What harm in agreeing terms for a new IRA ceasefire?

THE IRA ceasefire ended one year ago next Sunday. An "unequivocal" restoration of that ceasefire is obtainable on terms that are harmless, but because of British equivocation and unionist obduracy, the opportunity is being missed. That equivocation and obduracy are being egged on by venomous Irish revisionism.

The voices of that revisionism seek to corner us with the proposition that either one is in favour of the IRA campaign of slaughter or one is opposed to the peace process, which is merely an instrument in that campaign. We have been advised that this clear-cut moral choice is akin to the moral choice facing citizens of the Third Reich in opposing or condoning Nazism.

This is puerile rubbish; but not only that, dangerous as well.

Most of us who support the "peace process" do so not because we favour the slaughter campaign of the IRA, but because we do not. We believe that even if the "peace process" is a short-term tactic of the IRA, that in itself is of value in curtailing the slaughter in the short term and undermining the IRA's campaign to continue slaughter in the long term. And even if our confidence in the genuineness of the "peace process" is misplaced, what harm can be caused by that misplaced confidence?

We have already gained a great deal from the "peace process", however bogus it may be or may have been. In the 25 years of violence leading up to the IRA ceasefire on August 31st, 1994, on average about 135 people were killed each year. In the 2 1/2 years since the IRA ceasefire, three people have been killed each year. Even if the IRA/Sinn Fein "peace process" was otherwise a sham, surely the saving of 330 lives, that otherwise would have been lost had the prevailing killing rate continued, is of some value?

It is evident from the latest version of the Hume/Adams proposals that there can be another IRA ceasefire on minimal terms: an undertaking by the British government that Sinn Fein would enter all party talks within weeks of an "unequivocal" IRA ceasefire, subject only to acceptance by Sinn Fein of the Mitchell principles on democracy and non-violence.

Do the certain and potential gains from accepting this offer not far outweigh the potential risks?

THE certain gains include the continuation, at least for the duration of this new ceasefire, of the "peace dividend" in terms of saved lives. The potential gains include long-term peace, the beginnings, of reconciliation and, possibly, in some years time, an agreed settlement which would minimise the possibility of communal violent conflict for a generation or two.

The potential losses include the further alienation of the unionist community, suspicious of any apparent accord between the British government and republicans, and suspicious of the genuineness of the IRA ceasefire. But would such suspicions not subside as the ceasefire persisted and it because apparent that no deal was done by the British and republicans?

It will be argued that acquiescence now in IRA demands for Sinn Fein entry to talks will only harden their conviction that sporadic (or even prolonged) violence can achieve political gains. It will be argued further that the postponement of the "inevitable" confrontation with the "cancer" of irredentist republicanism will make that confrontation only more problematic.

But the IRA has long learned that violence does achieve political gains. The most recent and most vivid example of this was the capitulation by the British government on the terms for Sinn Fein's entry to talks in the immediate aftermath of the Canary Wharf bombing last February. So the pass on that has been sold already.

As for the postponement of an "inevitable" confrontation with irredentist republicanism, why is this inevitable and, even if it is, how does compliance with the "peace process" now undermine the prospects of succeeding in such confrontation at a later time?

Could the revisionists entertain the thought that maybe their analysis is wrong and, if so, that their prescriptions of confrontation is recklessly dangerous?

The price of "confrontation" with the IRA at a time when it is offering peace on terms that, to most of its constituency, will seem minimal, would be very high. Quite simply, a large part of the nationalist population would now see such a confrontation as being, not just with the IRA, but with the nationalist population as a whole. The price would be too high and it would not achieve anything.

But if there were an "unequivocal" IRA ceasefire, resulting in Sinn Fein's participation in talks, and if later the ceasefire were shown to be "bogus", resulting in renewed slaughter, then the perception of the nationalist community would be very different to a "confrontation" with republicanism.

THE problem with the above arguments is that they do not deal with the core focus of the revisionists. Their twisted priority is not peace and the possibility of an agreed settlement, but the defeat and extermination of republicanism and, ideally, its myriad perceived "fellow-travellers". Many of them need it as therapy for their guilt over past associations.

Postscript: In this column last week I commented on how the Sunday Independent undermined an undertaking made by Independent Newspapers on privacy in reporting in its gossip column on the expulsion from school of the son of Mrs Maire Geoghegan-Quinn.

That same gossip column responded last Sunday, without even referring to the point I made. But it recalled that, as editor of the Sunday Tribune, I once published material concerning the private life of a well-known woman and that I had offered the position of gossip columnist to the supposed author of The Keane Edge.

I published the material concerning the woman because, in his autobiography, which the Sunday Tribune was then serialising, Gay Byrne had alleged that this woman was the beneficiary of a sizeable fraud perpetrated upon himself, by a person then deceased. It seemed to me at the time that the dimension of fraud brought the matter from the private into the public arena. I might not make a similar judgment now, but what I did then bears no comparison with the breach of an undertaking on privacy by the Sunday Independent.

At the time of inviting Ms Keane to write a gossip column for the Sunday Tribune she was then the fashion writer for the Sunday Press. I did not expect and would not have permitted her to write or to get someone else to write under her name a column that was "bizarre, perverse, prying, sneering and prurient", to borrow the characterisation of that column by Eamon Dunphy, quoted in an interview last week in the Sunday Tribune.