Can the IRA break with its past?

The IRA says that it has turned its back on bombs and guns. That's two steps forward, but be prepared for one step backwards.

Have they gone away or haven’t they? This is the question in the minds of a lot of people in Britain and Ireland in the aftermath of the IRA’s declaration that its armed struggle to expel the British from Ireland had ended. For some it is the endgame. For others it is more of the old ambiguity. Lurking in the back of our memories is the fear that we will again hear someone reminding us -- as Gerry Adams did in the aftermath of the IRA 1994 cessation of violence --“They haven’t gone away you know”.

The truth is, they haven’t, and they have been here before. They promised a “complete cessation of violence” 11 years ago. What we got was an improvement -- a great improvement -- but it was far from a complete cessation of violence. Perhaps it is inevitable that this peace process is always going to be a matter of two steps forward and one step backwards.

Over the past week we have had two different kinds of analysis of what has happened. The two governments of Britain and Ireland have taken the positive approach. British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that this was an event of “unparalleled magnitude”. The Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, was somewhat more guarded and welcomed it as an outcome of what the governments have been working towards since the 1994 ceasefire.

On the negative side of the spectrum, Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionists, now the majority party among Protestant voters, greeted the statement with characteristic scepticism and anticipates that the IRA will again “revert to type” as it has done after previous “historic” statements. Moderate Unionist Sir Reg Empey says that only time will tell whether or not we have a cause for celebration. This in fact is the only sensible position. While the positive spin of the two governments and Sinn Fein is understandable -- and even desirable as a way of building a positive expectation -- it would be naïve to think that serious political work has not still to be done to make this opportunity into a stable reality.

If the danger of reverting to type by the mainstream IRA -- even on a one step backwards basis -- is one source of fear, the other is the classical danger of the famed Irish “split”. This is sometimes jokingly said to be the first item on the agenda of any new Irish political party. But in this case it is no joke. The single greatest atrocity of the 36 years of violent strife on the island of Ireland was the bombing in Omagh with its death toll of 31 -- including unborn twins in their mother’s womb -- by the “Real” IRA. This small but lethal organisation had split off from Sinn Fein-IRA after the 1994 ceasefire.

This is now the greatest fear. If the past year has shown us anything, it is that the IRA may not have the solid command structure that it would like us to think it has. The Northern Bank heist in Belfast earlier this year, at about £26 million, the biggest in British history, and the murder by IRA men of a Catholic, Robert McCartney, in a pub brawl -- offer ample evidence of rather loose discipline. No one has yet been brought to justice for the McCartney murder . The real reason for this is that Sinn Fein is unable to overcome the opposition within its own grass roots to the idea of delivering the perpetrators of this crime to justice. Given this situation it is likely that if dissidents within the organisation have a mind to carry on the “war” on their own authority there may be little that Sinn Fein-IRA’s leadership can do about it.

It is for this reason that there are vehement protests from Unionists this week -- and grave misgivings by others -- that the dismantling of security towers and a scaling down of British army regiments is premature. We can only hope that the gestures being made by the British Government to reciprocate the gestures in the IRA’s statement do not blow up in their faces.

So the degree of euphoria which greeted the IRA’s statement in its first 24 hours has subsided. Everyone is now getting back to a more familiar routine of living in hope, waiting and pushing for positive responses, avoiding going too far too fast for fear of leaving a dangerous rump in its rear. It is all very tiresome but it may be the only way that we will eventually arrive at a lasting peace.

Michael Kirke is a Dublin journalist.