Return of the Troubles
Kevin Myers says that no one should be surprised by the loyalist riots in Belfast, and no one should hold out hope for Northern Ireland
Kildare
Writing about Northern Ireland in a British publication is rather like performing a one-man rendition of Waiting For Godot on the beach at Skegness in January. One senses that no one is paying a blind bit of attention, for the affairs of the province are as taboo in British society as coprophagy. Indeed, the best way for an exhausted hostess of a London dinner party to cause her drunken guests to flee home, screaming, is for her to start a conversation about Northern Ireland.
So, ten years after I last appeared in this organ, let me repeat: the Irish Troubles are not over. They will never be over. Indeed, this week, we might well be standing on the threshold of a new era of violence. You can wait for the endgame of the Province’s travails, but Godot will not come through that door. The people of Britain are stuck with this wretch called Ulster. You can deny he exists; you can shout that you can’t hear him dementedly hammering in the closet; it makes no difference. As sure as the North Sea tides race over the sandflats at Skegness, the lunatic that is Northern Ireland will saw its way out of the cupboard in which you thought you had safely interred him.
The madman escaped again at the weekend and rampaged over the television news: newsreaders looked as amazed as if they were reporting on a return of Wat Tyler to the streets of London. This time it was loyalists who once again were causing trouble, rioting and shooting at police in the worst communal violence for years.
I say ‘once again’, because I could take you back 36 years, to October 1969, to the very same streets which were consumed by riots almost identical to those last weekend, when loyalists turned to violence, shooting and petrol-bombing policemen because they perceived that their rights were being eroded.
As it happens, this time, in 2005, they are correct. Seven years ago the Prime Minister assumed he’d put the ghoul that was Northern Ireland into its box for all time. But the hammer that he used was deceit, and the nails were lies. Unionists were inveigled into an accord with Republicans on Blair’s promise that the IRA would never be allowed into government without full disarmament, even though he has as much power over IRA arsenals as he has over the aurora borealis. Nonetheless, perhaps deluded by fatigue, and the sheer moral gravity created by the unbearable weight of 3,500 corpses, the Unionists bought the deal: and in effect, politically, as we now know, they bought the farm.
The IRA has not disarmed, and will not disarm. It will decommission some weapons, just the British army decommissioned its old SLR rifles and Chieftain tanks. But it will not go away. Its allegedly final, definitive statement, issued in July, did not even say its war was over. Moreover, through the past seven years it has bamboozled, defrauded, misled and cheated both the Irish and the British governments, and the unionist people. It looted RUC Special Branch of its files. It launched major intelligence operations against its partners in government. It perpetrated the biggest cash robbery in UK history. It has hunted down former MI5 agents to murder them.
All these monumental crimes alternated with the IRA army council popping in and out of Chequers and Downing Street and for all I know, indulging in a spot of pool side sunbathing in Tuscany with the Blairs. ‘More Ambre Solaire, Cherie?’ ‘Why thank you, Martin, right between the shoulder blades: hmmmmm — has anyone ever told you how sexy you are?’ The word appeasement long since lost all meaning as a description of British policy towards Northern Ireland: indeed, the only term that can begin to describe it is coprophagy on command.
This does not excuse the loyalist barbarism of last weekend; but however wicked it was — and the loyalists had come prepared to fight — it was not new. Violence has been going on for months; it’s just that you in Britain have scarcely noticed. Over the summer, across the province, hundreds of Catholic homes have been attacked by loyalist paramilitaries. One Catholic teenager was knifed to death in north Belfast last month in a return to the sadistic loyalist patterns of the 1970s. In terms of lives lost, even worse than that has been a Hatfields and McCoys-type loyalist paramilitary feud in which four men have been murdered and a dozen others injured, and which defies analysis in all but one regard.
It is this. Murder has again become commonplace in Northern Ireland, and for a good reason. The peace process has robbed both states on the island of Ireland of the power to imprison for life. All such punishments are conditional upon future promises of good behaviour — so why not kill, if the maximum sentence you serve will be 18 months?
Moreover, loyalist behaviour is explicable as a group expression of the pathological insecurity which Ulster Protestants feel. Even though the IRA has decommissioned not even a broomstick since its ‘campaign-is-over’ statement, the British government responded with a demeaning alacrity. Within hours it had destroyed the security infrastructure in south Armagh, and shortly afterwards announced the disbandment of the home service battalions of the Royal Irish Regiment.
Days later came the leak that the British were planning yet more farcical acts of humiliation: the recruitment of convicted paramilitary terrorists as ‘community police officers’ and the expunging of all record of their crimes.
This so-called peace process has not brought true peace, but merely conflict-inwaiting. Ten years ago there were 21 of the absurdly named ‘peace-walls’ between Catholic and Protestant areas in Belfast; today there are more than 60, reflecting the sectarian divisions which the peace process has institutionalised. These divisions have taken new and bizarre twists. When Northern Ireland played England at soccer last week, Sinn Feiners were backing England.
So don’t expect to understand Northern Ireland, because you won’t: simply remember that you are manacled to this ranting, gibbering lunatic for ever.
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