Partition remains the root problem
The killing of two soldiers and one policeman in Northern Ireland by the “Real IRA” and the “Continuity IRA”, both of which are splinters from the Adams-McGuinness republicans, sharply raises the level of challenge to the status quo by the fringe republican groups who have rejected the move into mainstream bourgeois politics which the Adams-McGuinness republicans took a decade ago.
There have been many incidents involving these groups in recent years, but the three killings amount to a qualitative escalation.
As we go to press on 11 March, peace rallies called by the Irish TUC are scheduled for many places in Ireland, north and south.
Will the outcry the killings have provoked will stifle those who want to resume the IRA’s war?
When the “Real IRA” killed 29 people — one of them a woman pregnant with twins — in Omagh in August 1998, soon after the power sharing Good Friday Agreement was signed, the backlash against them forced them out of action for a number of years. Inadvertently they “Real IRA” helped those working to call off the IRA war.
What the two splinter IRA groups are trying to do now is clear. They want to provoke the British government and the Northern Ireland police force (no longer the Protestant sectarian RUC but the Catholic-Protestant Police Service of Northern Ireland) into overreacting, in a way that will alienate Catholics and thus undermine the “peace process”.
They also hope to trigger Protestant paramilitary forces into indiscriminate attacks on Catholics, thus polarising the communities and creating conditions in which they can grow and expand as the Provos did at the beginning of the 70s.
They are intent on resuming the war which the Adam-McGuinness IRA has abandoned.
All reports tell of mass opposition to a return to war. But that may not be decisive.
Already there are Unionist voices calling for severe repression. Those who do not want to “play into the hands of” the militarist republicans may nor be able to control events.
Where communities are polarised as in Northern Ireland, the extremes on both sides can determine what happens, sparking off each other and each other’s activities, feeding each other by way of the response what they do creates in the “other camp”.
At the start, in the early 90s, of the conflict that would tear Yugoslavia bloodily to pieces, opinion polls showed a sizeable majority in favour of continuing the multi-national federation. This was rational and sensible. It was the first choice of a majority when it still seemed that there were choices to be made. But reason and sense did not set the pace and control events.
The militarists did. The militarists of one community would attack, thus rousing their mirror image in the other community to counter action. Back and forth, tit-for-tat, it would go in an escalating whirligig of violence and the fear of violence.
The Protestant-Unionist forces in the power-sharing arrangement are the most unstable and fissiparous of the two sides in that partnership. They stand on political ground that may shift under their feet.
If only a few communalist fuckwits on the Protestant side to do the sort of things that the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA are doing, that will vastly raise communalist tensions and thus increase the likelihood of Catholic counter-attacks.
This is an attempt by militarist republicans to wage war on the Adams-McGuinness Sinn Fein as well as on the peace process. They hope to stimulate those in that organisation who are not quite contented with Sinn Fein being a party of government. Here they have so far had an important success.
Adams and McGuinness have come out openly on the side of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and in effect of the British Army. That will stick in the throat of many of his erstwhile republican followers.
McGuinness has condemned his former comrades in words that leave no room for doubt on what the Adams-McGuinness group would do to them if they could. The killers says McGuinness are “traitors to the entire island of Ireland”. “They have betrayed the political desires, hopes and aspirations of people who live on this island. They don’t deserve to be supported by anyone.” He has said publicly that if he had information on the killers he wouldn’t hesitate to pass it on to the police.
Many will know that McGuinness’ words are as a description of what the IRA, led by McGuinness and Adams and others, did after the Sunningdale agreement of late 1973, which gave the Catholics everything the Provos would settle for 25 years later in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
They submitted the peoples to two decades of senseless war to win conditions they could have had without it.
Some will remember the words of Seamus Mallon, then leader of the constitutional nationalist SDLP, who said of the previous 20 years of Provo activity that the Good Friday Agreement was “Sunningdale for slow learners”.
Gerry Adams has promised to fight the militarists in the Catholic areas. Sinn Fein will, he says, “go toe to toe” with them and slug it out. Only those armed with guns can go toe-to-toe with gunmen; one implication of what Adams has said is that the IRA, now officially disbanded, will resurrect itself…
With hardline Unionists already calling for tougher action in response to the killing, Northern Ireland is at a dangerous crossroads.
The “Real IRA” and the “Continuity IRA” deserve no more support than the Provos did. We do not have to take McGuinness's advice and turn police informers, but no socialist should be so ignorant of the real Ireland and the real issues in Ireland as to support these political Neanderthalers just because they have begun to shoot British soldiers.
These are murderously confused people. We must oppose what they are doing and condemn it.
