As Fianna Fail, the party of government, aids Sinn Fein - the party with an illegal paramilitary wing which stills kills people and which still hasn't promised that the war is over - into the governance of Sligo, we might remind ourselves of the old saw that he who forgets his history is condemned to relive it. Though some find the tradition of paramilitaries becoming orthodox politicians almost overnight, without a cleansing process, or a protocol of renunciation and regret, rather pleasing, I do not. To permit the political allies of those who butchered the Mountbatten boating party into power in the very county where it occurred, without a word of contrition since, seems to me to betoken neither the charity nor the wisdom of forgiveness, but mere moral indifference instead.
Common goals
To be sure, the Belfast Agreement puts Sinn Fein into the Executive in Northern Ireland; but we know it's a fix. What authorises it is a unique mandate conferred by democrats on a system of governance in which there is no programme for government, no shared political principles, no common goals, no single allegiance. The rules were rigged to keep Sinn Fein-IRA happy, and those rigged rules then won the assent of the Irish people.
So be it. But that doesn't mean that Sinn Fein is sanitised and forgiven. Only forgetfulness amounting to delinquency should allow us to forget that Sinn Fein is the political expression of an IRA which has still not abandoned murder, whose arsenals are intact and secure, which still rules its ghettoes with violence and intimidation, and which has studiously declined to assist in the apprehension of the Omagh murderers.
Political amnesia about terrorist realities reached an apotheosis in the popular memory of the murderous events of 1919-21, which were transmuted from the squalor of killing real, living people into a glamorous series of encounters between heroic flying columns and dastardly Black and Tans. History was not history but a stereotypical morality play, one that was made possible by the lamentable failure of professional historians to record the true nature of the Anglo-Irish war.
Would the IRA war of 1970 onwards have been possible if a book like Richard Abbott's Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922 (Mercier Press) had been published in the 1950s or 1960s, instead of 2000? For just as Lost Lives, by David McKittrick and others, restores to the central narrative of the Northern troubles the victims, rather than the perpetrators, with their egregious reminiscences, so Richard Abbott - himself a policeman - has reached into history and given flesh and blood and bone and family to the forgotten victims of Irish history: the men of the RIC.
Hunted down
These killings were not confined to the period of the Anglo-Irish war. Ex-policemen from the disbanded force who returned to their homes were still hunted down and killed across the south and the west. On one day in 1922, five ex-RIC men were murdered in Kerry and Clare. In March that same year, seven months after the Truce, RIC sergeants Tobias Gibbons from Mayo and John Gilmartin from Leitrim were shot dead in their hospital beds in St Brigid's Home, Galway. Soon afterwards, Special Constable James Plumb vanished after an ambush in Garrison, Fermanagh. When his body was finally recovered, it was found to have been mutilated by his captors, the skull crushed, the jawbone shattered.
No cause was served by these murders other than the cause of evil; their murderers were spared both obloquy by historians and justice by the State.
It is one thing for the killers to have dehumanised their victims; that is what happens in all wars. It is quite another for society at large to have accepted this self-serving exculpation. By doing so, by allowing the insane and utterly unproductive violence of this period to be painted largely in tones agreeable to those who had perpetrated it, the victims of terrorism were written out of history. That great secret of 1919-21/22 - that policemen were not bloodless, unfeeling ciphers but human beings, doing their duty as they saw right - enabled the creation of a culture of justifiable homicide to take political root. Is it surprising that when I wrote last year about the fate of Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick, so senselessly murdered in 1997, I received a letter from a reader (in Sligo, no less) sneering that if the dead man had stayed at home, he'd be alive today?
Humane narrative
Richard Abbott's Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922 joins Peter Hart's The IRA and its Enemies as a major landmark in creating a true and humane narrative of the period in question, rather than one based on the selective morality and the convenient amnesia of the apologists of violence. It is a tragedy that it wasn't written in 1966: but then of course, in 1966, it would not have been published. We had for so long a political culture which revered ignorance and violence alike; and that imbecilic reverence was in due measure rewarded, once again, by an utterly unholy war.
That war seems to be over; but will its perpetrators win the peace, as their predecessors did after the last time Ireland went mad? They will if they are allowed to. Disarmament didn't start with the Good Friday Agreement, and history didn't stop. The challenge for democrats is the creation of a political culture which is uncompromisingly against violence. Is this what is happening in Sligo, county of the Mullaghmore massacre?