a united Ireland into being. Killing “alien” British soldiers was, [Patrick] Pearse declared, the “fundamental right” of all true Irish republicans. Guns and bombs were the way forward. In the end, Pearse got what he wanted, a honourable execution by baffled British Army generals, but his poisonous legacy lived on, inspiring generation after generation of young Irishmen to take up the gun.

When the IRA bombed a Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen in 1987, killing 11 people, it chose what, by its own perverse reasoning, was a singularly appropriate target. Its victims were commemorating the deaths, and giving thanks for the lives, of those who had fought fascism; in that fight, the IRA had been on the other side. Its Chief of Staff, Sean Russell, died of a perforated ulcer on a German U-boat in September 1940, 100 miles from the coast of County Galway, during an abortive Nazi attempt to land him and his comrade Frank Ryan in Ireland. They had planned to sabotage the allied war effort, and IRA attempts to the same end continued under the coordination of German spies such as Captain Hermann Goertz. Russell remains a revered figure in nationalist circles.

Is it really necessary to dwell on the IRA’s past record rather than welcome their statement? Yes, it is, because peace, as opposed to an armed truce characterised by mistrust and criminality, in the end depends on a state of mind. Trust will require the debunking of cherished myths, plenty of which (as revisionist historians such as Conor Cruise O’Brien and Roy Foster have demonstrated) are shared by constitutional nationalists as well as the IRA. No such re-evaluation is anywhere near to taking place. Perhaps one day there will be a parallel with another cause that sided with Nazism, and which many years later voluntarily accepted its defeat and discredit. But there is, as yet, no F.W. de Klerk of Irish republicanism.