We passed a couple of anniversaries this spring which went largely unmarked, though they should have been commemorated as the stark and terrible indicators they once were.
One was the 30th anniversary of the murders of Fusilier John McCaig, aged 17, his brother Joseph, aged 18, and their fellow soldier, Dougald McCaughey, aged 23.
Two months later, in May 1971, a suitcase bomb was left in Springfield Road police station. It blew up, killing Sgt Michael Willets. It probably would have killed two children in the station with their mother, but he gave his life rescuing them. A child being pushed in his pram across the road was blown through a shop window, and was not to emerge from his coma for many months afterwards. Eighteen other civilians were injured.
Neither abominable event - the murder of three off-duty unarmed soldiers, nor the deliberate jeopardisation of innocent civilians, including numerous children, in order to kill a soldier - caused the communities within which the IRA was operating to eject it. Indeed, there was a widespread acceptance that a war was beginning, and that in war, terrible things happen; so be it.
Ethos of war
The important thing to remember here is the speed with which first the republican community, and later loyalists, were able to acclimatise themselves to the culture and the ethos of terrorist war. Who could have thought, the previous year, that any republican could cold-bloodedly murder three boys as they urinated on a country lane, or blow up children in order to kill a single sergeant?
I don't believe either the culture or the ethos which could permit a full war to resume exist in Northern Ireland at the moment. But who is to say that the right conditions might not be swiftly manufactured by design or by accident? All we can do is to ensure that this State has taken whatever precautions are needed to rigorously repress terrorism; because whatever might be said about the actions of the Republic over the years after 1971, rigour is not a word which comes readily to mind.
How, for example, is it possible that some 30 years after the war actually began in the North, as events in Abbeylara last year showed, the Garda S∅ochβna did not have a special anti-terrorist team dedicated to dealing with hostage-holders? What was going on in the force itself and in the Department of Justice, with the kidnap of Lord and Lady Donoughmore, Tiede Herrema, Ben Dunne and Don Tidy in the 1970s and 1980s, that by the end of the 1990s we had still not got a unit dedicated to coping with the practical and psychological problems of sieges?
We might also ask: how it is possible that with a completely straight face we demand the full and unvarnished truth about Bloody Sunday, even as members of the Garda S∅ochβna seem determined to avoid giving evidence about the Abbeylara shooting to an Oireachteas sub-committee? What is sauce for the paragoose is clearly not sauce for the garda-gander.
Legal protection
Equally, we might wonder how it is that we have not yet created the legal protection for members of units such as the Garda National Surveillance Unit which would allow them to keep their identity secret. We know that last week, the trial of three men - whom the Special Criminal Court has since specifically declined to declare are innocent - collapsed after the court ruled that the coded numbers of the garda∅ involved in the arrest should be made known to the defence.
We need have no doubt that the court did right by law; what is perfectly amazing is that, after 30 years of terrorism, the law could be in such a ramshackle and porous condition that the security of brave and dedicated members of the Garda S∅ochβna could be remotely compromised by court hearings.
And what are we to make of the Special Criminal Court allowing an electrician, Thomas Ryan, who at the time of his offence was also a serving corporal in the FCA, to walk free on charges of stealing 87 sticks of gelignite from the quarry where he worked for use by the Continuity IRA? He betrayed his duty to his country twice over, both as citizen and as a member of the security forces. After the theft, he was arrested by garda∅, when he owned up to his crime.
He said: "I realise I have made a huge mistake and I'm very sorry." I'll bet he was, now he'd been caught; but he wasn't sorry enough to give himself up.
And what did this serving member of the security forces think the Continuity IRA was going to do with the gelignite? Make fireworks with it? Or do another Michael Willets? More like the latter, actually, as he confessed to the court, which found him guilty of possessing gelignite with intent to enable another person to endanger life.
Suspended sentence
But because he had owned up to the theft when confronted by garda∅, and because he'd "attracted huge support from every section of the community", the Special Criminal Court gave him a suspended sentence of eight years, and our gallant FCA Republican Sinn FΘiner walked free.
So is this it? As the materials for war in the North are being assembled once again, this State is going to strike abject fear into the quaking hearts of terrorists everywhere by creating laws which make undercover garda∅ who have done their duty disclose their identity, and which allow suspended prison sentences to be given to members of the security forces who have comprehensively betrayed their country (but are popular locally)?
Is that it? By God, I bet that's got the CIRA and RIRA trembling.