Violence in North - Dissidents should be ostracised

WRITER and Derry resident Jennifer Johnston, speaking in recent weeks, sounded a depressing note of warning about the North.

She said the old hatreds were being rekindled and warned that the economic and social structures needed to support a lasting peace were not yet in place.

She predicted that the disaffection so natural if an individual was unemployed was being harnessed by those who would destroy the hard-won progress of recent decades. Growing fears that the North, where the public sector employs a very high proportion of the workforce, will face greater cutbacks than other regions administered by David Cameron’s government only increase that dangerous disaffection.

Events of recent days confirm Johnston’s pessimism as an unrepresentative minority seems determined, despite the absolute absence of a democratic mandate of any kind, to destroy the longed-for peace established through years of tortuous negotiations and compromise.

If this island is to have any prospect of rebuilding its economy and building a society where opportunity is freely enough available to make old tribal hatreds irrelevant then these people cannot be allowed to build momentum much less succeed.

Those who style themselves as Republican dissidents do not represent a viable future. Their contempt for life, property and the freely expressed democratic wish of the great majority of Irish people of all traditions means that they should be isolated and their policies rejected.

Gerry Adams has announced that Sinn Féin will hold groundbreaking talks with the 32 County Sovereignty Movement in September after repeated requests for talks with all breakaway groups.

The suggestion that the veteran Sinn Féin leadership is held in contempt by the younger, more radical dissidents does not auger well but Mr Adams and his colleagues, in this instance at least, will have the support of anyone who remembers the waste and devastation inflicted on this island during the Troubles. It is important that Mr Adams and his colleagues bring the dissidents to the point they reached themselves all those years ago when they realised the futility of violence.

The threat these groups represent should not be underestimated. They orchestrated street violence in Belfast leading up to and around the July 12 flash point. Rioters were bussed into the Ardoyne and for three nights PSNI officers were stoned, fire-bombed and targeted by gunmen. The rioting stirred bad memories. The only difference from those of three or four decades ago was the absence of the British army and that Sinn Féin were unable to control it.

In the decades of violence rooted in the brutal suppression of the civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s a considerable proportion of the people living in the Republic were rightly accused of being ambiguous about the Provisional IRA. This made it far more difficult than it might have been to build the trust that has led to the peace of recent years.

That ambiguity cannot gain a foothold today and these dissidents should be ostracised and denied the support and refuge they need to grow and survive.