Give credence only when the IRA fulfils its promises with deeds

THE IRA formally called off another campaign on Thursday. Sinn Féin leaders have basically got the IRA to affirm what they promised when they signed the Good Friday Agreement more than seven years ago.

The statement should be welcomed, because it is clear and unambiguous. All members of the IRA have been ordered to dump their weapons and "assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means".

The IRA has also authorised its representatives to engage immediately with the decommissioning body to put IRA weapons beyond use in a verifiable way that will enhance public confidence as quickly as possible. Two church representatives one Catholic and the other Protestant are to be invited to verify the decommissioning process.

The IRA has not said explicitly that it will suspend all its criminal and paramilitary activities, but it has ordered IRA volunteers not to engage in "any other activities whatsoever". This amounts to calling for a total cessation of all operations.

But nobody should be fooled into thinking that the statement was worth more than the paper on which it was written. The IRA and Sinn Féin have lied so often that no sane person should trust their word. They were offering essentially the same thing last October, but they then went ahead with the Northern Bank raid and the killing of Robert

McCartney.

They denied involvement in both, but their denials were deceitful.

Does anybody believe that Gerry Adams was never a member of the IRA, or that he, Martin McGuinness and Martin Ferris were never members of the Army Council, or that they have now stepped down from Army Council, of which they were supposedly never members in the first place? They must verify their promises with their deeds. Then, and only then, will they deserve any credence.

But nobody should confuse credence with credit. They deserve no credit for desisting from murderous and criminal activities.

Those who are old enough to remember the civil rights campaign of the late 1960s will recall how the unionists exploited what seemed like irrational fears in their community that the IRA was behind the civil rights campaign. In time it became apparent that the IRA had infiltrated the campaign and manipulated it for its own ends.

The IRA has always contended that it was in the tradition of Patrick Pearse and Michael Collins, and the media was tracing the IRA campaign back to 1919 on Thursday. People may dislike the idea, but it has validity.

For instance, Pearse had no authority from the Irish people for the Easter Rebellion, or for a war that he glorified. He thought World War I was "the most glorious" thing in European history.

"The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields," Pearse wrote in December 1915. "Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives gladly given for love of country."

That blasphemous twaddle was written by a "blithering idiot", according to James Connolly.

As Pearse was about to set out from Liberty Hall on Easter Monday morning in 1916, one of his sisters tried to stop him. "Come home, Patrick, and leave all this foolishness," she pleaded. Connolly gave the order to march, which allowed Pearse to brush his sister aside and scamper to the head of the men.

The Rising did not go as Pearse had expected. He was horrified that innocent civilians were being cut down in the streets. Towards the end he was in tears, because this was not the glorious endeavour he had envisaged. He ended the rebellion by surrendering unconditionally.

The British military then came to the rescue of his reputation by turning what the Irish people considered an inglorious disaster into a magnificent triumph.

Michael Collins, who was in the GPO with Pearse and Connolly, was not impressed by Pearse.

"Connolly was a realist, Pearse the direct opposite," Collins wrote. He added that he would have followed Connolly "through hell had such action been necessary. But I honestly doubt very much if I would have followed Pearse not without some thought anyway."

Collins formed a hit squad in 1919 with aim of knocking out the eyes and ears of Dublin Castle in order to provoke the British into retaliating blindly.

He believed that they would drive the Irish people into the hands of the IRA. His plan of campaign basically provoked the British into introducing the likes of the Black and Tans, who overreacted by striking at innocent people. In the process, they incensed the Irish population.

The Provisional IRA did essentially the same thing in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. They provoked the British, who drove the nationalist people into the arms of the republicans. But there was a difference in the two campaigns.

Collins targeted individuals. He had the squad shoot detectives Patrick Smyth, Daniel Hoey, Thomas Wharton, John Barton, Forbes Redmond, Henry Kells, Laurence Dalton and Richard Revell.

He also sent them after Sir John French, the Lord Lieutenant, and the Resident Magistrate Alan Bell, and the MI6 agent John C Byrne, as well as those involved in killing of Cork Lord Mayor Tomás Mac Curtain.

The squad led all but one of the hit teams that shot undercover agents on Bloody Sunday morning. Collins had targeted most of them. Eleven agents were killed, along with two Auxiliaries who got in the way, and a British soldier who was killed in the Gresham Hotel when the only hit team that was not headed by a member of the squad got the wrong room and killed the wrong man.

On arriving back from the United States in December 1920, Eamon de Valera complained to Collins and IRA Chief of Staff Richard Mulcahy about the way the campaign was being conducted.

"This odd shooting of a policeman here and there is having a very bad effect, from the propaganda point of view, on us in America," he said. "What we want is one good battle about once a month with about 500 men on each side."

De Valera suggested the IRA attack the headquarters of the Auxiliaries in Beggar's Bush Barracks, but this idea was rejected in favour of burning the Custom House instead. Most of the squad were captured in that operation, which was a military fiasco, but it prompted the British to the negotiating table.

The Provisional IRA emulated Collins by provoking the British into mindless retaliation on Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972. The British then added insult to injury with their cover-up. At that point, most of nationalist Ireland was in sympathy with the so-called republicans, but then they made the same mistake as the British.

They launched a bombing campaign, blindly targeting anyone, including innocent men, women and children. In the process, they repulsed every decent Irish man and woman.

They don't deserve any credit now for calling off that crazy campaign, because they should never have started it in the first place. Nevertheless, they should be welcomed into Irish politics once they demonstrate that Thursday's statement was honest and sincere.