The Cedar Lounge Revolution

In a report in from last week in the Irish Times Gerry Moriarty notes that:

Dissident republicans are dangerous but incapable of waging a sustained campaign of violence, the PSNI chief constable Sir Hugh Orde stated after the police warned of expected attacks from groups such as the Real IRA and Continuity IRA.

Virtually in tandem with the warning, five people were arrested by the PSNI in Newry and the Jonesborough area of south Armagh over yesterday and Tuesday. Two were released while three were still in custody and were being questioned about “serious crime”, according to the police.

It appears that the latest vanguard of the Republic, in all it’s disparate forms, is eager to remind us of it’s currently – and fortunately – rather supine existence. This comes hot on the heels of a report in the Sunday Tribune under the heading “Real IRA: ‘The war is back on” (which Donagh of Dublin makes some points about here )

Republican Sinn Féin, which is linked to the Continuity IRA, condemned the arrests. “We in Republican Sinn Féin will continue to promote our programme for a true peace with justice in Ireland in spite of ongoing harassment of our members and supporters by those opposed to Irish freedom. We will not allow ourselves to be diverted from seeking a permanent end to the cancerous British presence in our country,” said RSF’s press officer, Richard Walsh.

On this site I’ve continued to probe away at the core issue that I believe faces Republicans on this island, how to engage with Unionism. To hear RSF continue to pretend that the conflict is reducible to a ‘cancerous British presence’ is laughable. It might be one element that has prolonged the problems, but the only one?

Last week the police warned of the danger of dissident republican incendiary bomb attacks on businesses in Northern Ireland. Late on Tuesday night the PSNI said it was “stepping up operations across Northern Ireland to disrupt dissident republicans”.

The PSNI in alerting the public to the “increased terrorist threat” said there would be a return to the use of vehicle checkpoints in an attempt to thwart the plans of the dissident groups. This level of alert has not been experienced in Northern Ireland in recent years.

This is serious. But although as in the following quote we can see the dismal potential for worse, it hasn’t happened yet.

Sir Hugh said the dissidents were “inept” and “disorganised” but nonetheless “dangerous”. In November two PSNI officers, in Derry and Dungannon, Co Tyrone, were shot and wounded in Real IRA attacks.

Clearly the impulse to continue remains.

Conversely, last month an Irish man and an Irish woman were arrested in a “sting” operation in Lithuania on suspicion of trying to buy a significant quantity of arms and explosives for the Real IRA.

Both police and politicians are anxious that Northern Ireland does not return to the days of daily checkpoints featuring heavily armed and armoured police, and more particularly should British army backup be required. The nature of this warning and the appeal for the public to be vigilant indicates that this threat is being taken seriously.

“We have a general warning of a threat which increased to the point where we had to go public,” said Sir Hugh at Stormont yesterday. While the alert is significant Sir Hugh said the dissidents did not have the capability “to mount anything that’s even close to being sustained”.

And this follows on from an utterly cynical interview in the Sunday Tribune purporting to be from the Army Council of the Real IRA (this it should be noted comes with a health warning as to the accuracy and provenance of same – see below). Apparently they are ‘preparing to launch a new offensive after a major three-year internal reorganisation’. In it they claim that:

“With more attacks on the RUC/PSNI we believe we can reach the stage where British soldiers are brought back onto the streets to bolster the cops.

“This will shatter the facade that the British presence has gone and normality reigns.

People will once again be made visibly aware that we remain occupied, “

Cynical? Well consider this. Political violence in Northern Ireland is now at an historic low for the last three decades. There is a broad based agreement between Unionism and Republicanism/Nationalism. Yet these paragons of Republicanism have decided that in order to further their political struggle ‘attacks’ are justified in order that they breed further attacks. And the problem, from their perspective, is that there is a sort of ‘normality’. It’s far from perfect, but it’s also a far far cry from the situation extant in the 1980s.
One could summarise it as ‘we will beat you until you understand’. It is also a vision wedded to a sort of nostalgia for the bad old days, when the world was a more dangerous, and more certain place. That this certainty involved the death of many is almost irrelevant. That one can now argue that many – if not all – of those deaths were largely pointless as all engaged in vicious little educative process does not appear to dent their enthusiasm. On an ethical level this is bankrupt stuff. But it’s also stupidly counterproductive. It was hard enough to continue to shoot RUC members when every such act had at least some hint of a sectarian element to it in that they were drawn overwhelmingly from the Unionist/Protestant community. With the PSNI being more broad based it is difficult to see how successful shootings would not produce an arguably unknowable or unpredictable response (indeed it’s telling how limited attacks have been on PSNI members over the past number of years) and one which might not be in any way to the liking of RIRA and its supporters.

