Keeping the Irish peace
The Irish Prime Minister, Mr Jack Lynch, visits the United States. One of the purposes of his trip is to dissuade Irish Americans from contributing cash and other assistance to the IRA. As part of his campaign, Mr Lynch speaks of the Marxist leanings of some of the IRA leaders. But it is less their Marxism than their common-or-garden criminality which most bothers the Irish government. The IRA has become another Mafia, securing funds whenever it needs them by robbing banks, post offices and the like for cash, by running businesses thus financed, by dishing out summary and vicious punishments, by extorting protection money, by corrupting the very young into its service and generally by acting like a state within a state.
It acts this way in Ulster; but it also acts similarly in the Republic; and the IRA conspiracy extends throughout the Irish-American community much as it does throughout Ireland itself and throughout the Irish community living in Britain. The number of conspirators may be small; but the number of those who, in varying degrees, sympathise with them, or with their supposed ideals and objects, is very large. If it were not so, the IRA would long since have been exterminated in Ireland and would never have drawn sustenance from the Irish communities overseas. The IRA, although being a nasty and obvious Mafia, has managed to Preserve more than an insignificant residue of respect among Irishmen. Even those who apostrophise the perpetrators of the latest atrocity as 'animals' (or 'pigs') will nonetheless refuse to consider the IRA as criminals, and Will refuse to countenance any attempt to exterminate them through measures appropriate to their behaviour. There is, that is to say — as Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien has said, of the present Irish government's attitude towards the IRA, but as he might well have said, of practically every Catholic Irishman's attitude — an ambivalence about it. The atnbivalenee of the Irish towards the IRA is not confined to Mr Jack Lynch and his colleagues, the heirs of De Valera. It runs throughout the Irish communities in America and England, and Dr O'Brien, who in his unreconstructed days used to call us 'the Brits', was no less ambivalent, although Possibly more sophisticated, than the supporters of Fianna Fail. Members of Fine Gael and of the Irish Labour Party have always expressed the greatest possible distaste for the IRA; but they, too, have sung their songs.
The British are cast as the villains of the piece; and it is perfectly true that in the past the English have dominated and exploited the Irish and used the Scots to colonise the island. But it is not true that the British, or the English — or the Scots come to that — have any desire to rule, to dominate, to exploit or even to subsidise Ireland or any part of it any longer. The British presence in Ireland has become a duty, and a most expensive and unpleasant one at that. The presence of the troops represents an expiation of an historical guilt. They are there to do good by keeping the peace for, and of, the Irish whether they be Catholic or Protestant, Republican or Loyalist, northern or southern, Pictish, Celtic, Norse, Scottish, Anglo-Saxon or Dublin Jewish.
The troops have a thankless task, for which the Irish have not much thanked them, except when they first arrived to protect the Catholics from the Protestants. But now, at last, Mr Jack Lynch has become less ambivalent. He has said, first, that 'The present IRA bears no relation whatsoever to the IRA that existed in the early Thirties and before our war of independence . . It is brutal and horrific gangsterism.' He has said, second, that 'If the British army withdrew precipitately, it would give rise to a higher level of violence • . . It could be tantamount to a civil war.' He said, third, that the gangsters in the IRA 'are not fighting for a united Ireland, they are maintaining the division of Ireland.' He speaks no less than the truth, and not before time. But if the IRA are gangsters, and if the British army is preventing civil war, what residual ambivalence prevents Mr Lynch from permitting the Republican and the Ulster police from uniting to stamp out gangsterism and the Irish and the British armies from collaborating in averting civil war? The logic of Mr Lynch's latest words is collaboration. But collaboration with the British is still a dirty word in Ireland, and thus it is that the real filth, which is the IRA, remains ambivalently laundered, and the peace of Ireland perforce is kept by British troops.
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