What planet has Michael McDowell, our beloved Attorney General, been living on, that he should be surprised and affronted by the Sinn Féin-IRA jamboree last weekend? All armies honour their dead, which is what Sinn Féin-IRA were doing, and I can't blame them for it. And if they're not aware of the rules of democracy, and are unaware of the gross offence that sort of shindig causes, who is to blame: these complete outsiders in the new and baffling game of democracy, or their accomplices in the p
Michael, don't take my word for it, but just make a phone call to the head of anti-terrorist operations in Special Branch and ask him two questions. Ask him who carried out the Castlereagh operation, which has effectively neutralised his Northern colleagues. He will tell you, the Provisional IRA. Ask him whether it would be possible for such an operation, in such profound violation of the peace process, to have been conducted without the specific approval of the Army Council of the IRA, and he will tell you, probably not.
Raid on Belfast docks
Ask him another question, Michael. Ask him who organised the raid on Belfast docks the weekend after the British general election. Ask him what organisation deployed up to two dozen men armed with Kalashnikovs to perpetrate the largest armed robbery in Northern Ireland's history. Ask him what the consequences would have been if police or soldiers had chanced on this operation.
Then ask him, Michael, if he's still listening - and he might not be, because he's probably wondering why the Attorney General is asking him damn-fool questions that the first law officer in the land should know the answers to anyway - who the members of the IRA Army Council are. And then ask him for the names of some of the people elected to Westminster the time of the tobacco raid, and ask him also for the names of people who were praising the men and women of the IRA at Citywest on Saturday, and see if there is any link between them.
Michael, you'll find that there is. And what I don't understand is that you find the Sinn Féin-IRA honouring their dead of the past so objectionable when you have said nothing whatever to condemn their continuing terrorist activities during your tenure as Attorney General. The IRA was responsible for the docks raid; and you said nothing. The IRA was also responsible for Castlereagh, and you said nothing about that either.
Fledgling democrats
Yet Sinn Féin-IRA have a single, law-abiding dinner in the very place where your colleagues in Government hold their ard fheis, and they commemorate their dead comrades, and all of a sudden you get angry and self-righteous. Why is that worse than anything else the IRA has done? And how are those fledgling democrats of the IRA Army Council to know the rules if the first law officer of the land is not carefully enunciating them every time they violate them?
I don't blame the IRA for not knowing the rules, because I certainly don't. The IRA breaks the law whenever it likes, and its colleagues in the peace process merely invite IRA leaders in for tea, and not even the teaspoons are rattled disapprovingly.
In this bizarre land, where regulations apply only to some of us, but not to others, the IRA can steal millions of pounds worth of cigarettes in January, for re-sale across Ireland. And then the Sinn Féin Minister for Health in the North, Bairbre de Brún, annnounces that she is backing a ban on cigarette advertising.
"Smoking is the greatest cause of preventable illness and preventable death here with around 3,000 deaths occurring every year," she said, apparently with a straight face. She is not - unlike some people I can name, and have named, not that it makes the blindest bit of difference - a member of the IRA Council. But she is a senior member of Sinn Féin, which, as she knows, appoints one member, as of right, to the IRA Army Council. She is also a member of an organisation which backed the war which cost - well, bless my soul now - some 3,000 lives. And she belongs to the political wing of the organisation which is now selling millions of stolen cigarettes on the black market, even as she is banning advertising for the very same.
Weird mumbo-jumbo
You couldn't make this up. What is even more grotesque is that democrats say nothing to the political representatives of terrorists who continue to flagrantly break the law, instead engaging in the weird mumbo-jumbo of peace process double-speak. And if people do advert to the Castlereagh raid, as the Unionist adviser Steven King did in this newspaper last week, it is in tones which suggest that those beastly cads in the IRA have, yet again, been parking on double yellow lines, and this was jolly rotten of them, because this sort of thing was making it very difficult for moderate unionists, lickul izzums.
So actually, I don't blame the IRA for not knowing the rules. The rules are not their rules. They're our rules. Yet whenever it breaks those rules - as it does, apparently, whenever it likes - democratic leaders do not insist that there are penalties for such violations, but instead turn a blind eye, and mumble the normal old fudge about pushing the peace process onwards. Dealing with some complacent duffers as that, I'd behave just as the IRA does. In fact, I'm joining up. Learning the lingo first. Chuckie ar lah!