When all is said and done, the question remains: What will South Armagh do? Is it possible that the IRA, undefeated and awash with the blood and the body-parts of the men it has killed, will return to the slumbering quiescence to which it invariably returns when violence is done? Or will it feel, as it gazes on its red letter-boxes, and on the unopened letters from Her Majesty's Inland Revenue, that it has not yet achieved a proper return on its investment?
That South Armagh has produced the most effective guerilla/terrorist army in the world is beyond doubt, as Toby Harnden's recently published book Bandit Country (Hodder and Stoughton) confirms. But to what purpose? With what moral authority? And to what degree was laxity by the security forces on this side of the Republic vital in enabling South Armagh to run its war?
Unpopular question
This last is not a popular question to ask in the Republic; it reeks of treason, of pro-unionism, of pro-Britishness. Yet to make such judgments on any question rather than trying to examine the question properly, to discover what the full answers might be, is coercive philistinism: it is to allow the mountebank to triumph over the critic, the mob orator to drown the doubts of the sceptic. Questions have to be asked.
Question One. Did a Garda officer assist the IRA to murder Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan of the RUC 10 years ago? According to Toby Harnden, former Northern Ireland correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, there is technical evidence that a garda contacted the IRA while the two RUC men were on a cross-Border liaison visit. The RUC Special Branch received a similar report. Detective Inspector "L", formerly of the Garda Special Branch, confirmed this. "I'm afraid the leak came from a guard. Bob Buchanan was a lovely, lovely man, and those murders were an absolute tragedy. The fact that one of my colleagues was involved made the whole thing 10 times worse."
It doesn't need to be 10 times worse; it was bad enough as it was. The two men - who were, unbelievably, unarmed so as to comply with our firearms laws - were ambushed as they crossed the Border back into Northern Ireland. Buchanan, the driver, was shot through the head. Breen, wounded, staggered out of the car, waving a white handkerchief in surrender. One of the gunmen walked up to him, put a Ruger pistol to his head, and blew off the top of his skull.
Maybe there's a song to celebrate this victory for Ireland. I don't know. Nor do I know what happened to the IRA mole in An Garda Siochana. Was he put through the mill? Is he still on the force? Or is he now on a State pension, chuckling as he nightly downs his whiskey?
Provisional IRA
And there are other, more serious institutional questions, which go right to the heart of the way this State opposed terrorism, most specifically the Provisional IRA. We have seen in recent months an uncompromisingly vigorous approach by the Garda to the Real IRA; why was such an approach not taken towards the Provisionals? Was it because there was not the political will? And is the absence of political will to combat murder not passive complicity with that murder?
We were told repeatedly during the years of violence that it was almost impossible to police the Border. But, as an RUC Special Branch officer observed, how policeable the Border suddenly became when the BSE crisis arrived, and the Garda crackdown meant that nothing moved in either direction without authorisation. Was the protection of the national beef herd of greater political priority than the suppression of violence in the North? That is the question. What is the answer?
Bandit Country asks other questions. It describes an incident in which three British soldiers lay dying. A fourth, uninjured soldier sought help from a priest, who turned and walked away. Ten minutes later another priest walked past the bodies without stopping. Later still, a priest, asked to attend to the men, also turned and walked away. Toby Harnden charitably declared that the British army officers who reported this could not realise the difficult position the priests found themselves in. He is kinder than I would be. Walking away from the dying in order to maintain your position in the community is giving the mob Barabbas.
Political primitivism
The military prowess of the IRA in South Armagh is probably a matter of great pride to republicans. One hundred and twenty soldiers have died there. So too have 42 policemen. So too have 75 civilians, often in unspeakable ways. And to be sure, the IRA in the area is extremely efficient, often daring, and sometimes spectacularly successful. Yet these are the skills and this is the culture of political primitivism. Heathens worship at the shrine of the tribal warrior cult, and that is what the IRA in South Armagh is.
It is not simply a matter of expressing opposition to British rule; you are perfectly free to do this by voice and vote. That is not the purpose of IRA violence in South Armagh. Its purpose is the elevation of the barbaric over the civil, of the pagan over the Christian.
Faced with that contest, did we in the Republic do all we might have done? Again I say: that is the question. What is the answer?