I was caught between a swift intake of breath and a belly laugh, not a comfortable place to be, when I turned on the radio yesterday morning to hear Peter Sheridan, a PSNI Assistant Chief Constable, endorsing a speech by Martin McGuinness.
"As Martin McGuinness quite rightly said" Sheridan stated, "they can choose that direction that leads to more death and destruction for this community or they take their chances in the peace process like everybody else."
Sheridan is one of the province's ablest cops and he was right to support McGuinness's calls for dissident republicans groups to disband. The irony was that exactly the same arguments which McGuinness deployed at the weekend were dismissed by him when they were used against the Provisional IRA.
They had no mandate; they brought only death; they were obstacles to peace; and if they had listened to the people they would have known that their popular support was too low to sustain a successful campaign. People should support the police against these criminals. These arguments, deployed by McGuinness at the weekend, were precisely the arguments used against the Provisional IRA in the 70s and 80s.
With some editing for style, for instance substituting the "Londonderry" for "Derry", much of what McGuinness said could have been passed for a News Letter editorial circa 1980.
When McGuinness led it, the Provisional IRA brushed aside its lack of a mandate by claiming it had inherited the mantle of legitimate government of Ireland and the right to wage war in what Senator Martin Mansergh called a "sort of apostolic succession" passed down from the war of independence.
It was like the divine right of kings – a system which allowed leadership to be inherited without any necessity for popular consent. Like that system, it spawned dynastic disputes with rival claims to legitimacy.
There are now a number of groups claiming to be the IRA Army Council and the legitimate government of Ireland. For instance, the Continuity IRA claims their mandate from General Tom Maguire, a leader of the old IRA who died in 1993 but not until he had passed the parcel of republican legitimacy to CIRA in 1986. When Republican Sinn Féin, CIRA's political counterpart, commemorates his death in Mayo this Saturday and will, no doubt, take the opportunity to argue that they are the only real republicans.
To an outsider these claims to legitimacy are absurd, like arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The more serious side is that they are accompanied by attempts to escalate CIRA's campaign because the role CIRA claims to have inherited commits it to pursue its aims by force of arms. It is the claim of legitimacy that dissidents believe sets them apart from criminals.
One factor undermining these arguments is the continued existence of the IRA Army Council. If it steps down, then there will inevitably be a scramble amongst dissidents to claim its authority.
As the Independent Monitoring Commission has noted, the IRA Army Council has already been useful for folding up the other parts of the IRA and organising decommissioning. There is an argument that it should be kept around in some form to make it more difficult for anyone else to claim its title.
For instance, Ian Paisley proposed, on November 24, 2004 and again last year, that the IRA could become an "old boy's association." This would keep its members together and discourage defections to the dissidents.
The Army Council, perhaps with a new name, is likely to be the core of such a structure. In the meantime, there are a number of things that they could do to build confidence and pave the way for the devolution of policing and justice.
They could officially announce that the war is over and that political methods have superseded "armed struggle". They could amend the IRA's Green Book, which sets out the rules of engagement to reflect this new state of affairs, and they could directly deny the legitimacy of other groups styling themselves the IRA as McGuinness has done. They endorse the new policing structures.
Such steps would put republican legitimacy beyond use. It would be sealed up in an old comrades association which could devote itself to the organisation of commemorations and the welfare of its former supporters.
