VINCENT BROWNE recently paid me the compliment of devoting his entire column and his erratic forensic skills to an attempt to destroy my credibility. I have neither the time nor the inclination to get upset over personal insults but I will deal quickly with the more substantial of Browne's silly comments before talking about the politics of the peace process.
Browne found it peculiar that although in the Sunday Times I stated that the IRA was a sectarian organisation that primarily wanted to kill Protestants, I myself had murdered a Catholic RUC officer. I should have thought it was obvious that I was told to murder this man precisely because he was seen as having gone over to the enemy.
On Browne's radio show I spoke about a conversation I had in 1991, in Crumlin Road prison, with a senior republican, which revealed the cynicism behind the IRA's political strategy. Browne triumphantly announced in his column that this person had told him that no such conversation could have taken place, since I was known to be an informer. We had spoken in jail, but only about my mental condition for the IRA thought me "psychiatrically ill".
Why was this particular IRA man in prison? Because he was part of the IRA gang which had kidnapped and was about to murder an informer, when the RUC intervened and saved the informer's life. The IRA has a straightforward policy about informers it murders them. To date it has killed about 50. The notion that they are forgiven if they show signs of mental instability is simply laughable. There were about me in Kerry at the time, but the republican leadership believed in my loyalty.
The same IRA man was, for many years, the IRA's director of publicity, which entailed feeding journalists like Browne with an IRA spin, the subtle green gloss of propaganda. Of course he has to discredit my evidence. He must be amused that Browne chooses to take his word against that of an agent of the Irish State.
Browne asserts that I worked for MI5 while also working for the Garda. I didn't, as it happens. When I, left the IRA in November 1985, the Garda, lacking the facilities I'd do a full debriefing in Ireland, asked me to co operate with Scotland Yard and MI5. Is there a problem with two democratic governments working together to combat terrorism?
Now to the peace process. Browne attempted to rubbish my fears about the peace process by claiming that I believe "that there is a grave danger inherent in the IRA's abandonment of violence and adoption of constitutionalism".
I never thought, said or have written anything remotely like that, and I find it quite incredible that an intelligent man could actually believe that I would fear the IRA becoming a normal democratic political party. Like any other sane person, I would, be overjoyed if that happened and the ugly spectre of violent nationalism was exorcised from our lives.
The point I keep making is that the IRA has no intention of abandoning violence and embracing constitutionalism. The republican leadership long ago lost any shred of decency or principle. It is engaged in a highly cynical and dangerous exercise to subvert constitutional nationalism by dragging it down to its own!
Browne believes it would not matter if Sinn Fein becomes the dominant voice of Northern nationalists. Like John Hume, he appears to believe that the IRA of 1996 is a benign organisation, fundamentally different from the one disgraced the name of Ireland throughout the world.
Let us look at recent evidence: Canary Wharf Manchester, Garda Jerry McCabe, Thiepval barracks, the 16 year olds hung up by the legs and beaten senseless and, just before Christmas, the shooting up of a children's ward in a deliberate attempt to provoke loyalist retaliation. Is that what Browne means by the IRA's adoption of constitutionalism?
Sinn Fein is not a democratic constitutional party. Like constitutional parties the world over, it engages in unarmed propaganda, but its big brother, the IRA, through its terror campaign, engages in "armed propaganda". Any journalist who ignores that is not doing his job.
I have no doubt that the Provisional movement will never abandon totally the option of terror - until the government and people of the Republic decide that the IRA campaign of violence must end for good. It is the democrats, not the fascists, who must call the shots.
I would like to end by asking two crucial questions.
As a Kerry teenager, I joined the IRA and became a bomber, a robber and a double murderer. When I came to my senses and realised I was committing criminal acts for a vicious, sectarian organisation I left, but my conscience drove me to rejoin in order to work against it. I served as an informer for the Irish Government and, in the course of six years I helped to stop a huge IRA arms shipment, I put many murderers behind bars and I sabotaged many violent and criminal plans.
The first question I pose is this. When I, stopped seven tonnes of weapons coming into Ireland was I doing the right thing?
THE second question concerns the nature of political debate about a peace process which I believe to have been based on the completely false premise that the IRA was prepared to abandon violence permanently and enter into genuine negotiation.
The Chief Constable of the RUC recently said that sectarian polarisation in Northern Ireland was now at an all time high. That upsets decent onlookers, but it comes as no surprise to Gerry Adams who, 10 years ago first called for a pan nationalist front to see off the unionists and who is a leading strategist behind republican efforts to exacerbate sectarian tension.
Adams wants to see all the Taigsat the negotiating table forcing the Prods into submission. He wants, too, to wrest the leadership of Northern Irish nationalism from John Hume with the help of an electoral" pact between the SDLP and Sinn Fein. If Northern Protestants see that given a choice, constitutional, nationalists prefer murderers to moderate nationalists it will send out a disastrous signal.
If this ill thought out peace process is proceeded with for much longer it will, in my opinion, provoke a terrible Protestant backlash, with innocent Catholics beings butchered by the score.
There are vital issues to be addressed, yet ask one question about the validity of the IRA's commitment to peaceful means and people such as John Hume and Vincent Browne try to bludgeon you into submission with their peace cudgels.
150 my second question is: why is there such a deep reluctance in Ireland to have a proper debate about the peace process?
I believe that the answers to those two questions will tell us a great deal about our maturity as a people.
