It's good to see that Martin Ferris, a member of the IRA Army Council, is also both a TD and a registered medical card holder. That a well-paid elected representative is entitled to free medical care while belonging to an organisation which has put so many people beyond such care provides an enchanting insight into the morality of Irish life, writes Kevin Myers.
No doubt he would maintain that he is entitled to some reward for all his years of work in the voluntary sector; and indeed, who can argue with that? Importing arms for the IRA can be arduous: you have to learn Arabic, and maybe even the tiresome yo ho ho slang of mariners: reef the AKs 'neath the fore t'gallants, Mr Mate, and stow the Semtex aft the foc'sle. In the evening, bottles of rum and shanties galore: "What shall we do with the drunken sniper. . ." But still, arms smugglers can get seasick and even drown for their country. Sailors are we. The truth is, a terrorist organisation can't kill thousands of people without an awful lot of unsung, unseen hard work.
New member
And now the IRA Army Council has a new member, the Surgeon. Surgeons are expensive, and usually have prohibitive waiting lists. Yet lucky, lucky Martin can consult his surgeon whenever the council has finished discussing whatever merry pranks it's planning next, and for free.
The ferrous Martin can murmur in a low note to the Surgeon: I've got something to discuss, a small rather personal ailment, it looks like male rust, I wonder if you might, ah. . .
The Surgeon might hurriedly interject that he's not actually a surgeon, more a bayonet man than scalpel, but to no avail. Once a belief spreads that you've got healing powers, regardless of the truth, you get all these ill-looking people at your front door with strange swellings and odd backs and too many feet.
The Surgeon is actually rather good at getting rid of feet, and anything else that annoys him. He features prominently in Toby Harnden's extraordinary account of the IRA in South Armagh: Bandit Country. This credits the Surgeon with at least 70 bewitching murders, and I'm not at all sure which is the loveliest.
For the Surgeon is the Peter Stringfellow of homicide. He helped make the bombs which massacred 17 soldiers at Narrow Water. In time, he turned the Border crossing point at Killeen into a narrow gauntlet of slaughter. He led the ambush and murder of senior RUC officers Breen and Buchanan as they returned from a cross-Border meeting with the Guards at Dundalk, probably shooting them at point-blank range himself.
Hannah family
A year before that, in 1988, the Hannah family were crossing the Border when the Surgeon's boys detonated a mine beside their car. All that was found of Robin Hannah and his wife Maureen was a foot each; of their son David, his right forearm. The real target of this attack was Mr Justice Higgins. There is an unbearable irony in what follows.
In 1985, the Surgeon had masterminded a mortar bomb attack on Newry Barracks in which nine RUC officers were killed. Soon afterwards, the IRA terrorist Eamon Collins was arrested, and after six days' interrogation, told all he knew, implicating the Surgeon in a wide range of terrorist murders. But under pressure from his wife, Collins withdrew the statements implicating the Surgeon, who was then released.
Collins himself was later freed by a Northern court, because he might have been assaulted while in custody: the judge who made that ruling was Judge Higgins, the very fellow the Surgeon was trying to kill when his unit blew the Hannah family to pieces. To complete the circle, just four years ago, even though the IRA was firmly on ceasefire at the time, the Surgeon's gang caught up with Collins, knifing him to death with such primeval and unsurgical savagery that his skull was shattered, his features turned into an unrecognisable pulp.
So. This now was the rule of law against terrorism. It allowed the Surgeon and Eamon Collins to go free; and thus freed, the Surgeon then tried try to kill both the judge who freed Collins and - successfully - Collins himself. The political penalty? None.
Now he's on the Army Council of the IRA; and he and his colleagues are free-floating in a gravity-free zone, where they may perform whatever deeds they like, and completely without consequence. For the two governments will make every unprincipled concession possible to keep the peace process, and thereby the City of London, intact.
Bad old days
In the bad old days, the Surgeon and his IRA chums used the law against itself, dodging through the thickets of habeas corpus meluddery. But in today's peace-process land, such cunning is unneeded: London and Dublin are resolutely ranged in the IRA's support, minimising the corporate consequences of IRA misdeeds whenever they can. Far from the Surgeon being an outlaw, the law is his refuge and his strength.
The British government probably believes its gift to the IRA of control of petrol, diesel and white alcohol supplies across Northern Ireland will lure many terrorists into retirement, to rest their swelling bellies on snooker tables in those vast and vulgar bungalows the banditti in that part of the world favour.
But the Surgeon didn't bathe in strangers' blood for that. In his own wicked way, he is a man of utter principle, and he probably has a mordant smile on his face. Faced by the unscrupulous ninnies of Whitehall and Leinster House, he thinks his crowd is winning; and by God, he's probably right.