Gloves come off as North debate starts to warm up

THE demand by backbenchers to speak in the debate on Northern Ireland has been so great that an extra day has been allotted to it.

After a first day dominated by speeches from the party leaders, yesterday revealed the mood of front bench members and of those backbenchers who could get time.

After the statesmanlike speech of the Fianna Fail leader, Bertie Ahern, the party clearly felt it was time to take the gloves off and go for the Taoiseach and his "mistakes".

Ray Burke listed the "wrong signals" that John Bruton had sent to the unionists over the Framework Document, refusing to meet John Hume and Gerry Adams together, and then allowing John Major to bin the Mitchell report.

Seamus Brennan caused temperatures to rise on the Government benches when he said he was not going to go along with the "cosy consensus" speeches of the first day's debate. He also listed the Taoiseach's "failures" and how he had no "over riding passion" for the peace process.

Fine Gael's Jim O'Keeffe found this ludicrous. He knew that John Bruton "eats, drinks and sleeps" Northern Ireland.

Liz McManus was alarmed at what she saw as a proposal by Seamus Brennan for a three month "temporary ceasefire" as a precondition for all party talks. Was this Fianna Fail official policy? Or was there a twin track process inside Fianna Fail?

The benign side of Fianna Fail reappeared when David Andrews commended the leadership of the Taoiseach and Tanaiste in recent days when "the ship of State needed to be held steady".

The role of the IRA and how it is dominating the debate alarmed the PDs' Des O'Malley. It had become "noticeable" since Friday's bomb that "many people like to view the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein a two separate entities, one of which is full of "militant baddies" and, the other consisting of "peace loving goodies".

For Mr O'Malley the reality was that there is a "high degree of cross membership between the two organisations", so to suggest that "Sinn Fein is a peace loving organisation that exists primarily to tone down the violent excesses of the IRA is erroneous".

Labour's Decian Bree would not quite agree. For him, the fact that neither Gerry Adams nor anyone else in the republican movement was advised that the IRA ceasefire was about to end would "clearly indicate that the militarists on the IRA council in effect carried out a military coup on the political leadership of the republican movement".

Ambivalence towards physical force in the Irish psyche preoccupied Charlie McCreevy (FF) and Brendan McGahon (FG). For the former there was a "schizophrenic attitude" to violence for political ends among Irish people, although it was not popular to say so.

In his own case, one side of his brain abhorred violence, while the other was from a background which could understand it. "How can you understand murder, Charlie? shouted Mr McGahon.

Mr McCreevy envies those politicians who have been able to switch their mind set from being wedded to physical force to now abhorring it. He lavished praise on W.T. Cosgrave as "the most under sung hero" of Irish polities for "letting Fianna Fail enter the House without going through the real letter of the law".

What all this added up to was that there was no point in putting impossible demands on Gerry Adams and risking that he would have to leave .45 per cent of his supporters outside the door

Mr McGahon deplored the "predictable speeches" in this debate which began by condemning the IRA bombing but then displayed the usual "schizophrenia" by going on to "blame the Brits".

Governments here had been "meddling too much" in the affairs of Northern Ireland since the Anglo Irish Agreement, he said. Backbenchers will have more to say today.