The recent newspaper and radio interviews with Patrick Magee were rare events. Magee, convicted for his part in the bombing of the Grand Hotel at Brighton in 1984, was willing to consider some of the moral questions raised by the use of violence for political ends.
The interviews were disappointing because Magee was highly reticent about some key issues. Reflecting on his involvement at Brighton, he said he had to do a sort of moral audit and ask whether he could justify not just his own actions but others' actions in the overall struggle. He concluded there was no other way to win the nationalist community's freedom and democracy.
Reminded of the five people who died at Brighton, the many people injured, including Mrs Tebbit, who was sentenced to life in a wheelchair, Magee said: "The victims of Brighton, I would put them with all the other victims of this conflict. I think all the deaths and all the injuries were regrettable . . . . when people are sentenced to life in a wheelchair, how can you not but regret that . . . . from the heart I regret, as I believe all republicans regret, the necessity of violence. I don't believe there was another course open to us." (Report on radio interview, The Irish Times, September 6th, 2000).
"Let me make it clear, I think it highly regrettable that anyone had to die but equally I believe that the IRA actions over the last 30 years were justified. There was simply no other way." The Sunday Business Post, August 27th, 2000.
Underlying all the actions of the IRA during the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland is the insistence on moral legitimacy: the struggle is a just war, in continuity with past generations who have fought for freedom for the Irish people. Yet, reading and listening to Patrick Magee, I did not hear any hint of the old proverb - "he who comes to the court of equity must come with clean hands." There has to be a moral foundation to all quests for justice. What we heard from Magee were large, universalising concepts and assertions: "armed struggle", "military campaign", and "the military campaign was about radicalising politics in the ghetto".
He did not engage at all with some of the key concepts which led him to conclude that the "armed struggle" was just and necessary, and to invest his own life in it. "Armed struggle" is an endlessly flexible concept, used in countless IRA statements to describe "military operations". What does "armed struggle" mean in practice? It cries out for narrative display.
The inquests into the Omagh bombing of August 1998, in particular the witnesses' reports of the immediate aftermath, provide a searing commentary on the meaning of armed struggle as a means to a moral end. Omagh was the worst incident of the Troubles - 31 people were killed, and many seriously injured. However, it was morally continuous with numerous "military operations" which took place in the previous 30 years. It would be hard to distinguish between Omagh and the bombing of the Tory Party Conference in Brighton, in which many hotel workers could have been killed or maimed along with the intended targets.
Over three decades, the conflict in Northern Ireland has corrupted moral language and imagination. Paramilitary thinkers and spokesmen have suppressed moral sensibilities to create a free space for acts of redemptive violence. A human being who dies a painful death in a bombing incident, or is maimed for life, is transformed into a casualty of war, to be regretted like all casualties. This is moral corruption, leading to the death of the soul.
Undergirding everything is the myth of redemptive violence. It is what works. Violence appears to be the nature of things, embraced by people on the right and on the left. Only by the use of violence can we achieve our rights, justice, freedom from oppression. The myth of redemptive violence inundates us on every side. It is certainly not peculiar to the IRA, to Ireland, or to paramilitary groups generally. One can only allude here to its impact on the foreign policies of many countries, on militarism, the Cold War up to recently and on human relationships.
The myth of redemptive violence has structured a whole way of thinking and feeling about Irish history, and about our relationships to our traditional enemies. The ruling power of the myth is apparent in Patrick Magee's recent reflections.
In the Irish republican tradition, the myth of redemptive violence has enshrined the supremacy of one sole possible reading of Irish history. Absolutely excluded are stories of leaders and movements which witness to other ways of understanding the past: Daniel O'Connell, Michael Davitt, Charles Stuart Parnell, John Redmond. Each of these mobilised and empowered large numbers of impoverished people to achieve substantial freedom without violence.
In 20 years' time, the perpetrators of the Omagh bombing may express sincere regrets while insisting on the necessity of violence in the onward struggle for freedom for the Irish people. The myth of violence is primordial and pervasive. We are all affected by it. To put an end to the spiral of violence demands a huge investment of creative thinking and action. Patrick Magee has done a great service in sharing so much that is central to his own life. He may help to provoke a fresh and much more widespread discussion about the use of violent force for the sake of political ends. From what he has said so far, it is not clear how he resolves the tension between his generalised commitment to the justice of IRA actions over the last 30 years and his current wholehearted support for the peace process.
How can he persuade highly motivated members of the "Real IRA" to put down their arms? On the evidence of his recent remarks, no persuasive reasons are available to him except highly subjective and pragmatic ones. It was John O'Leary, a founding father of separatist Irish nationalism, who said there are certain things a man or woman ought not do for his or her country.
The Rev Dr Breifne Walker teaches moral theology at the Holy Ghost Fathers' school of theology in Enugu, Nigeria.
