Gerry Adams' words in Conway Mill yesterday were
well-chosen and timely. Mr Adams praised the IRA for its contribution
to the peace process and asked them to direct their energies towards
political and democratic activity. We pay tribute to Gerry Adams for
his vision and his courage and we recommend his statement to the men
and women of the IRA.
The enemies of this community will greet the statement with
the usual hysterical spin – especially since an election campaign has
just been launched. But we who have lived day and daily with the
realities of life on the ground in nationalist and republican areas
realise how challenging and difficult it is to persuade the IRA to
depart the stage and join Sinn Féin in its political surge forward.
We will leave it to others to vilify and condemn the IRA – and
they will be lining up to do it. We acknowledge that, like every other
military organisation since wars were fought with sticks and stones,
the IRA has made mistakes; it has killed and it has been killed; it has
killed soldiers and it has killed civilians; it gave no quarter and in
taking on the overwhelming might of the British military establishment,
its volunteers asked for and received none.
Revisionist historians and politicians alike argue that the
IRA put back the cause of Irish unity, when the opposite is the case.
From being a cowed and terrified minority, the nationalist people have
been on a long and painful journey towards justice and equality – a
journey that could not have been made had the British and the unionists
not been made to know in no uncertain terms that if they continued to
brutalise, intimidate and humiliate this community then there were men
and women with enough courage to stand up and fight back. For five
decades since the formation of this dysfunctional little statelet,
nationalists kept their heads down, a reviled and despised minority in
a Protestant state for a Protestant people; and when human dignity
overcame fear and our people stood up, they were bludgeoned back into
the corner in a series of regular state-sponsored pogroms.
The last pogrom of note took place in the late sixties, when
the IRA was a disorganised rump. Since then, since the IRA reformed and
re-armed, the sight of Catholics fleeing their homes en masse with rows
of houses burning in the background has become a sepia-tinted image for
the history books.
The pogroms didn't stop because of a lack of will on the part
of the British or their loyalist puppets, they stopped because those
who would attack this community knew for the first time that they would
have a fight on their hands if they did.
Today, circumstances in Ireland have changed; circumstances in
the world have changed. Nationalists are no longer a marginalised
minority, but a confident and growing people with the tide of history
on their side. When once the North of Ireland was a still and fetid
backwater which the Irish, the British and the international community
pretended didn't exist and where a baleful and bigoted Stormont regime
could and did act as it pleased, it is now monitored closely by a wide
range of governments and human rights organisations. There is still
potential for occasional explosions of sectarian violence, particularly
at community interfaces, but the days of mass loyalist incursions are
over.
Similarly, while British army installations in West Belfast
bristle with spying equipment, while the RUC Special Branch tail
continues to wag the PSNI dog, while 'the police' man patrol crossings
with automatic weapons and stockpile plastic bullets in mind-boggling
quantities, condoned by those who should know better, the jackboot is
no longer on the neck of this community.
The IRA helped remove that jackboot. The job is done.
Sinn Féin's advice is good advice. It is advice that should be taken.