And on a practical level it seems unlikely that they could provoke the sort of response that they so desperately appear to seek. Is it credible that the state will act in the way they wish, that it would impose the sort of interventions that increased the hostility of the nationalist community in the 1970s and kept it simmering for much of the 1980s and into the 1990s? Is it credible that nationalists will respond in the same way either? One could suggest that the dismal showing of dissident Republicanism at the Assembly elections last year demonstrates the almost total lack of appetite for their project amongst the population at large. But allied to that is the clear appropriation of localised state power in that Assembly and Executive. This simply is not Stormont Mk I. It may indeed be flawed, but the basis of any serious analytical approach is some degree of honesty.

Having looked at the path to the conflict in some detail it is difficult not to register the way in which a myriad of different forces converged to provide the impetus towards a sustained armed struggle. Those forces simply do not exist today.

The statement from RIRA is, as smiffy of these parts noted on P.ie, mathematically incoherent, as in the quote where they say:

The attempted murder of two police officers in Derry and Dungannon in November showed “the IRA believed it could kill a cop and take whatever the state threw at it”. The Real IRA hasn’t bombed Britain in six years. When asked if this was to change, the army council representative said: “We will attack Britain where and when we see fit. The law of averages suggests the longer a target hasn’t been hit, then the more likely it is to be attacked.”

The law of averages tells us no such thing. But perhaps one should be glad that this is the level of discourse within their organisation.

Worse again they continue to attempt to put clear blue water between them and the Omagh bombing (indeed I’m working on a Myths of the Peace Process on just that topic).

In a controversial claim, the Real IRA alleged it had “minimal involvement” in the Omagh bomb: “Our codeword was used . . . nothing more. To have stated this at the time would have been lost in an understandable wave of emotion. That is the only detail on Omagh we’re prepared to give at the moment.”

Previously, it had been claimed in some quarters that while the Real IRA made the bomb, Continuity IRA members planted it. However, the Real IRA is now alleging it didn’t even make the bomb. Coming 10 years after the atrocity in which 29 people were killed, and without any detailed information to support its claim, the Real IRA’s statement will be treated with scepticism.

Scepticism isn’t the word. This is, from the information available, an entirely deceitful rewriting of history. RIRA were heavily involved in the Omagh bombing, that much is entirely clear. They had prior to that carried out a campaign of town bombings across that year. Omagh was the predictable result of detonating explosive devices in urban areas. Sooner or later deaths would occur. They did. Appalling to see that outcome, mere insult added in any attempt by them to pretend that they held no responsibility or to minimise that responsibility.

And we have an unpleasant echo of previous periods of the conflict in an almost parodic language that owes as much to business schools as it does to any concept of Republican struggle:

The paramilitary group warned of firebomb attacks on shops and businesses in the north. Although it views members of the Stormont executive, including Martin McGuinness, as “British ministers” and hence “legitimate targets”, it is unlikely to attack them.

“Targets aren’t always chosen on legitimacy but on whether hitting them would be politically expedient or counter-productive and on the likely effect on public support, ” the Real IRA leader said. But this decision would be “kept under review”.

Interestingly in the latest edition of the Phoenix there is a piece on just this subject where it is proposed that the ‘flood of media stories’ are similar to the ones last year about a supposed “Terror Convention” in Toomebridge. The source for those stories is now apparently exposed as a British agent, leading the Phoenix to wonder if all this isn’t just a ploy by MI5, now billeted at their fine new offices in Co. Down. Perhaps, but that might be an underestimation of the capacity for some to remain wedded to the gun, even – or particularly – in the absence of a political strategy of any seriousness. What it does point up, yet again, is the manner in which the British have managed to penetrate dissident Republican groupings. Chalk that one up to yet another failure by the latter.

And finally, this political paucity of their project is exemplified when they state “[the RIRA] wasn’t engaged in any direct or indirect talks with the British or Irish governments’.

On the face of these statements there is no political programme beyond self-referential and entirely unconvincing rhetoric which follows the content and form of previous campaigns, but with one crucial ingredient missing. There is no apparent base for such activities, no segment of the population enraged or alienated sufficiently to give the tacit/overt support that is necessary to fuel and sustain conflict. The critique of previous campaigns that you read here does not ignore a recognition of the fact that political aspects of the conflict by almost all actors drove towards prolonging the conflict – here we have one actor attempting to restart that conflict on an armed level.

So what then is the point of the exercise? Because, as I’ve also noted before, the end point of all this sort of activity leads to a table with Unionists at it. There is no way of avoiding that, wishing it away, pretending that they don’t exist. One does not have to agree with the Unionist perspective in the slightest to accept that it has a force of its own and has to be taken account of in any effort to move towards a new political future on this island.

How many attempted shootings or fire bombed shops will it take to make the slightest difference to the response of those waiting around that table?