ANOTHER VOICE

The thing about IRA terrorism that I have never heard officially acknowledged

MATTHEW PARRIS

Writing in last week's Times, Simon Jenkins looks at reaction to the Atlanta bomb and asks whether by raging against the terrorist we do not exalt him.

'It is setting him on a pedestal, turning the spotlight on his violence and crediting him with a power that challenges presidents and nations.' We would do better, Mr Jenk- ins urges, to ignore (so far as we can) acts of terrorism. 'By not surrounding the inci- dent with hysterical posturing, we cut it down to size. We make it seem a nuisance rather than a cataclysm. We stifle its capac- ity to instill terror. We decline to be afraid.'

Simon Jenkins is so much better a writer, with so much sharper a mind, than the cho- risters of conventional wisdom against whom he tilts that one is tempted to sur- render without a struggle to his polemic. I share his impatience with cant about 'defeating the forces of evil'. The propensi- ty of official persons to explode into piety is proportionate to their impotence. I want Mr Jenkins to be right.

But is he? For the other possibility I will make an argument which takes me onto delicate ground. I must place in print an anxiety whose expression there will be peo- ple stupid enough to castigate as 'putting ideas into terrorists' heads'. Yet among the tens of millions who have used the London Underground at rush hour, there can be few to whom this anxiety has not already occurred.

What has stopped the IRA blowing up a crowded tube train?

It would not be difficult. Suitcase left in carriage as doors close — 90-second deto- nator — train in tunnel — terrorist already on escalators .. . horror indescribable. The plan would be proof against the best proce- dures for reporting 'unattended baggage' which officialdom can devise.

The IRA have not done this because they have not chosen to. It must be their present policy to limit the extent of the outrage they cause. Their aim is to be a massive thorn in everybody's side, not a threat to the very core of our existence. That — and not the 'constant vigilance' of the public, the rings of steel, the wail of sirens, the skill of the bomb-defusers, the mad dash of police cars hither and thither — is why the IRA do not blow thousands of us up. They could do it tomorrow.

I have never heard this officially acknowledged. IRA sources, using codes previously agreed (nobody explains how)

with the police, give warnings before bombs explode. Nobody explains why. Politicians and police chiefs continue to talk about `all-out war' against the 'unbridled evil' of the terrorist, and nobody is vulgar enough to point out that reality is otherwise: less like all-out war, more like a stately minuet between the command structure of the British state and that of the IRA, a danse macabre whose ritual bows to certain unwritten understandings about the rules of engagement.

Do not disparage the dance. Its rules matter. Despite the nuisance, anti-terrorist procedures must be observed not because they could ever thwart a professional ter- rorist but because — precisely as Simon Jenkins notes — they concede his limited victory in inconveniencing us. Atrocities must be answered — like verse and versicle in the Anglican Communion — by the ritu- alised repetition of official outrage because, as Mr Jenkins notes, they do ele- vate the terrorist's stature. That is his reward for his endeavours: the reward he craves, as Mr Jenkins says, for the moder- ate degree of public irritation he has caused.

It is —pace Jenkins — inalienably within his capacity to irritate us. What is beyond his capacity is to overthrow the state or force the state to concede his demands. For every wise troublemaker knows he can never dictate. He must produce a change of heart, or fail. Push atrocity too far and you approach the limit of your powers, harden- ing the hearts you seek to change. This is the terrorists' fear. It therefore suits both sides for terrorism to produce the maxi- mum public noise with the minimum human casualty.

Far, then, from bidding up the level of atrocity at which we deign to acknowledge we are inconvenienced (as Mr Jenkins sug- gests) — raising the stakes — we might do better to squall louder at a lower level of

As consumer confidence improves, so does housing.' outrage. Perhaps if we squalled at the deformation of a single parking meter we could pitch the minuet at a lower level of human suffering.

I think Mr Jenkins views the terrorist as a parent might a destructive child, threaten- ing to trash its bedroom unless we with- draw it from school. 'See if I care,' he advis- es us to respond; and from parent to child this might be right. But the child's demand is unthinkable, the damage it can do is lim- itable, and the child is a child. The IRA are not children, potential damage is illim- itable, and their demands are negotiable.

I do not say we should negotiate. I say the IRA are not mad to suppose we one day might. In this reading of the English mind they and I are joined by Ulster Unionists. To those who say otherwise I say Calais, Southern Ireland, India, Palestine, Malaysia, Cyprus, Kenya, Aden, Icelandic fisheries, and all the rest.

So many of these chapters from our past share three features: first, what was in dis- pute did not go to the heart of our survival as a nation; second, we actually could have held on at what was judged a dispropor- tionate cost; third, we yielded more readily when we were able to yield gracefully. You do not constrain an Englishman best with a gun to his head. Better show him the gun, put it away, and wait for him to invite you to tea. Leopoldo Galtieri should have occu- pied, then immediately deserted, Port Stan- ley, leaving a respectful note. We do like conferences, and Lancaster House is always there.

Galtieri failed to appreciate this. I am not sure whether the IRA appreciate it. They may do. They may have thought it was time for tea when they started John Major's peace process with their famous 'the strug- gle is over' message. But then they failed to keep their act together.

So we are back to the minuet, re-testing each other's stamina. The IRA judge that a major tube outrage would be counterpro- ductive. The nuisance of false alarms, traf- fic checks and new windows at Canary Wharf, they judge, is working fine.

To feign indifference (as Simon Jenkins proposes) to the next smashed building and handful of lost lives would be to lay down a challenge to that judgment. You may guess how it might be met.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter of the Times.