Bombing in Down - Democracy treated with contempt

DESPITE the brain-numbing and never-ending avalanche of bad news around our economic suicide yesterday morning’s news from Holywood, Co Down, will register on a different scale all together.

Having to contemplate bankruptcy is bad enough but even remembering what it was like to be a country almost at war with itself is something else altogether. It is something none of us want to experience, or much more importantly, are prepared to tolerate ever again.

It may be hard to convince anyone under, say 40, of the depth of despair and hopelessness that the last round of the North’s Troubles spread right across this island. For almost 30 years it created a negative and aggressive atmosphere, an atmosphere that poisoned too many relationships and some governments. It convinced too many idealists, many of whom just left the North, to live elsewhere and deny their talents to their communities. It was a bitter, hateful time and no one, least of the anti-democratic criminals who detonated yesterday’s bomb close to the British Army base at Holywood, has any mandate to foist that kind of violence on this country — or our neighbours — ever again.

The attack comes after a number of “dissident” attacks, including a car bomb which damaged a court building in Newry, Co Down, in February. In March last year two soldiers were shot dead by the extremist fantasists of the Real IRA outside Massereene Army barracks in Antrim town. Shortly afterwards, Constable Stephen Carroll was murdered by the Continuity IRA in Craigavon, Co Armagh.

It is feared that these attacks by dissident republicans, who do not believe in a political process to further their campaign for a united Ireland, will continue. Police have described the risk of attack as severe, and security forces remain the prime target. Yesterday’s attack was, we expect, designed at marking the appointment of the North’s first justice minister in 38 years.

The Northern Ireland Assembly yesterday afternoon elected Alliance leader David Ford as justice minister to exercise the new powers over policing, prisons and the courts. Justice powers were finally returned to Belfast at midnight yesterday after nearly four decades, ending a controversy that led to the collapse of the old Stormont and that imperilled devolution ever since.

This is democracy in action and is a direct result of the 32-county election that endorsed the peace process. The very election that pushed these “dissident” terrorists outside democratic society. That is the context in which they persist and that is the context in which they must be judged and suppressed.

It is near enough unimaginable that Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness, who have spent nearly 40 years at the head of the Republican movement in the North do not know, or at least do not have a very strong idea, who these dangerous people might be. And, as George W. Bush said in another context — “You’re either with us or against us.”

It would be very reassuring if the Sinn Féin leadership were to issue a statement saying that the PSNI and the Gardaí have access to all the information they have about these wretched dissidents. It would be even more reassuring, if such a statement was made, if the police authorities said they believed it.