For all the riches of the English language, it still has no word to describe the murder of poor innocent, defenceless Danny McColgan. No killing could have been easier; no killing could have been more purposeless; and few killings could in a more general sense have been predictable, for this, we have known down the decades, is what happens in Northern Ireland. Innocent Catholics are invariably held to account by loyalist fascists when they don't like what is going on in the world.
But nor has the English language any word to describe my reaction to the Taoiseach's complaint about the failure of the new police force in the North, PSNI, to make many arrests after the recent wave of loyalist terrorist attacks on Catholics. For there is no word to describe a sensation which combines utter incredulity with weary resignation. What else, dear God, did the Taoiseach expect?
Special Branch
For the peace process has systematically gelded the very body which should by this time have broken into very small pieces the murderous filth behind these attacks; that body is - or rather, was - the RUC Special Branch. Just as the IRA developed into a highly efficient terrorist organisation, so the RUC in opposition became the most professional anti-terrorist police force in Europe, with the Special Branch the cutting edge of its operations.
It was not perfect, and sometimes it might have had a cavalier attitude to the way it ran informers and to the operation of the rule of law. But these were operational delinquencies, not institutional ones, and there was nothing about the Special Branch which could not have been attended to with reform, and with a more zealous regard to the rule-book.
For all its failings, Special Branch and British military intelligence had in most areas of Northern Ireland broken terrorist organisations in both communities. Telephone taps, massive surveillance, secret microphones, concealed cameras and a vast body of informers had ensured that it was very difficult for any terrorist group to be in existence long without being detected and dismantled by the security forces. So what else would terrorist groups want more than to see Special Branch destroyed? And by Jove, that precisely is what the peace process set about doing, and succeeded in doing so, too.
I know I've said this a thousand times in this space. But how did this happen? How did the political classes of both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland and the government of the United States manage to negotiate into extinction the bulwark against which terrorist movements had repeatedly dashed themselves, while those terrorist movements remained, fully armed, in existence, their prisoners released from jail, effectively without condition?
Disarmament
This is not rocket science. If you throw away your raincoat on this island, sooner or later you will get wet, unless you arrange for the weather to improve permanently. The peace process didn't do that. It didn't even insist on undertakings from anyone that the war was over for good. It seemed to promise, but as it happened didn't, disarmament of terrorist groups; but that brief appearance was enough for the majority of people to think that the peace process meant disarmament and an end to war.
That was what people voted for in the all-Ireland referendum. They absolutely did not vote for the destruction of the RUC while the IRA, UVF, UDA, Red Hand Gibbering Lunatics et cetera, fully armed, fully barking, were allowed to remain in existence, with Sinn Féin in government in the North, IRA vigilantes imposing Sinn Féin justice in North Kerry, and IRA punishment squads freely breaking limbs the length and breadth of the island.
In addition to throwing away the raincoat of the RUC Special Branch, the peace process did something else too. It repositioned Northern Ireland into a rather rainier part of the Atlantic. This was quite an achievement, but it was nonetheless managed, and with few enough objections from anyone. This repositioning was done by the slightest of sleights, that day when Alliance members re-designated themselves as Unionists for the purpose of re-electing David Trimble as First Minister.
The peace process was meant to ensure that all sections of the community were represented in government in Northern Ireland. I have always thought that an insane and inoperable ambition, but no matter: I am in a tiny minority on this. Whatever your opinion about the peace process, last November that process was kept alive by naked fraudulence, thus violating the very principles upon which it was based.
Murderous consequence
In the perverse and violent madhouse that is Northern Ireland, what is the likely outcome of telling the unionist people that their votes count only when it suits the peace process? If you perform the internal gerrymander of Alliance MLAs pretending to be Unionists for a day, do you think this fraud will go unnoticed and without murderous consequence in the seething tribal townships of North Belfast, mid-Armagh, north Derry?
Last week, the successors of the RUC, PSNI, yet again held the line for peace, order and justice in North Belfast, and not a single voice in nationalist Ireland, either from the SDLP or from the Government, praised the heroism and restraint of those police men and women. Instead, in this mad peace process world, the faces of those who attacked the police were obliterated from newspaper pictures. This is straightforward censorship, unprecedented in these Troubles, yet who should be surprised? For when you spell peace process, you do so with a capital A: for Appeasement.