When Adams attacks everyone else he’s really addressing his own ranks

“RESPECT our mandate.” With which political party do you associate that demand? Every political party has a mandate, to a greater or lesser extent.

One political party, Sinn Féin, regularly demands that everyone else should respect theirs.

Isn't it time that Sinn Féin began to respect its own mandate? Maybe, just maybe, Sinn Féin believes that it was given a mandate for whatever level of violence or criminality it decided to engage in. It wasn't.

In every constituency I know, Sinn Féin was given a mandate for peace, for the perception of hard constituency work on the ground, in some cases for the perception that they were willing to go to lengths in relation to drug-pushers that weren't open to other parties. There are bits of that mandate that people like me find hard to swallow.

But what I'm absolutely certain of is that nobody down here voted for Sinn Féin in the belief that the republican movement might, one day soon, be threatening to go back to war. And yet that's what they did this week.

And they did it, it seems, in a fit of pique because the two governments didn't seem to take their first statement seriously enough. How are we supposed to react to an organisation that carries on like that? How are we supposed to react to their threats?

At a meeting the other night, I heard a person associated with the Irish Government saying: "we're coming to the point where we might have to park peace in order to confront the republican movement." And at a function the other day, I met a British government official who told me there wasn't the remotest chance of any breakdown of the IRA ceasefire.

"They lost interest in the peace process years ago," he said airily. "Now the only thing they're interested in is the size of their bank accounts." Because the context of both those remarks was private, I can't name the people involved.

But on the RTÉ News on Sunday, I heard Gerry Adams saying that the only reason the Government had decided to attack Sinn Féin over the Northern Bank robbery and the issue of criminality was because they wanted to hide their own embarrassment over the Ray Burke affair.

The last of these three remarks is easily the most fatuous. I don't carry any torch for the present Government, but it is simply not true to say that they decided to use Sinn Féin criminality as a diversion to try to mask the publicity surrounding the jailing of Ray Burke. Gerry Adams knows that he is making the crudest of propaganda points when he says that.

When he goes on to say that the main opposition parties didn't raise the connection between Fianna Fáil and Ray Burke in the Dáil because they were too busy talking about Sinn Féin, he is asking us to believe in some nutty conspiracy theory that not even his most innocent customers are going to buy.

I notice that a number of political commentators, especially in Northern Ireland, seem to be attracted to the general Sinn Féin proposition that the real reason behind all the criticism of Sinn Féin is fear of their electoral growth.

According to this theory, Fianna Fáil will suffer most if Sinn Féin continue to attract votes and win seats in the way they did in the local and European elections. So Fianna Fáil find it very useful to be able to have a real go at Sinn Féin now over the issue of criminality.

The only problem with this theory, of course, is that whatever balls are being thrown in Sinn Féin's direction, Sinn Féin made them.

For as long as the republican movement feels that it alone will decide what constitutes criminality, and what doesn't, and for as long as they feel free to dismiss any and all criticism on that basis, they have no-one to blame but themselves for the criticism they get.

They seem to have entirely forgotten the Proclamation of Independence by which they claim to set so much store. The call to arms in that document ends by calling on republicans to ensure that "no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine."

But at one level it doesn't matter whether the conspiracy theories are daft, or whether the motives being attributed by Sinn Féin to everyone else are honest or not. The fact that they are still willing to engage in such a petulant response, that they seem unwilling to acknowledge the real and deep anger in the community over their behaviour, is dangerous.

Just as dangerous as the blasé and naive way in which the Irish and British officials I quoted above seem willing to dismiss the threat of a deterioration in the peace process.

When Gerry Adams attacks everyone else, of course, he has only one audience in mind his own. The more stridently he attacks everyone else, the more pressure he is feeling from his own ranks. At times like this, you will never hear Gerry Adams offering even the most oblique criticism of the IRA.

Martin McGuinness occasionally sounds like he is capable of criticism, as when he said on RTÉ on Sunday that the people who carried out the bank robbery didn't give a damn about the peace process. But note the dual purpose of that sentence: if it was republicans who carried out the robbery, they deserved the criticism of other republicans; but since the people who carried out the robbery didn't give a damn about the peace process, sure they couldn't be real republicans anyway.

When a political leader is incapable of addressing any audience except his own, there is only one reason fear.

What Gerry Adams seems to be afraid of is a split in the ranks of republicanism. All his utterances and actions, and the willingness to tolerate behaviour within his own ranks that he knows to be damaging, point in that direction.

The last IRA statement, with its crude threat to the peace process, suggests strongly that there are some at least in the republican movement who think there is only one kind of language the rest of us understand. In worrying more about a split than anything else, the republican leadership is hugely underestimating the rest of us. There will be no back-down in the face of a threat; in fact, the rest of democratic politics will close ranks against a republican threat.

In a real sense, and not a derogatory one, this is a time for growing up on their part. We are years past the ceasefire, years past the Good Friday Agreement.

But the maturing of the process hasn't been accompanied by the maturing of all its elements. If they care about the process, if they really believe in their own mandate, the republican movement will get away now from the carping criticism and the bullying behaviour. It's their peace process as much as anyone else's.

They can decide to save it or destroy it. We're overdue an act of generosity and vision by the people who claim a mandate for peace. It's not too late.