David Caldwell: Do you remember him? He is dead, murdered. How good is your brain on these matters? Not good? Be not ashamed. Nor is mine.
To be sure, journalists do not normally profess ignorance. Our trade deals with moral and factual certainties, but alas, not here. For on this peace process business, I feel no moral or factual certainties. Instead, I sense a spreading chill of uncomprehending numbness, the mental frostbite of those who are marooned on the same ice-floe as the peace process, but are not gathered around its brazier, nor warmed by the glowing coals of its pieties.
Politics, for all its compromises and the shiftiness, in essence has a shared morality. There are agreed areas where the rules are broken or bent, where subterfuge and sleight masquerade as principle and promise; but otherwise we know that even in a world packed with spin-doctors and image-burnishers, that there are rules which bind all the participants. These form the institutions of state which stand as comforts for the powerless and limits upon the powerful.
The peace process abandoned those rules. Murderers were allowed to saunter free from their prison-cells in happy chuckling clusters; moreover, to placate the political leaders of those murderers, the police force which had put them behind bars was first neutered and then reconstituted on nakedly sectarian grounds. The amoral state was thus created: and within this amoral state, amorality became the central feature of political life.
What binds David Trimble with Martin McGuinness? A subscription to the peace process is merely a common immersion in the sea of convenience. But what else is there? Do they both believe in the rule of a common law? No, they do not. Do they both support the police against terrorists? No, they do not. They do share the same economic principles? No, they do not. Do they both subscribe to a common sense of nationality? No, they do not. And have they a common response to the murder of David Caldwell? No, they have not.
David Caldwell: another blow for Irish freedom. Pass on, David, into that great grey host, several thousands strong, who went that way before you, victims of the war launched by republican cretins. You were the softest of soft targets, a civilian checking a medical training camp for the Territorial Army. You picked up a lunchbox, and boom! Moments later you were lurching around with your arms and much of your face blown to kingdom come, where your soul was to join them in an hour or so.
Murderous imbeciles
They like such targets, the cunning, murderous imbeciles of the Real IRA. They blew up, blinded and maimed Peter Mason, another civilian employee of the Ministry for Defence, with a similar device, a booby-trapped flask, a couple of months ago. Some time before that, in London they blinded for life a teenage territorial army cadet who picked up a booby-trapped torch outside his depot.
Oh, good shooting, chaps.
These are pointless deeds which serve to make a point: that the Real IRA is still in business, waiting for the Executive to fall, and for the authorising baton of war to be passed into its open palm from the falling hand of the Provisional movement.
No morality governs RIRA's actions; whatever is expeditious suffices, which is precisely the same ethos which governs the peace process and the Northern Executive.
The Sinn Féin component of the Executive finds it unexpeditious to urge nationalists to publicly denounce the Real IRA, to boycott its members, to picket its headquarters, to make the green ghettoes a cold house indeed for "dissidents". Most crucially of all, it does not find it expeditious to urge everyone in the nationalist community to tell the new police all they know about these killers.
So was this the deal? That the Shinners are given government departments, have the police restructured largely to their blueprint, and are allowed an informal Shinner policing system within nationalist areas; and in return, they give nothing? Meanwhile the RIRA is able to operate from within the safety of the security concessions that were made in order to make the Shinners stick to their ceasefire.
Did you vote for that? Is that what you thought Good Friday was all about? Did anyone, apart from the much-reviled peace process-sceptics, believe this was going to be consequence of the biggest single act of electoral approval in Irish voting history - that what keeps one IRA on ceasefire simultaneously provides the very protection for the other IRA to maintain its grisly, dismal war? No mention here so far of Gerald Lawlor, the hapless Catholic youth in a Celtic shirt murdered by the Ulster Freedom Fighters in what that wretched band called "a measured military response". That jackanapes-wording aside, too pathetic to merit a rebuttal, there is this difference between the murderous goons of the Ulster Freedom Fighters and Sinn Féin: the UFF is not in government, and the Shinners are, and moreover, they take coffee and cookies in the White House and admire the roses in Downing Street. Yet for all this, the Shinners apparently feel no more duty to support the law which brought them to power than do the loyalists and republicans who are opposed to it: poachers and gamekeepers gather at the brake and find their rules are the same.
And when lawmaker and outlaw have so much in common, then what meaning has law? And how much longer can the amoral state which enacts meaningless law survive?