As any public relations flack can testify, issuing bad news late on a Friday night is
a tried and tested way to minimise the impact. If the IRA thought that
by choosing last Friday evening to announce that it had expelled three
of the IRA gang responsible for the brutal stabbing of Short Strand
man, Robert McCartney would ensure limited coverage, then it was badly
mistaken.
The IRA and Sinn Féin leadership were under pressure as
rarely before to surrender the suspected cuprits to justice and to
satisfy the demands of the dead man's family, his sisters in
particular. The McCartney family were all Sinn Féin supporters and came
from the Short Strand, the isolated Catholic enclave whose armed
defence from Loyalist attack by the infant Provisional IRA in 1970
became a metaphor for the protective role the organisation claimed was
the reason it had come into being.
Abandoning the McCartney's by refusing to give up at least some of the
killers would have been tantamount to denying its own history and
origins and deserting the people who had sustained the IRA and Sinn
Féin for more than three decades. It would have been the beginning of
the end for the Provisionals. Gerry Adams and his more astute
colleagues finally realised that and acted.
It remains to be seen whether this action will satisfy everyone. At
least six men, all IRA members, were involved in the knifing of Robert
McCartney and his friend Brendan Devine but only half that number have
been forced out of the IRA. Of particular significance will be the fate
of the most senior of the IRA gang, a figure who is part of the
organisation's national operational leadership. Was he included in the
expulsion or was that confined to lower level members only?
The option of expelling the alleged killers was always open to the IRA
leadership and there was a compelling precedent. In January 1989 an
entire active service unit was stood down and disarmed by the IRA
leadership after its members had shot dead a former RUC reservist,
Harry Keys from Fermanagh who was visiting his girlfriend in Ballintra,
Co Donegal.
The gunmen fired 23 bullets into his body and were heard whooping and
cheering as they drove off. The killing caused outrage throughout
Ireland and led to the expulsion of the unit. Having expelled members
for killing a former policeman the IRA could hardly avoid doing the
same to people who stood accused of butchering one of their own
supporters.
The power to expel members in such circumstances is derived from the
IRA's own General Army Orders, a set of rules and regulations which
govern internal discipline. Order number 13 says that any IRA volunteer
who brings the IRA into disrepute is liable to immediate expulsion and
it is difficult to think of anything more likely to do that than
knifing a man to death in a bar-room brawl and then using IRA resources
to cover up the deed.
The immediate effect of the expulsions will be to release the
witnesses, said to number over 70, from any fear of reprisals if they
go to the PSNI to give statements. They can now do that in the
knowledge that they will not be informing on IRA men but on ordinary
civilians suspected of having played a part in murder.
The implicit message in all of this is one that is full of
significance. The IRA leadership knows full well that the effect of its
action will be to allow the PSNI to prosecute the case in court and
that this process will do much to enhance the PSNI's credibility and
acceptability in the Short Strand and other parts of Nationalist
Belfast. Would the IRA have allowed this to happen if it intended to
forever boycott and shun that force? This is a small but momentous step
towards acceptance of the North's new policing arrangements.
The IRA action also settles another issue, that of growing speculation
about a split between IRA hardliners and the Sinn Féin pragmatists on
the Army Council. This is a decision that will benefit Sinn Féin, not
least by removing any threat of electoral damage, but if there really
was a split and the hardliners were in the ascendancy, as some
observers have claimed, it never would have happened. Had they been in
charge the IRA hardliners would have insisted on standing with their
men and hunkering down for the storm. If anything the decision
demonstrates that it is the Sinn Féin element of the IRA leadership
which is calling the shots.
Having said that the IRA and its political spokesmen had to be dragged,
almost kicking and screaming to this decision and had it not been for
the persistence and courage of Robert McCartney's sisters it is likely
this would never have happened.
This carries an important message about the way this IRA and Sinn Féin
leadership behaves and it has lessons for the wider problems caused to
the peace process by the Nortrhern Bank robbery. Without intense and
unrelenting pressure that leadership will resist making any move at all
in the hope that it if it sits long enough something will happen to
improve fortunes. But if the pressure is applied strongly and
resolutely enough that leadership will move.
As the Irish and British governments look forward to new peace talks
and the hope that they can persuade the IRA to disband, decommission
fully and abandon criminality it is a lesson they would be foolish to
overlook.
