`Real' republicans and the doctrine of double effect

It was the stillness of the main street in Omagh that was most striking on Monday evening. There were about 100 people on the street between the courthouse and the area blocked off by the security forces at about 7 p.m. They stood around in clusters, mainly silent.

There was no traffic, no noise, apart at one point from the crying of a woman who was reading the condolence cards on the bunches of flowers outside Watterson's clothes shop. On the shop's shutters was a notice saying the shop would remain closed until after the funerals of its three shop assistants who were killed on Saturday.

Along a side street I met a woman, walking with her young daughter. Both were crying silently. A little further on a middle-aged man was crying at a bridge.

Omagh seemed consumed by grief that evening. Not yet any anger or outrage, but these will come.

It has been mainly outsiders so far who have called the killers evil, cowardly, mindless, and psychopathic. It is as though they are different from the killers of Enniskillen, Teebane Cross, Bloody Friday, Coleraine, the Droppin Well, Claudy, the customs post at Newry.

Evil they may be, but cowardly hardly. No coward assembles a bomb and drives it primed in a car at risk to his/her own life as well as liberty, all in pursuit of some cause, however crazy that cause may be.

And as for being mindless, perhaps, but in being so they share much of the mental furniture of the rest of us in nationalist/Catholic Ireland.

Like many others, "real republicans" believe that the people of Ireland as a whole have an inalienable right to national self-determination. That this right was asserted first in the Proclamation of 1916, then affirmed in the 1918 election and given full expression in the Declaration of Independence by the first Dail in 1919. They believe everything done since then to frustrate that assertion of national self-determination is illegal.

"Real republicans" believe the denial of this right to self-determination is achieved by the superior military might of the British state and that there is a right on the part of the suppressed national people to oppose by force of arms this subjugation.

As for there being no democratic mandate for the use of such arms, the mandate comes not from the people but from the justice of the cause. Liberation movements everywhere have acted on this premise, including republicans in 1916 and in the Irish War of Independence and the insurgents who rose against Britain in the American revolution.

Thus, for "real republicans" the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Irish people voted in favour of the Belfast Agreement is neither here nor there, The Irish people had no right to do so. The right to national self-determination is inalienable, i.e. it cannot be conceded. Thus no act of concession of such right, as may be in the case in the Belfast Agreement, has validity.

And as for the Omagh atrocity: very likely the "real republicans" believe the deaths of innocent people are regrettable and there was no direct intention to cause such deaths. It was merely an accident of war. The real culprits, they believe, are those who have forced this war upon us: the British. Anyway, doesn't the Catholic doctrine of "double effect" absolve the "real republicans" from moral culpability for these 28 deaths?

There was no intention to cause such deaths and, in the absence of such intention, there is no moral guilt. (Remember the doctrine of "double effect", for instance, that birth control pills would be taken with moral impunity if taken to regulate the menstrual cycle but not for the purposes of birth control, but if birth control was an incidental by-product, then that was OK? The same moral logic that says it is OK to wipe out a few hundred innocent Iraqis or Libyans if the intended target was Saddam Hussein or Col Gadafy?

And as for no cause justifying the use of violence, "real republicans" point out that the usual coiners of that refrain don't believe it even themselves. Apart from pacifists, most people accept that violence is justified in self-defence, and for "real republicans" the defence of the ideal of national liberation is merely an extension of self-defence.

It comes down to this for "real republicans": in every generation for centuries there have been courageous Irish men and women prepared to risk their lives in the cause of Irish liberation, through resort to force of arms. Their sacrifice is all the more glorious when undertaken in the face of misled popular antagonism to the cause.

The problem is that our culture has never challenged most of these beliefs. What is the meaning of this "right" to national self-determination? Who decides what constitutes a nation that has this right, and what happens to people within that nation who do not want to be part of it? Do they, too, have a right to national self-determination? The whole idea of this right to national self-determination is wobbly, incoherent and ultimately dangerous. The fact that it has been around for so long does not make it less so.

As for minorities having the liberty to act violently in the name of the slumbering masses, yes, this is what happened in many of the revolutions we commemorate. But it is pernicious and was pernicious even when their outcomes were welcome. Pernicious because the very act of such revolutions is a defiance of the equality of humankind that supposedly inspires these revolutions.

And, yes, this means that the 1916 revolution was wrong, that the War of Independence was wrong, that the American revolution was wrong, that the French revolution was wrong.

The Catholic doctrine of double effect is another piece of poison that has entered our moral language. Our criminal law has it right: that we should be presumed to intend the foreseeable consequences of our actions. Thus the bombing of Iraq and Libya was evil. The placement of bombs in civilian areas is evil, for an inevitable foreseeable consequence is that innocent people will be dismembered, maybe not in the first bomb or the second, but inevitably sooner rather than later, and Omagh last Saturday was sooner.

Mary McAleese had it right last Sunday when she said there were some people who were immune to the arguments and logic of democracy. That in itself does not make such people evil, but it makes them dangerous to the rest of us, and the rest of us have a right to take special measures to protect each other and ourselves from them. The pity is that such protection was not available to the children, women and men who were massacred on the main street in Omagh last Saturday.

And if this means the reintroduction of internment, so be it. The only argument against it is a pragmatic one: would it cause more harm than good?