Dealing with the IRA in this extraordinary vessel SS Peace Process is rather like being on a yacht in a high storm with a crew member who appears to be deranged, writes Kevin Myers. He does a hornpipe when you ask him to batten down hatches, and he climbs to the crow's nest when you ask him to check the bilges.
Ask him to furl the topgallant (or whatever the damn thing is called), and he's solemnly hurling the anchor overboard.
The other problem is that you are critically undermanned: without him aboard, you will certainly be overwhelmed. Anyway, for an awful lot of the time, he does really seem to understand the language you're using - until, that is, you're hit by a huge sou'wester and you ask him to lash the helm, at which point he promptly slips below to make some pea soup, bawling sea shanties as he does so.
We all know, no IRA, no peace process. Yet time and time again, the IRA shows its morality is utterly different from ours; and making the two meet is like trying to cram a circuit-board for a Hitachi satellite navigation aid into a Panasonic depth-finder on your yacht. In fact, most people, at some level or other, understand that an ethics disjunction is inevitable, which explains why pro-peace-process politicians have been making approving noises over the recent IRA apology for the hundreds of civilians it killed. Better than nothing, what?
Killing of innocents
No, it's not. There wasn't a week in the past eight years when the IRA couldn't have apologised for the killings of innocents, fully and abjectly. Gusty Spence did so, and without timing it to the loyalists' advantage. But Sinn Féin-IRA have done differently. Their apology has pre-empted the numerous projected programmes this weekend about Bloody Friday, 30 years on. More than that, their declaration has shifted the focus of political attention away from themselves and their numerous violations of the peace process back onto Tony Blair and David Trimble. Their confession of murder, bizarrely enough, has in their own eyes even placed them on the high moral ground.
Thus the bones are on the table again, played as an ace of trumps, decades after they were first laid on the green beige for precisely the same purpose. Then the carnage in Belfast showed how ferocious the IRA could be; now the same dead are being recycled, this time to show the humanitarian heart that burns within the republican movement. And with that item on the agenda dealt with, goes the game-plan, let us proceed to the next item. Because, as of last Tuesday, according to IRA logic, Bloody Friday has been dealt with.
Apologise away
No it hasn't. You can't just apologise the dead away, and then proceed as if your fulsome words of apology have raised them from the clay and breathed life into their broken cadavers. Nor can you use them to wriggle off the hook on which you have put yourselves with your involvement in Colombia, with your murders, your punishment beatings, your forcible expulsions, and your continued importation of guns two years after decommissioning was meant to have been completed.
(Last year you imported the Russian AN-94, the most powerful rifle in the world. In sniper-mode, it fires two high-powered rounds a microsecond apart, the first to shatter body armour, the next to kill its wearer; it can even disable armoured vehicles. You got 20 of them. Why?)
Oh to be sure, the republican movement has many people in it dedicated to peace, and far from unsaying the flattering words I said about Alex Maskey earlier this week, I will merely add that since I wrote them, I have learnt more details about his generous behaviour as mayor of Belfast. He is an honourable gentleman, and I wish him well. ("Cancel The Irish Times!" comes from the roar from Belfast City Hall).
But this issue isn't personal. It's political, and politics in the North is now about the survival of David Trimble. Unionists will simply not accept last Tuesday's apology as the end of the affair. At worst, they won't see the genuine contrition that those who organised Bloody Friday apparently - if only finally - feel. At best, they will ask as I ask: why was that contrition so artfully and so guilefully deployed to political advantage? Did not the thousand or so civilians killed by the IRA, and the tens of thousands of their family members, not deserve a gesture unsullied by the goal of political gain for their killers? Could not an apology have come without advantages to the apologiser? The evil of Bloody Friday was not merely in the deeds of the day, but in the awesome threshold it represented. The IRA passed it unflinchingly, to do the same, for month after month, year after year, down the decades, so that there were not enough dawns in the week or even the month to give each atrocity a distinguishing day.
Central atrocity
So the war itself, far more than any particular vileness within it, was the central atrocity, and every death within it was meaningless. Nothing was achieved. Scores of thousands of lives were wrecked and billions of pounds in Ireland and Britain were squandered. Only the most casuistic practitioner of a thoroughly diseased priestcraft could supervise the crowded conveyor belt of death beneath him, and point at odd corpses here and there, crying, "Justified! . .justified! . .justified!" Meanwhile, the crumpled heaps of unjustified deaths shuffle off into a blissful amnesia, just like all the victims of republican violence throughout history.