Perhaps you understand the reasons why prisoner releases continue, even as the IRA murders, tortures, beats and expels working-class Catholic males, but for the life of me, I can't. It seems that the Irish and the British governments must perform the most extraordinary public contortions of law and morality to keep IRA-Sinn Fein aboard the rickety old steamer, SS Peace Process.
Not merely are we trying to ensure IRA-SF its place on the bridge even while its members are dragging out stokers in the engine room and flogging them or even throwing them over the side, but the police force which prevented the ship from degenerating into a festival of cannibalism is to be effectively disbanded and re-reorganised to keep SF-IRA in countenance.
Private fiefdoms
Did anyone think five years ago that the peace process would involve this? That nationalist ghettoes would become the private fiefdoms of the IRA, in which terrorists could break limbs, smash ankles and knees, pronounce edicts of exile, and even murder when the mood so took them, all without political consequence? And since SF-IRA does not feel the warm blast of genuine anger from nationalist democrats whenever it transgresses the laws of both society and of morality, is it surprising that it feels it can get away with this sort of thing? Does not the unchastised delinquent child repeatedly offend?
Has anyone in Government in Dublin ever sat down with any of the leaders of Sinn Fein and said, calmly but firmly: This is not peace. This is low-intensity political terrorism which makes a political settlement simply unachievable. No politician anywhere, least of all unionists in Northern Ireland, can come to terms with a political movement which behaves like the SA in Weimar Germany.
History tells us the consequence of admitting into the democratic system organisations which live by two sets of rules: one, the rule of the ballot box, and two, the rule of the gun. The gun will sooner or later triumph over the ballot box, and tears will inevitably follow.
Does SF-IRA fear us? Does it fear our Government? Does it fear breaking our laws? Does it fear the consequences of being imprisoned? Does it fear the wrath of the State in all its majesty? Does it fear that coercion and raw State power are qualities which democratically elected governments must resort to for the protection not merely of the lives of their peoples, but their own authority? Does SF-IRA understand the contract which exists between citizens and government: that we surrender to the state our personal capacity for violence, coercion and imprisonment, that it may employ these methods in our name?
State power
The answer to all of these questions is no. Throughout the 30 years of IRA fascist violence, the one thing it did not fear was the power and the ruthlessness of the Irish State. What on earth could it think of any state which rewards terrorism with self-catering, self-policing, open-access imprisonment for killers, gunmen and bombers?
Repeatedly, the arrogant bloodthirstiness of the IRA gave this State the pretext and the political opportunity to move against its entire organisation. A member of the Oireachtas, Senator Billy Fox, was slain in cold blood during a sectarian attack on Monaghan Protestants. Members of the Garda Siochana were murdered going about their duty. The British ambassador and his secretary were assassinated by landmine. A young officer was shot on the church steps on his wedding day in Meath. We recently passed, without public commemoration of any kind, the 20th anniversary of the butchery of the Mountbatten boating party in Mullaghmore. Senior businessmen were kidnapped and held for ransom; a soldier and a Garda recruit were cut down trying to rescue one of them.
The State responded with piecemeal measures: an arrest here, an arrest there, with maybe a few years in the extraordinary comforts of Portlaoise. Throughout this time, did any IRA man or women genuinely fear being caught by the authorities in the Republic? Did the prospect of the unmitigated, unforgiving, unbridled hostility of this State cause a terrorist a single unbroken night's sleep?
Plotted murder
Hardly. Our courts became playthings, debating chambers which could release dedicated bombers to rededicate themselves to bombing merely because an i was not dotted, a t not crossed. Dear me, how these men and women who plotted murder meticulously, who could conceive schemes as truly audacious and monumentally evil as the destruction of the entire British cabinet must have smirked when they saw how feeble and dim-witted this State was both in its own protection and in its guardianship of civilisation.
SS Peace Process is steaming towards the rocks. Is it not time to let the SF-IRA members of the crew know that should it founder - and let us hope it will not - this will not be an excuse to return to war? Is it not time to assure them that in the event of war they will be crushed without mercy by the democratically elected government of this Republic? That might just concentrate their minds on keeping the vessel on course. Ceaselessly propitiating them merely brings the rocks, and war, that much closer.