One man’s terrorist

to address the 2 questions on which you seem to have constructed this entire article:
1) i don’t know why you think the south is reluctant to embrace the north – what evidence do you have for this assertion?
2) it is obvious that dev rejected the british offer as he wanted to maintain irish neutrality and also because i doubt he really believed that the british would keep their end of the bargain. it is ludicrous to suggest that he didn’t want reunification.

you ask what adams was in prison for? well actually he wasn’t convicted of anything (not even charged as it happens) just detained in a concentration camp – so really no inference can be drawn from the fact of his release.
i’m not sure what you mean by the phrase “And still, to this day, no guns to show for it” – you did hear of the decommisioning didn’t you?
anyway i suppose your major gripe is that adams won’t up and admit he was in the IRA. why would he? it would open him to prosecution. (mcguinness already served a term on that charge so legally he had nothing to lose by his openness). surely it is obvious that actors on all sides will never come clean on all the murky secrets – are you so naieve to think they ever will?

Enda, in answer to (1), 80 years of non-embracing can speak for itself. Lip service to a 32-county republic was just that, as indicated by the actual reason for De Valera’s refusal of the offer of the North, (2); he thought Fianna Fail would not win an overall majority in a united Ireland. So much for republicanism. Your assumption that Dev refused because of his distrust of Perfidious Albion speaks for itself.

But, you are right, Adams was indeed interned without trial. I’m sorry for being rather glib on that count. While I don’t think his pre-internment activities were remotely wholesome, the absence of due judicial process robbed Adams of the chance to defend himself against terrorism-related charges, and us of a chance to draw a line under it and move on.

I’m not naive enough to think everyone who ought to will come clean. But I do see the contamination of our whole political process by unrepentant murderers and those who would draw a thin veil across their bloody deeds. Brushing inconvenient truths under the carpet is a real obstacle to the peace process, and not at all an unpleasant but necessary condition for it.

Let’s look at the last time Ireland went through something similar; the 1920s Civil War. It took until the 1990s for Irish politics to normalise after that internecine conflict. With no ‘truth and reconciliation’ process, we simply had to wait till all the protagonists, and families of their victims, were dead. Surely we can do better this time round.

Michael; by bloody-minded I mean one who is not given to compromise. It also occurred to me to wonder why so many in the US seem to dismiss Arafat as having too much blood on his hands to be trustworthy and somehow imagine that Adams can be trusted. But I reckoned I’d done enough conflating of other people’s opinions for one day…

Am (nearly) always glad to be compared to an 18 year old, but I’m a Clark girl myself.

John — replace ‘most Irish-Americans’ with ‘most Americans’ period. I have much less animus toward Adams than Maria, but her central complaint (the hypocrisy about terrorism which often seems to boil down to a defition of terrorists as ‘people who engage in terror activities who bear some ill-will toward the US) is absolutely right, and as for the Irish situation I am amazed by the beliefs people have about it here (EG that without the British holding them back the Irish would reunify tomorrow).
Note, there’s some hypocrisy on the other side of this too. For all their declared progressiveness, Sinn Fein deals with some of the most repulsive US politicians — Congressman Peter King of NY stands out as an unyeilding supporter of IRA/Sinn Fein who spouts his mouth off about the French being soft on terrorism and opposes just about any decent piece of legislation that comes before him. The guy is vile.

Maria writes: “Can you imagine reading a similar article in 10 years’ time about Osama Bin Laden or one of his cadres? It might read; ‘it doesn’t really matter whether the man was a member of Al Qaida or not – after all, the organisation is so murky and fragmented, who can ever really know? – just that he’s smooth, articulate and plausible, and almost sounds like ‘one of us’.”

This wouldn’t happen in the US, but not because of 9/11 alone. The Oklahoma City bombers were never publicly demonized in the way Al Qaida has been. Maybe because they were clean-cut white American native-born-citizens from the heartland. Whether it is the “clean-cut”, “white” or “native-born” that does the work here, some terrorists get demonized and others don’t.

In the UK the IRA gets demonized, with good reason. But the rule isn’t applied consistently. There is a heck of a lot more understanding of violent reactions to systematic misrule when it happens elsewhere – Palestine, for example, or Apartheid-era South Africa, or Chiapas. Or, following 9/11, many UK essays saying that the US ought to have expected violent reaction to its foreign policy. But not Bradford or Brixton or Belfast.

I’m not accusing you, Maria, thoughtful and intelligent limb of my favorite crooked tree, of being hypocritical or racist, or as ever endorsing MI5 collaboration with the UDF, or police brutality.

