Fourthwrite .......................Issue No. 11

ASSESSMENT

Look who is sorry now

Had the Provisional IRA quietly retired to a tranquil spot and, following a period of undisturbed and sober reflection, decided that it would be good and proper to tell the world that it was sorry for some of the hurt it had inflicted, we might well have applauded their sincerity if not their wisdom. There is after all, something strangely odd about apologising for what you always considered justified in doing. There is quite a difference between regretting the outcome of an action and apologising for it. With the former there is the admission of a mistake honestly made and in the latter there is the tacit acceptance of guilt. Therein perhaps, lies the major impact of P.O’Neill’s July statement of apology.

Through the long years of conflict in the North, the Provisionals made many mistakes and generally made a clean breast of accepting responsibility for them. Within the terms of an intense struggle, republican ‘regrets’ were often derided by their enemies but their words do, nevertheless, stand favourable comparison with other begrudging post-operation statements of regret. Not for them the callous description of dead humanity as ‘collateral damage’. Nor indeed the brutal arrogance of feigning surprise that anyone should even question their good intentions when asking the question why. At least the Provisionals always felt obliged to answer for a stray lethal round or a mis-timed bomb.

An often ignored fact of the Provisionals’ campaign is the high casualty rate suffered by the organisation while working with time bombs. Up to twenty per cent of IRA deaths were as a result of premature explosions. The reason they chose timing devices over the much easier to construct (and hence safer for the user) ‘black-fuse bombs’ was to allow for a warning to be given to the civilian population. The innocent  people of Dresden, Baghdad, New York, Belgrade etc. might well have wished that someone as humane as  Seamus Twomey had been in charge of the hostile aircraft flying over their cities.

That the Provisionals caused innocent people to die is beyond dispute but that their campaign was any nastier or inhumane than other conflicts elsewhere is just not true. Mr.O’Neill has less reason to apologise than many military commanders who have been in charge of armed men in a combat situation. Unless that is, their war was unjustified in the first place.

Least we forget though in the rush to a new ‘Golden Age’, the Provisional IRA was born out of the very real need to protect from lethal attack, unarmed people demanding basic democratic rights. The attackers were not just a demented banditti either. They had members of the state’s forces in their ranks, and they operated with little hindrance from a local administration for which the British Government had direct responsibility. And when the British Government proved itself lamentably incapable if not downright unwilling to correct the democratic deficiencies in the northern state, it was not unreasonable for the Provisionals to deem that the political connection with London was as much in need of demolition as was the reactionary regime in Stormont.

A sizable portion of a generation gave their support to the struggle to do so. Many of them spent the best days of their youth in jail as a consequence and many of them tragically lost their lives in the course of the conflict. They were a small community that refused to accept undemocratic misrule and struggled against huge odds to ensure that they were not permanently doomed to remain marginalised and excluded. Very few of the fighting men or their supporters believed then (or believe now) that they have anything to say sorry for and certainly not in the absence of any sign of contrition from the author of the problem – Britain.

Strangely too, the leadership of the Provisional IRA does not believe in its heart that it has any cause for apology. The truth is that poor old Pat O’Neill was acting under duress when he signed the statement. He was persuaded that in order to save the career of David Trimble and therefore save the Executive and thereafter save the Good Friday Agreement and ultimately save the Sinn Fein leadership’s strategy, that he had to put his name to the paper.

The difficulty is that a substantial section of unionism will not view this step as sufficient and will now decide to enter a fresh round of demands. Already there is the clamour for a total disbanding of the Provisional IRA. This will most likely be used as a new stick with which to beat Trimble in the first instance and Sinn Fein at the end of the day. There is a real danger in this too that the UDA (and its even wilder associates) may soon begin to view the Provisionals as so supine that they and their supporters are actually vulnerable. This would really be where the wheel began to roll in the first instance.