You have to be either deeply cynical or deeply stupid not to care about Sinn Féin-IRA's "on-the-runs" project. For the Shinners are busy successfully redrafting history with the aid of two largely compliant governments in Dublin and London, and two political establishments which are either fast asleep (Westminster) or are being drawn by their nationalist nose into the Sinn Féin trap (Oireachtas).
Sinn Féin-IRA demands that presidential pardons be offered to IRA men in the Republic, and that the British grant what amounts to an unquestioning amnesty to unconvicted paramilitary offenders. Yet it also demands that no mercy be offered to members of the British security forces who allegedly colluded in terrorist activities. Familiar territory: for this is the Black and Tan project revisited. Thus an entirely mythical historical landscape is created in which the only visibly guilty people at the end of the Troubles will be members of the security forces, thereby retroactively legitimising the atrocities of the IRA.
After years of appeasement, the Shinners now routinely expect their disgusting set of values to be accepted by the two governments. So they are now genuinely astonished and indignant that the British government intends to grant its employees the same pardon which it is offering its enemies.
But why wouldn't they be surprised? Are they not regularly invited to tea and scones at Downing Street and Chequers? Has the brutish Martin Ferris not been ushered into the drawing-room of Number 10, while the prime minister giddily tap-danced in attendance? So how could thugs like Ferris have the least idea how the rest of us feel about him, his vile organisations, and their filthy deeds? Because you can be sure that Blair, playing cutesy mother with the teapot, never told him. And of course, how could he? For Blair is cut from the same moral material as his guests. None of them know right from wrong any more than a tadpole knows a fine-tooth comb from an All-Ireland Final.
Gerry Adams once again spake in Shinnese on the issue last week, when he denied that republicans had double standards in seeking to close cases for republican paramilitaries, but to keep them open if they involved members of crown forces. "The fact is that hundreds of people have been killed by the British crown forces, and there is an attempt to cover up this issue, and I think people understand that." Only in the burlesque world of Shinnery could such preposterous falsehoods exist. Go, as one should daily do, to David McKittrick's Lost Lives, to get a measure of how risibly evil the Adams world-view is. Republicans were responsible for 58.3 per cent of all deaths in the Troubles. The regular British army was responsible for 6.5 per cent, and special forces were responsible for 1.7 per cent. The RUC was responsible for 1.4 per cent. The UDR (as UDR) killed eight people, just 0.2 per cent. Yes, point two per cent. The regiment's dead numbered some 200 - surely, the highest disproportion in any conflict anywhere. The Royal Irish Regiment's contribution to the dead of the Troubles? Nought per cent.
The British army was responsible for 158 civilian deaths, 4.27 per cent of the total. The IRA killed 644 civilians - 17.4 per cent of the total. The IRA also killed 163 republicans. In other words, republican fratricides accounted for more deaths than the total number of civilians killed by British soldiers. Moreover, many killings by soldiers were in return-fire incidents, which had been initiated by terrorists, and young soldiers had to make instant, often impossible decisions about whom to shoot and whom not. Such killings of the innocent cannot usually and decently be called murder. Moreover, the pressure of terrorist warfare explains 13 "blue-on-blue" security force killings of their colleagues.
Nationalist Ireland has been tiresomely but predictably huffing and puffing about the "scandal" of letting security force colluders go free. And in Tony Blair's abject and craven attitude towards Shinnerdom, he might even give ground here, with British soldiers thus finding themselves in the dock while republican and loyalist terrorists are effectively pardoned for far worse crimes. If that is so, Blair may now withdraw his troops from Iraq before they mutiny there or, more probably, stay in barracks, reading porn.
For, as a group, the British army suffered massively in the Troubles, with 688 dead. And how many terrorists were convicted of involvement in murdering soldiers? Four hundred? One hundred? No. Just 81. Which means that the deaths of 597 soldiers went without any punishment whatever.
Moreover, most of those convicted were in fact bit-part players, while the really serious killers - the snipers, the bomb-makers, the land-mine detonators, the point-blank assassins - why, they have mostly never been punished for their crimes.
The simplest way of drawing an end to the most purposeless, stupid and unproductive terrorist campaign of the 20th century in Europe is to say its crimes will not now be judicially revisited. The dead are dead, the guilty are guilty, but there can be no question of creating a legally binding hierarchy of victimhood, of rightness and wrongness. We may all have our many different opinions on this, but to incorporate such a hierarchy into a formal and lasting political agreement is merely to recreate the mythology of "Black and Tan evil, IRA saint-like and suffering", and thus generate the DNA of further troubles.
Not that Blair cares for such decent concerns. The most amoral British prime minister since Lloyd George, no infamy is too infamous for him, no indecency too indecent. Beneath the rule of this unprincipled reptile, almost anything is possible.