Sir, - In your issue of May 3rd, Security Correspondent, Jim Cusack, wrote that the IRA was regarded as being responsible for the murder of Joseph Foran in Finglas in February of this year. Mr Cusack also wrote that on April 18th gardai in Dublin had prevented an IRA attempt to murder another person in south Dublin.
In a separate article on the same day, Suzanne Breen reported that the IRA was believed responsible for an incident in which a 22-year-old man was attacked in front of his girlfriend and four-month-old daughter. He was beaten, shot four times and then beaten again, resulting in a fractured skull.
Despite similar attacks carried out almost daily by mainstream republican and loyalist paramilitaries, both governments have continued to insist for the last three years that "the ceasefires are intact".
If the cease-fires are "intact" what conclusions can we draw? Is it the case that the governments believe that the IRA is perfectly entitled to beat, shoot, intimidate and murder Catholics, and that the UVF/UFF are entitled to beat, shoot, intimidate and murder Protestants, without breaching the concept of a "complete and unequivocal cease-fire" outlined in the Good Friday Agreement? It would be helpful if the governments had the honesty to admit that this was their position.
This policy of explicitly turning a blind eye to widespread and manifest violence is one of the factors undermining the moral integrity of the Agreement.
The Alliance Party is unapologetic in taking the view that working-class Catholic males should not be shot or beaten. We believe that Protestant workingclass males should not be shot or beaten. Given that the current political process has become so distorted that responsible Governments are acquiescing in systematic, serious and sometimes murderous violence, it is hardly a surprise to find the Good Friday Agreement on the verge of collapse. - Yours, etc.
Philip J. McGarry, Alliance Party, Dorchester Park, Belfast 9.