“Armies” without people: The recent attacks on the PSNI and the political futility of dissident Republicanism…

It’s hard to assess the nature of an enterprise which considers that shooting at a PSNI member in 2007 somehow constitutes either a serious military or political endeavour. But such an assessment is necessary if only to demonstrate the tenacious hold that armed struggle has on some within Republicanism even at this point in time. A hold that the political developments of the past 15 years or so have done little to alter.

The details of the attacks are fairly clear.

A lone gunman is reported to have approached the car and opened fire, hitting the officer, shortly after the car left Dungannon PSNI station and as it slowed for traffic lights.

Despite his injuries, it is understood the officer managed to drive the short distance from the scene on Circular Road near St Patrick’s Church back to the town’s PSNI station, and an ambulance was called.

His condition in Craigavon Area Hospital was described last night as stable.

The attack follows a similar shooting on Bishop Street in Derry last week. Jim Doherty (43), another off-duty officer, was shot in his car as he left his child to school. That attack has since been claimed by the Real IRA, which opposes the powersharing deal at Stormont involving the DUP and Sinn Féin.

There is an element there of testing the water. Wanting to strike but being unsure as to whether to. But that is little or no comfort. To take up arms is to allow for the potential for killing. And to wound is to injure and to maim. The scant information available doesn’t indicate the level of injury, but it could range from minor to considerable.

The supposed motive?

It is thought the attack was designed to coincide with a meeting of the local District Policing Partnership, a forum for members of the public and community leaders to raise matters of local importance with the PSNI’s area commanders.

Last night Sinn Féin, which recognised the PSNI in January this year, was due to nominate its candidates for membership of the body.

The meeting was called off once news spread of the shooting.

But the meeting will be called again, and it will happen. Sinn Féin will nominate its candidates and they will sit on the DPP – as they should.

So what precisely is the point again?

There is a paucity to these shootings. A sense that they are little more than gestural acts. And that is all they are.

Because, apart from the fact that two people have had their lives disrupted in one of the most appalling ways possible, it is the sheer meaningless of this tactic which is so difficult to take. Do those who went out on Monday and last week genuinely believe that by shooting PSNI members they are in some sense furthering the arrival of a United Ireland? An obvious question, but one which demands an answer. Martin Meehan of PSF (and PIRA) was quoted as saying that during the height of the Troubles there was always the sense that ‘it just needed one last push’. Time disabused him, and many others, of that idea.

Sheer pragmatic analysis (or ‘objective’ as we used to say in the WP) of the material conditions leads to a very simple conclusion. Meehan was talking of a time when the North was militarised, when PIRA was able to field large numbers of Volunteers, when there was little or no political, cultural or social space for Republicanism. Yet even then PIRA was only able to move the situation to a stalemate. Britain could not impose their chosen solution. PIRA could not impose their will.
But however bad things got in the North there was a self-limiting aspect to the violence. Characteristics of other societies with similar stresses simply did not appear. There were very very few actions against political leaders from opposing communities. Violence between paramilitary groups from opposing sides was equally limited (consider how unusual the Shankill bombing was). There was almost no mobilisation amongst the middle classes and even within the working classes there remained (as Ed Hayes has noted on a thread yesterday – and it is an important point) significant sections who would not cede support to PIRA. That provided constraints to the level and ferocity of violence – although it is a back handed tribute to all involved in the processes that ingenuity managed to create circumstances that tested those constraints but rarely broke them.

So, it’s hard not to believe that what was achieved was about all that could be achieved armed struggle or not. Much is made on occasion about how Jim Lynagh and the ‘flying column’ model of activity on the Border in the late 1980s could have been a means of prolonging or even extending the armed struggle. Frankly, I doubt it. Whatever the sincerity of those involved in an age of mass overlapping surveillance I suspect that it would have taken little or no time for such groups to have been removed. And the Afghan or Iraqi model of insurgency – which has also been quoted as a template in a fit of enormous wishful thinking – doesn’t suffice as an example for the reasons stated previously… pragmatic political considerations trumped nihilism at almost every stage. Belfast isn’t Baghdad, Armagh isn’t Kabul.

