Throwback to terror may focus minds

STORM isn’t a verb that’s usually applied in relation to just one individual. But when loyalist killer Michael Stone stormed Stormont last night, there was a grisly precedent.

On March 16, 1998, Stone arrived at Milltown Cemetery in Belfast armed to the teeth with grenades and handguns. A huge crowd of republicans had gathered to bury the three IRA members killed by the SAS in Gibraltar.

Stone embarked on a one-man storming of the enemy in the must public way imaginable. Under the gaze of TV cameras he indiscriminately began lobbing grenades into, and shooting at, the crowd.

Three people were killed and 60 injured during his lone assault. He immediately became an icon for extreme loyalist terror — a pariah to everybody else, many of whom swallowed hard when such a callous killer was allowed early release.

The television pictures initially suggested that Stone was indulging in a nasty publicity stunt. When he attempted to gain entry through the revolving doors of Stormont, it seemed that he was restrained in a ridiculously easy manner by two of the security staff, one of whom was a female. All he managed to do was throw a bag into the great hall and daub some crude graffiti in red paint on the pillars of the doorway. ‘No surrender to the Sinn Féin/IRA scum,’ it predictably read. Later the footage showing him being searched with his legs aloft and akimbo made him look an utterly pathetic figure.

A pathetic publicity stunt it may have looked but as the afternoon wore on, it took on a more sinister cast.

The female guard had bravely managed to grapple a gun from his hand. And when the police later conducted a sweep of the building, they uncovered between six to eight devices. They were of crude manufacture, but they were equally capable of maiming and possibly killing people.

Stone’s storming of Stormont wasn’t a diversion. It overshadowed the farce that passed for the first meeting of the transitional Assembly this morning. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and British prime minister Tony Blair had invested the last of their peace process chips into this attempt to revitalise the peace process. And even though what they expected to happen in yesterday’s first session fell far short of what they promised earlier this year, it would have moved the process forward.

What transpired yesterday was a farce, as ridiculous a charade as you could ever imagine. Ian Paisley was supposed to indicate publicly that he would be prepared to become First Minister if Sinn Féin fulfilled certain conditions. He did no such thing.

“The circumstances have not been reached where there can be a nomination or designation this day,” he said.

Still both governments took it as one of those rare occurrences when somebody says no when they really mean yes. The conditions had been met, said Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair, before dusting themselves off, getting back on the saddle, and giving the dead horse a couple of flogs in the vain hope that someday soon it will bring them home.

Bertie Ahern was as thin-lipped and as tongue-biting as he has been in any public appearance. You could feel the dead weight of a whopper of euphemism being employed when he said: “In a parliamentary assembly, clarity is a good idea. We didn’t get it this morning.”

He also berated Paisley for failing to find the simple words he is renowned for. But damaged as the effort was, and as buckled as the steely determination of both governments was, both still lashed themselves to the mast of the half-scuppered ship.

For the other main parties, for so long outflanked by the DUP and Sinn Féin, it was a day for settling some scores. The SDLP leader suggested that both parties should synchronise their U-turns while Reg Empey of the UUP mocked what happened in the Assembly as “codology” from Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams who did not have the guts to say they had lost their respective arguments on power-sharing and policing.

The day had not finished with its array of extraordinary twists, however. Late in the afternoon, Paisley — unprecedented for him — issued a fresh statement saying exactly what the governments wanted him to say but what he had refused to state that morning. He would become First Minister if all the conditions were met (by Sinn Féin).

It emerged that it was a reaction — and an annoyed one — to a hardline statement issued by 12 DUP Assembly members saying there was no indication or concession from the party to power-sharing with Sinn Féin at this stage. It also followed a tense phone conversation with Blair.

Was it Paisley reasserting his authority or was it the emergence of a very serious rift within the DUP? The 12 DUP dissidents included some of the party’s heavy hitters including Nigel Dodds, Gregory Campbell, and the Rev William McCrea. It means that the party will now have to face up to the internal ructions and divisions that caused so much difficulty for Sinn Féin in the 1990s as it went through its modal shift.

And in the deepest irony of all, perhaps it was Stone’s one-man storming of the citadel that concentrated minds, giving politicians from all parties a horrible flashback of the awful place that Northern Ireland used to be. In a way what he wanted to destroy may now finally destroy what he and others like him wanted.