There is no moral equivalence – that's what David Trimble said two weeks ago. He was responding to Bertie Ahern's suggestion that while the IRA was at fault for not saying the war is over, the UUP was at fault for the repeated "nonsense" of Assembly collapse. Mr Trimble didn't like that. An odious comparison, he indicated. Republicans use guns to support their political views, the UUP does not. "There is no moral equivalence." Clearly, then, if we're to find true equivalence, we'll have to go where the guns are.
First stop, the British army. No organised group on this island has anything like the number of guns the British Army has. Even were they to cut back to their promised level of 5,000 men, they'd still have 5,000 guns and no doubt a few spares for back-up. So who are the British army pointing their guns at? Anyone who tries to detach the north of Ireland from the union with Britain. Put it another way: British army weaponry supports the unionist political argument. You may think it's quite proper they do so or you may think it appalling, but that's what they're here for, that's what they do. And to rephrase Gertrude Stein: a gun is a gun is a gun. Moral equivalence? Bet your life.
Who else has guns? Well the police of course. There are some 7,000 PSNI officers, each with a weapon which s/he has been trained to use. Even though 50-50 recruitment of Catholics and Protestants has begun, it's safe to say that the PSNI is still well over 90% Protestant which, like it or lump it, means over 90% unionist.
There are those who say the PSNI shouldn't be brought into a discussion like this, since they are a strictly non-political police service, concerned only to enforce the law even-handedly. Perhaps they are, perhaps they aren't. But supposing the PSNI were gun-toting and 90% plus nationalist, and probably numbered in its ranks people who had colluded in the killing of Protestants : would unionist politicians feel uneasy? Believe that this gave nationalists an unfair advantage in discussions? Of course they would. Just what influence the guns of unionist PSNI officers have on political negotiations is hard to measure, but you may be sure they provide at least a small warm glow at the back of the minds of unionist politicians. A gun is a gun is a gun.
But if you really want to go to where the guns are, think licensed weapons.
In January 1996 Seamus Mallon had an interesting exchange with Sir John Wheeler in the British House of Commons.
Mr Mallon: To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland if he will list the number of legally held weapons in Northern Ireland as a proportion of the resident population, or such figures as are readily available.
Sir John Wheeler: Firearms licensing is the responsibility of the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. He advises me that, at 31 October 1995, there were 133,769 firearms held on certificate under the Firearms (Northern Ireland) Order 1981. This equates to approximately one firearm per nine heads of the population. – Based on 1991 census statistics.
That's around ten times as many weapons per head of population as in England, and indications are that the numbers here have risen rather than fallen since 1995. Three things are certain: the figure here is astonishingly high, the great majority of these licensed weapons are in unionist hands, and we can't possibly have that many crows.
The argument in favour of allowing these weapons to stay in unionist hands is that they're legal, useful and, for gun club members, the sine qua non of a great hobby. Well, call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I thought we were all in favour of removing the gun from Irish politics. If there are over 130,000 guns out there in unionist hands, doesn't that kind of skew things when unionists and nationalists sit down to negotiate the road ahead?
Earlier this week we had poll findings which showed how much people would welcome the elimination of IRA arms from the equation. So now can we have another poll to hear how happy we'd all be if the several clanking arsenals supporting the unionist argument were removed? While we're waiting, wouldn't it be encouraging if we could hear from even one unionist politician who's working for the elimination of ALL weapons? In the meantime, David, no more moral pirouettes. They just make you look silly.