So what do we have now? Dissident groups which can mount individual attacks of murderous potential but little more. To get to a point where they might challenge the state (a state that now has absorbed Republicanism in the main and in the process has also had to reformat itself into a configuration that is largely unrecognisable to previously existing structures) they would have to effectively rerun the process of mobilisation that took twenty odd years the first time around. Granted the initial momentum towards conflict was rapid and the earliest years were marked by the greatest violence. But that was at a time of massive sociopolitical structural change. This time it would have to occur in the context of a largely agreed state where there is representation and participation of all groups within the society.

I can’t see that happening. The pools of rage and alienation that in part contributed to the longevity of PIRA have been largely drained. The arrival of SF in government is – by whatever yardstick one chooses – a qualitative change in the nature of the administration of the North. The support for SF appears near-hegemonic, and… as importantly, the change in the nature of the society with effectively a decade of relative calm has its own calming effects. The engagement by the South (and here can I actually praise Ahern for a second for recent comments on FF in the North?) however cosmetic on some levels is clearly genuine on others such as infrastructural funding. The dismal sense that Nationalists were a forgotten people shrugged aside by the Irish polity at partition is no longer true and partitionism not withstanding all know it isn’t true. So the sort of ‘defenderism’ which characterised some, but not all, of the struggle has little or no currency any longer.

But there is something strange about these acts if one places them within the context of Irish Republicanism. This must be the very first time in that history during the last 80 odd years where acts are carried out by groups with no political representation at all (and I’m deliberately discounting the micro-groups that were carried along on the tail of the Troubles  – or indeed during the Border campaign – since there was a broader political context)  and are carried out anonymously. While that may seem to fit a template of the Troubles it actually doesn’t as regards mainstream Republicanism. From 1916 onwards violence was used either overtly and by (semi) uniformed groups (as with 1916 and the Border Campaign) or within the context of a broader socio-political struggle and as a means of placing pressure on clearly defined targets. I’ve said it before, I think the armed struggle was a cul-de-sac after the first ‘defensive’ stages and we can all argue the toss about when that ended, but having said that I wouldn’t minimise the difficulties that would have been faced even in the absence of an armed campaign as regards altering the societal structures. Yet violence happened within social structures, a hinterland if you will, that placed certain constraints upon those engaging in armed conflict.

Contemporary dissident Republicanism has no such constraints. The organisations that support it have no representation and as such have not even the most peripheral degree of oversight from those they nominally represent. This is a very disturbing situation. The only analogues I can think of are the urban terrorists of the 1970s on the continent who by dint of their separation from the people in effect became a self-referential elite.

Hence the recourse to the rhetoric of the ‘Republic’ by those who continue to ‘dissent’ because when you lose the people, or a sizeable section of same all one is left with is ideas. But their notion of a Republic appears more and more to be a semi-theological concept with less and less relationship to the existing world. The concentration on ‘sovereignty’ understandable but irrelevant.

Jackie McDonald made a number of statements at the weekend about the UDA. Much of it was the sort of rhetoric one might expect. A lot less polished and varnished than we are used to from SF, but one phrase caught my attention (and that of Splintered Sunrise). He said that the UDA’s weapons were the people’s weapons. Hyperbole, of course. And utterly self-serving.

But I can’t help feeling when one looks at the RIRA that their time has passed. The GFA remains. The current institutions may be unloved – but they are worked. And they represent the people – whatever that strange amorphous body of many different individuals may be. And, it seems to me that any Republic can only root itself in the people. And those people, not the groups who would act on behalf of a Republic of the imagination, voted this year overwhelmingly for candidates who support the GFA institutions.

Which means that when it comes down to it perhaps the people want their weapons back.