At one level David Trimble's link between an inquiry into Bloody Sunday and one into the Dublin's Government's role in the creation of the Provisional IRA is simply disingenuous. As Vincent Browne argued the other day, there is no evidence that the then Government intended aggression when it tried to supply arms and money to nationalist "defence groups" in the North in 1970, which - rightly or wrongly - feared attacks by loyalists and/or the RUC.
Dublin in part shared those fears, knowing nothing whatever about the deeper and darker ambitions which were already stirring in the souls of certain nationalists, and which were captured perfectly by one Co Derry solicitor who remarked to me in 1970: "There's going to be a 25-year war, and when it's over, this'll be a wasteland. But at least it'll be our wasteland."
Monumental blunders
The perverse and nihilistic ambition to create a wasteland and then inherit it became the core strategy of the Provisional IRA - though very sensibly, the leaders of the wasteland tendency back then did not consult the electorate on this. Instead, they got on with their war; and, aided by monumental blunders and a pig-headed stupidity from the British, they were able to entrench themselves within the nationalist community, where they will probably remain into the indefinite future.
But how much did the policies of the Dublin Government assist the IRA? Even though David Trimble is probably misguided to demand an inquiry into the background of the Arms Trial, for there is probably nothing there now but titillatory tittle-tattle, he has a right to ask and we have a right to wonder: did the Government of Ireland do enough to suppress the IRA in 1971-1973, and again in the late 1980s? Was the Government guilty of the sin of omission, and thereby in part morally responsible for atrocities perpetrated by the IRA? And how well did the Special Criminal Court execute its duties against the forces of terrorism?
These are questions to which the unionist community, which reeled under the assault of the IRA in 1971-72, have every right to have an answer (as nationalists have on the criminally inert response of the British government to the loyalist terrorist assault on nationalists at that time). Some vital, incomprehensible nerve was touched in the unionist community by Bloody Sunday. Not a single unionist in Stormont was moved to utter a word of sympathy or regret. Apart from bloodthirsty savages, like the late and unlamented pederastic killer John McKeague (who called it Good Sunday), the political and moral consequences of Bloody Sunday filled unionists with fear.
Victimhood shared
So if it is right for us to ask questions which, if properly posed, will go right into the heart of the British establishment - and it is - is it wrong for others, who do not feel as we do about Bloody Sunday, to ask about the supinity, the cynicism, the dilatoriness which permitted the IRA to flourish in the Borderlands of the Republic? Victimhood over the past quarter-century is not an unsliced cake which has been passed into the undisputed possession of Northern nationalists. The cake was thick, and was cut many ways; we should all be asking how the cake came to be cut the way it was.
The Government cracked down on republican terrorism - with the Heavy Gang, whose muscular reputation overshadows its considerable successes - only when the IRA outreached itself in affairs in the Republic. The dismal truth is that in 1972 Ted Heath was able to tell Jack Lynch of IRA training camps in the Republic which the Government had permitted to remain in existence. The Special Criminal Court hardly paralysed the IRA with terror: when Martin McGuinness was caught with 500lbs of explosives in Donegal and boasted of his IRA membership to the Special Criminal Court, he was sentenced to just six months' imprisonment. When the IRA arms smuggling vessel the Claudia was seized, the crew was let go home, "with a kick up the transom".
Meanwhile, a cross-Border campaign of almost genetic selectivity was weeding out loyalist families in certain parts of Fermanagh and South Armagh. Who remembers the UDR woman Margaret Hearst, murdered in her caravan in South Armagh, her baby beside her? Who remembers her father, Ross, who was not even in the security forces, who was murdered at Ballybay some weeks later? Who remembers the massacre of Protestants at Tullyvallen Orange Hall?
Billy Wright
We all do. For Tullyvallen begat the murder of the Reavey brothers by the UVF. The murder of the Reaveys begat the murder of eleven Protestants near the Border by the IRA. That Whitecross massacre turned an amiable young local Protestant, Billy Wright, who used to play Gaelic football, into the butcher of Armagh, King Rat. His death last Christmas . . . ah, but need I go on?
So where are the clean hands? Bloody Sunday was a sin of commission by the British Government and its agents. But along the Border, there was a Bloody Sunday of Protestants on the instalment plan commissioned by the IRA. Some of those instalments, such as Enniskillen, were almost Bloody Sunday-sized. But the sin of omission - through inertia, political cowardice, insensitivity - by the Government of this Republic made it possible for the long Bloody Sunday of Border Protestants to occur. We should be not surprised that if we want questions answered, so too do the unionist people of Northern Ireland.