The murder of Ronan Kerr, the 25-year-old PSNI officer who was buried last week, did not have the desired effect. Instead, the killing seems destined to go down as another watershed in the decline of physical force republicanism.
It was a vicious dying kick, though possibly not the last, from an ideology that passed its sell-by date in the previous century. The physical force tradition, with roots stretching back to the 17th century, is now reduced to a zombie ideology. It runs around like a headless chicken, spreading blood and panic, but with no brain, no strategy and no future. It is dead but it won't lie down.
Last week, a caller to a phone-in radio programme made this point in an arresting and original way. The anonymous woman told of how a relative was killed by the British army during the Troubles and how she had disliked the RUC when they carried out searches. Now she was encouraging her son to join the police. She predicted the murder of Constable Kerr would be to the PSNI what Bloody Sunday was to the Provisional IRA: a recruiting sergeant. Catholics will flock to join up.
She called for the reintroduction of 50/50 Catholic/Protestant recruitment to the force, which ended last month, to facilitate the expected influx. The 50/50 recruitment policy, whereby every Protestant entering the police service had to be matched by a Catholic, caused resentment among unionists but helped boost Catholic numbers up from 8% of the force in the last days of the RUC to 30% today.
Together with the ending of the oath of allegiance to the Queen once taken by police recruits, it has resulted in a transformation in the police culture in Northern Ireland. There is a GAA [Gaelic Athletic Association] team in the PSNI. Nationalists and republicans in the ranks are welcomed as the fulfilment of a diversity strategy, not regarded as a fifth column.
The 50/50 recruitment was resented by unionists because it sometimes meant that higher-scoring Protestant recruits lost out. The statistics show that only 39% of applicants for police jobs were Catholic and 61% Protestant, so the scales were tilted in favour of Catholics to speed up the transformation in policing. It was worthwhile, because Catholic police recruits have been targets for republicans since the days of Dan Breen. In fact, the IRA's first victims were James McDonnell and Patrick O'Connell, two Irish-born Catholic RIC officers, killed in an ambush led by Breen and Seán Treacy at Soloheadbeg, near Tipperary town, in January 1919.
The IRA's stated objective was to "requisition" a consignment of quarry gelignite in the name of the Dáil, which was meeting for the first time that day. It was claimed the police officers were shot for resisting, but Breen revealed the true agenda in his memoirs. "We took the action deliberately, having thought over the matter and talked it over between us," he wrote. "Treacy had stated to me the only way of starting a war was to kill someone, and we wanted to start a war, so we intended to kill some of the police whom we looked upon as the foremost and most important branch of the enemy forces ... the only regret we had following the ambush was that there were only two policemen in it instead of the six we had expected."
This mindset, this tradition, was what lay behind the murder of Kerr. It also lay behind the killing of Constable Stephen Carroll in 2009, and behind the bomb which maimed Constable Peadar Heffron, a noted gaelgeoir and the captain of the PSNI GAA team, in January 2010.
With such actions, dissident republicans, like Breen before them, are trying to start a war and, as a secondary objective, to isolate the police from the nationalist community. The Provos did the same thing during the Troubles. Catholic police officers, such as Superintendent Barney Fitzpatrick from Andersonstown who is now retired and standing as an assembly candidate for Alliance in East Londonderry, were unable to visit their extended families. The fear of becoming a target if you returned home did as much, or more, than the canteen culture of the RUC to keep Catholic recruitment down.
That is what the dissidents are hoping for but, as in the analogy of the headless chicken, they are going through the motions with little hope of getting anywhere. When Breen and Treacy struck, a majority of Irish people had voted for Sinn Féin and independence from Britain. When that was denied, it provided the classic justification for armed conflict, the flouting of a popular mandate. Today, the dissidents are the ones flouting the clear mandate of the Irish people, delivered by an overwhelming majority in referenda north and south in favour of the Good Friday agreement.
It would be difficult, even for a fanatic, to frame a justification for the murder in terms of democracy, fulfilling the will of the people, or the pursuit of freedom.
The task of composing a claim that does not sound overtly fascist has been made even more difficult by the public reaction to the death. In the previous century, the GAA barred police officers from membership, and some northern GAA clubs formed escorts at the IRA funerals of former players. Now the tables have been turned and a GAA club, the Beragh Red Knights, formed a joint guard of honour with the PSNI at the funeral of its member Kerr. Mickey Harte, the iconic Tyrone GAA manager, helped to carry the coffin.
The dissidents' claims are as absurd and outdated as if they were fighting to restore the divine right of kings. The quarrel they are pursing is so long over that nobody even remarked on the fact that Sinn Féin called for information to be passed to the police, and welcomed arms finds. That is now routine.
It inspired communal pride when Peter Robinson, Martin McGuinness, the first and deputy first ministers of Northern Ireland respectively, Gerry Adams and Enda Kenny walked into the requiem mass of a police officer together.
It was first time that a DUP leader had attended mass and the first time that a serving taoiseach had attended a northern police funeral.
Perhaps remembering the propaganda republicans extracted when the erstwhile British prime minister Margaret Thatcher changed her schedule in response to IRA killings, the Sinn Féin leader Adams refused to cancel the launch of the Sinn Féin election campaign last Monday. "The more we thought about it and discussed it the more important it seemed to us that the political process cannot become a hostage to the unrepresentative group which murdered Constable Kerr," he said.
The dissidents' options are narrowing. The reaction to the Omagh bombing of 1998 forced the Real IRA to call a ceasefire and showed the perpetrators that bombs which killed civilians were counterproductive. Last week's events made the same point about the murder of police officers.
When the man who planned it looks in the mirror he should ask himself whether he has now become the very thing he once believed he was fighting: the oppressor who sends young men to early graves and lonely prison cells in an effort to bend the Irish people to his will.