All I mean is that, in the US, especially in cities with many descendants of Irish-Catholic immigrants, it looks like the only violence that cannot be explained, or tolerated is violence directed against white, Protestant Brits. So weak American support for the white, Catholic IE-wannabe’s seems legitimate. Remember, the IRA killed fewer people overall than die from urban crime in a bad year in a US city, or a bad week in Guatemala in the 1980s, etc. Vilification of Gerry Adams is distinctly out of proportion, viewed numerically.

Tim says

*In the UK the IRA gets demonized, with good reason. But the rule isn’t applied consistently. There is a heck of a lot more understanding of violent reactions to systematic misrule when it happens elsewhere – Palestine, for example, or Apartheid-era South Africa, or Chiapas. Or, following 9/11, many UK essays saying that the US ought to have expected violent reaction to its foreign policy. But not Bradford or Brixton or Belfast.*

At least those final two sentences are not fair — the very people who wrote those sorts of essay have been extremely critical (quite rightly) of UK policy in Northern Ireland, and, while frequently condemning the terrorists, have opposed UK policy which, from about 1972 to 1986 seemed tailor-made to promote terrorism. The British left has probably been too friendly to Sinn Fein for either my or Maria’s liking but huge swathes of it have been opposed to stupid UK policies in the north. British governments have frequently been extremely hypocritical about these things, but Apartheid was widely regarded as unnacceptable by the British public throughout the period we’re talking about, as was Israeli rule in Palestine. Sharon is widely regarded and talked of as a terrorist even now. Support for terrorists in Central America was completely off-limits even for the Thatcher government, and, again, the left and huge amounts of moderate opinion opposed US policy in Central America.

Conrad, my impression is that’s a pretty fair assessment, but I’d like to know what the better informed think. If it is a fair assessment then its worth noting two things about Adams’s situation. If he really wants peace he is in a bind, because moving too far too fast simply makes it impossible for him to bring along the (even) more thuggish elements — what’s the point of the IRA making peace if the consequence is the reemergenece of the IRA under another name? Second, if, as is my (defeasible) impression, Adams and McGuinness are so pivotal, both they and the people they are dealing with walk a tight line. They are both eminently assassinatable (is that a word?): they know this, the UK government knows this, the UUP knows it…
Understanding is not excusing, and my impression (again defeasible) is that Adams et. al., even on the best interpretation of their behaviour, have been excessively conservative and unimaginative in the pursuit of peace, and have simply failed to take opportunities that were readily available to them. That’s the most charitable interpretation — less charitable interpretations find the explanation of their failures to be more sinister.

The problem is worse than that, Carlos. That level of mythology is broadly true for exile/expatriate politics. Post-communist Europe gives you well more than a dozen examples of exile communities, some of which became deeply involved in the politics of the “old country.” Particularly in the early years of transition, some of the returnees who held high positions or who earned large shares of votes were pretty nutty.

Anyway, there’s nothing exclusively Irish or American about the general form of the problem Maria is talking about. Problems often look reassuringly simple from across the ocean; just look at all the policy advice America gets from thousands of miles away…

On a friendlier note, does anyone here have an observation on the depth of connection between the IRA (et al.) and more garden-variety criminality? My poorly-informed impression was that the overlap was substantial, and a large chunk of ‘liberation’ rhetoric was a good cover for drug running, extortion, theft and so forth.

“Is it simply the case that only atrocities committed against Americans are vile acts of terrorism to be condemned to the end of time? Do atrocities against others have a time limit beyond which we should ruefully admit it’s time to put all of that behind us and pretend the un-met consequences don’t leak into and poison our political discourse? Or maybe it’s just that white, English-speaking people with the same surnames as us can’t really be terrorists.”

The New York Times isn’t even that excited about dealing with the morass in the Middle East which led the destruction of the towers and murder of thousands in their own city. They were pretty much willing to pretend everything was over after Afghanistan, and in fact weren’t super-thrilled about going in there. I don’t see the need to ascribe their disinterest in dealing with other terrorists as some sort of racism against darker people. The problem is much more likely to be found in their disconnect from reality on the whole subject.

