The patriot game: the terrorism in Northern Ireland will continue, until the politicians dare to stop it - and from

National Review, April 26, 1993 by Conor Cruise O'Brien

The terrorism in (and from) Northern Ireland will continue, until the politicians dare to stop it.

A series of peace rallies is going on in the Republic of Ireland, beginning with a rally on March 28 that filled O'Connell Street in Dublin with an estimated twenty thousand demonstrators. The rallies are directed against political violence in general, but specifically and primarily against the IRA's armed struggle against Britain in the name of the people of Ireland.

The demonstrations were precipitated by the previous week's IRA explosions at a shopping center in Warrington, Cheshire, which cost the Eves of two children. The Irish media initially played the story down, but it was forced to the front by a great wave of popular indignation. For the public, Warrington became the potent symbol of a cruel and futile "war," waged in our name without any mandate from us. For a long time now - and especially since the Armistice Day bombing at Enniskillen in November 1987 - the IRA has had very little support in the Republic. In the last general election its political front - Sinn Fein - won less than 2 per cent of the popular vote. The general rejection of the IRA is now more articulate and insistent than ever before.

That is in the Republic. In Northern Ireland - which is part of the United Kingdom, by the wish of a majority of its people - the situation is significantly different. About one-third of the Catholic minority there regularly vote for Sinn Fein. Many of the remaining Catholics live in a condition of ambivalent neutrality between the IRA and the security forces, and in some fear of both. The Protestant (Unionist, Loyalist) majority there is strongly hostile to the IRA, from which its members have been under lethal attack for more than twenty years now.

At this moment, while the peace movement in the Republic is at its most vocal, the situation in Northern Ireland is increasingly approximating civil war: a civil war which reaches out into other parts of the United Kingdom, as in Warrington, and threatens to spill out into the Republic also. The Protestant backlash, long threatened, long discounted, and only sporadically manifested, is now a grim and sustained reality. Last year in Northern Ireland, more Catholics were killed by Protestants than vice versa: contrary to the previously prevailing pattern. The new pattern continues this year. Immediately after Warrington, Loyalist paramilitaries murdered six Catholics (one of them a known IRA activist) in Northern Ireland, most of them at Castlerock, Co. Derry. The peace movement in the Republic, laudable and welcome as it is in itself, will not end the smoldering civil war in Northern Ireland. What is needed there is an even-handed clamp-down on the godfathers of the paramilitary terrorists in both communities. Unless that happens soon, the drift toward general civil war, in the whole island of Ireland, may become irreversible.

So far, in the aftermath of Warrington and Castlerock, the responses of the whole political establishment were notable for their failure to address themselves to the primacy of security.

From Northern Ireland Secretary Sir Patrick Mayhew, from Irish Foreign Minister Dick Spring, from John Hume, leader of the SDLP (Social Democratic and Labour Party) constitutional nationalists, we had a combination of messages which has become nauseatingly familiar. Ritual condemnation of each atrocity is followed by the claim that each such deed "Iends urgency" to the resumption of talks and to "the quest for a political solution in Northern Ireland."

Such statements represent a flight from the harsh reality of terrorism and the need to fight it here and now.

The dominant political wisdom, during more than twenty years of unrelenting terrorism, is that patient negotiations will eventually lead to a political solution, which in turn will "isolate the men of violence" and so render them harmless.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 was supposed to have benign effects of this kind. It didn't. IRA violence became even more audacious and spectacular, and the Loyalists, feeling themselves betrayed, prepared for their own campaign of violence, which erupted last year.

Spiraling Violence

Indeed, the quest for a non-existent political solution in Northern Ireland actually stimulates the violence by playing on the conflicting hopes and fears in both communities.

The reality is that Northern Ireland is ruled directly from London, a state of affairs that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. It is not ideal but it is the only framework that both communities there find tolerable. Unionists don't care for it but far prefer it to any form of United Ireland. Nationalists don't care for it but far prefer it to any form of majority rule (i.e., by Unionists) in Northern Ireland.

But if direct rule is to be respected and not merely tolerated it has to discharge unflinchingly the most basic responsibility of any government - the protection of the lives and limbs of law-abiding citizens. That has to be done in a concrete way, by an adequate response to terrorism as it is committed. No realistic government can leave these matters to be attended to by some future arrangements, which are to be imagined as possibly resulting from long-bogged-down talks between present adversaries.