Sir, - It was good to see the report by Jim Cusack (The Irish Times, February 2nd) refuting the IRA's claim to be the defender of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland. His figure of some 400 Catholics killed by the IRA between 1969 and 1999 (divided roughly equally between civilians on the one hand and "involved" Catholics - either in the security forces or in the IRA itself - on the other) shows up the IRA as the biggest killer of Catholics next to the loyalist terrorists, well ahead of the British Army (138 Catholic civilians killed), the RUC (26 Catholic civilians killed) and the UDR (3).
Reminders of this kind are a necessary corrective at a time when republican spokesmen are attempting to get away with the most outrageous rewriting of history, and - because of sensitivities over the peace process - are going unchallenged as they do so. The aim is to justify a refusal to decommission by portraying the IRA "armed struggle" as a war to defend and win fair treatment for Catholics, rather than as what it was, a squalid and unwinnable war against the unionist community.
In the past week alone the following gems have issued from republican mouthpieces on radio and TV: "We have just spent 30 years fighting to get the vote" (Gerry Adams); "the RUC, the UDR and the RIR have been killing nationalists down the years" (Gerry Kelly); and "IRA guns have been silent for five years" (Kelly again). None of these assertions was questioned by the interviewers.
Thanks to the monumental work Lost Lives, edited by David McKittrick, we now have a clear idea of the arithmetic of violence. Republicans killed 303 RUC personnel along with 176 of the UDR. The reverse roll was 15 IRA/INLA killed by the RUC, five by the UDR. Many in the South were unaware of this dripfeed of assassination by republicans, since single deaths often became mere footnotes in the media.
These figures make very clear which side was on the offensive. As to the recent "silence" of the guns, the relatives of John Jeffries and Inan Ul-haq Bashir, killed at Canary Wharf, of the community policemen Roland Graham and David Johnston, cruelly gunned down in Lurgan a mere two-and-a-half years ago, and of the 32 other people killed by the IRA since August 1994 may not share the Kelly assessment.
Those in the South who cling to the myth that the republicans were really frustrated power-sharers all along should take a look at what happened during a crucial period, the 147 days over which the 1974 power-sharing Executive functioned. Nothing better illustrates Jim Cusack's thesis. This was a time when a group professing to want equality of treatment for Catholics might have been expected, at the very least, to hold back and adopt a wait-and-see approach. Instead, as well as stoking the anger of the unionist community by a concerted bombing campaign against Protestant businesses, the IRA murdered eight RUC men, five UDR man, five Protestant civilians and 10 Catholic civilians, while failing to prevent the murders of 36 Catholic civilians by loyalist paramilitaries.
But then they had signalled their attitude well in advance by branding the SDLP as "collaborators" and by launching a gun attack on Austin Currie's home. Their New Year's message, issued just as Gerry Fitt and Brian Faulkner prepared to take their places at a power-sharing Cabinet table, was: "We look forward with confidence to 1974 as a year in which British rule in Ireland shall be destroyed and the curse of alien power banished from our land for all time." - Yours, etc.
Dermot Meleady, Dublin 3.