The huge financial support that Irish-Americans give to Sinn Féin is even more important now that they can no longer be seen to be actively acquiring same from banks and post offices. The party does not usually emphasise its revolutionary socialist credentials to doners who are probably members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians or other traditional catholic organisations in the US. Sinn Féin are really a “catch all” party who like to appear in different form depending on what political or electoral market they are playing. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin is replacing the SDLP as the dominant voice of mainstream nationalism. In the Republic the party still positions itself as a left wing alternative to the Labour Party and the voice of the economically marginalised. They can maintain this stance for a while-there is an electoral niche for this type of party. But most Irish electors either vote for who they want to be in government or for very localistic considerations and not on the basis of ideology. The party can rail against the Republic’s corrupt political establishment for another parliamentary term or two but eventually the electoral logic of Irish politics will demand that they some day enter government with their fellow nationalists in Fianna Fáil or else be consigned to irrelevance. It is this likely future outcome that provides one of the reasons why many people shuffle uncomfortably and want to evade some of the harsh truths and uncomfortable facts such as those highlighted by Maria.

Tangentially: remember that Gerry Adams can enter the US without being photographed or fingerprinted. Just wanted to share that with you.

Also, Ali G may have had one of the more insightful exchanges on mainland attitudes to NI politics when talking to a Unionist councillor:

Ali G: ‘So, you is Irish?’
Unionist: ‘No, I’m British.’
Ali G: ‘Okay. So you is here on holiday then?’

Most people across the Irish Sea as a sad appendix; it’s an irony that the most fervently ‘British’ people in the UK (Ulster Unionists) are regarded by most in Britain as an embarrassment.

That said, I’ve seen the hat being passed for ‘The Cause’ (i.e. NORAID) among third-generation ‘Irish-Americans’ in bars in New England, and as a Catholic of Irish descent, it disgusts me almost as much as the history of sectarian discrimination against Catholics in NI.

Americans tend not to realise that nowadays the paramilitaries on both sides are little more than mob bosses, with the council estates as their turfs. It didn’t help that during the glorious Thatcher 80s, unemployment in NI reached close to 25%, creating a lot of idle hands. The days of the IRA working as a kind of Irish Hamas are long gone.

So, there’s no ’cause’ left in NI outside the political process. Whatever fools like Ian Paisley say. And that’s why Americans with an interest in foreign policy could actually take lessons from what’s happened in NI over the past decade.

I’m sure someone’s gonna yell at you for that.

Perhaps so, perhaps not. As I say, I had a Catholic upbringing, and that included being taught by young teachers from NI, who’d grown up on the Falls Road and dealt with the fact that there were no damn jobs in the province by moving to the mainland.

And the point is simple: the provos rule their turfs like mob bosses. Teenage kids were (and are) ‘asked’ to run errands, and if they refused, they were first beaten, second kneecapped, third shot. But it meant that ‘renegade’ drug dealing and car theft were stamped upon, and certain ‘social programs’ promulgated. Just like Hamas, in fact.

Tangentially, I find it intriguing that ‘Line of Fire’ has a mob boss (Jonah Malloy) who’s identifiably Irish-American. If those who stuck bills into the collection box at the Half Moon and O’Shea’s extrapolated that back to Belfast, they might think twice.

My point is quite subtle: for all of Adams’ undeniable past, he’s quite simply stuck with the political process, and with Sinn Féin as a part of it. And as long as it’s moving, even in steps that are imperceptible to most — Vincent Hanna (RIP) was the smartest commentator on how the peace process in NI passeth all understanding — and as long as paramilitary activity remains akin to mob violence, then (paradoxically) it’s a success. The ultimate success being a political stability that finally is able to deal with the way that paramilitaries on both sides terrorise their own communities.

As the risk of posing two sensible questions in a discussion about Northern Ireland, didn’t the IRA run pretty thoroughly afoul of Washington when some of their people were caught running a bomb-making training camp with the FARCs in Colombia? Didn’t their friends in the States get slapped with frozen bank accounts and the other sundry things Treasury does to people it really, really doesn’t like? I thought the last remnants of official US wink and nod had gone away after the FARC business…

In the early days Gerry and the PIRA were defenders. This is a fact that can not be denied. To compare Gerry to Bin Landen is obsence and is a sad attempt at posturing.

Not at all; “in the early days” (how I long for ’em Osama bin Laden and his Taliban were welcomed as heroes by the people of Afghanistan because they put paid to both the warlords and the Russians. It’s a rare complete bastard indeed who doesn’t have at least some semblance of a heroic past.

Sectarianism still exists, but we Catholics […]

you’ve gotta laugh, or else you’d cry.

Osama bin Laden and his Taliban were welcomed as heroes by the people of Afghanistan because they put paid to both the warlords and the Russians.

Actually, the Russians were long gone by the time the Taliban came onto the scene (1994). And, actually, OBL had nothing to do with the Taliban during their initial rise. The Taliban were almost, if not already, in Kabul by the time OBL made it to Afghanistan from Sudan.

But, hey, who needs facts when you’re making a point about the Middle East? It all just melts into a murky haze.