It is a sobering thought that the biggest single party west of the River Bann in Northern Ireland is organically linked to a paramilitary organisation which abducted, murdered and secretly buried some 20 people. It is a sobering thought that the electors who voted for Sinn Fein did so knowing about these deaths. It is a sobering thought that the political wing of the organisation which did these poor creatures to death is able to raise a million dollars quite openly in the US. It is a sobering thought that so many "civil-liberties" groups wax wrathfully at the use of plastic bullets, anti-terrorist laws, one-week detention, and jury-free trials, but remain silent on the disappeared.
We know the background for this, of course. Everyone is terrified to do anything which will weaken the link of the present leadership of Sinn Fein-IRA; so nothing must be said or done to irritate the IRA into deposing its current leaders and going off and blowing up an English city or two. All very understandable - but this does not mean we should hoodwink ourselves into accepting the self-reinvention which the IRA has been able to perform with astonishing success in recent years.
Travail and misery
The IRA war of over quarter of a century had one sole purpose: to secure a British withdrawal and a united Britless Ireland, none other. Yet those 25 years of travail and misery have now been retroactively magicked into a campaign to have Irish taught in schools in the North or to secure respect for Irish culture or to have Irish nationalism given its place in the sun. One almost expects to wake up one morning and hear that the IRA war was all about the return of the Hugh Lane paintings or the return of the Joyce papers to Ireland. Small cultural war; not many die.
It wasn't small, it wasn't about culture, and thousands died. It was a catastrophe for both parts of Ireland which set the island back decades. And now, to wrap this bloody farce up in a parcel of finality, we are telling a Big Lie about what it was all about, that the fundamental issue was access to democracy, civil rights, Gaelic culture, Irish dancing agus Uncail Tomas Coblaigh and all.
It's just possible that if I thought this Big Lie that we're all telling was going to work, I too might be tempted to go along with it - after all, what does the truth matter if a relatively unimportant lie secures peace? But it doesn't, it didn't and it won't, and reinventing the IRA as an artistic and human rights organisation, and transforming the bloodshed of the past 25 years into a sort of kulturkampfe merely makes some future resurgence of organised and violent stupidity masquerading as patriotic duty more likely.
Unconsulted civilians
All republican violence this century has been anti-democratic. There are no exceptions. The Easter Rising was a devastating attack on the rule of law and of elected government, and it was mythologically so successful that it completely supplanted the political successes peaceful, orderly democracy had already achieved. It also killed several hundred unconsulted civilians in the centre of Dublin, something apologists of the Rising were able to gloss over - even as today apologists are averting their eyes from the miserable horrors of a quarter of a century of war.
The myths of a gallant uprising against a cruel oppressor had begun - never mind for a moment that the cruel oppressor had permitted armed and revolutionary civilians conduct manoeuvres around its headquarters at Dublin Castle, or that only months later was to give a general amnesty, even to those suspected of capital murder, such as Constance Markevitz, who had shot an unarmed policeman in St Stephen's Green.
The 1917 Amnesty set a pattern which has been repeated ever since. Huge successes won by courageous democratically-mandated political action - Home Rule, say, or the Civil Rights Programme in 1970 - are obscured by a needless festival of bloodshed, followed by amnesty, followed by a careful rewriting of history so that unmandated bloodshed becomes mysteriously authorised by retrospective popular will.
Certain of amnesty
Since 1917, all IRA campaigns have been fuelled by a belief in the certainty of an amnesty for wrong-doers if things don't quite work out as they should, even when that belief was wildly misplaced; and who would not break the law if amnesty were around the corner?
We are in the amnesty-rewriting history phase of the cycle of violence now, as we have been before, most especially between 1919-1923, when the IRA got away with killing and secretly burying scores of people it didn't like. If their bodies were ever later found, the press obligingly adopted both IRA terminology and IRA morality and called them "informers".
No more. Democrats cannot again relinquish the duties of writing history to the killers and their fellow-travellers; they cannot pass on to other business while the secretly-buried moulder, their loved ones keening alone. In trying to end these troubles, we are being seduced by the great double A-sign: amnesty and amnesia.
It is that double-A sign which has faithfully prepared the seedbed for fresh troubles in the past, and will faithfully do so again in the future. Democrats must this time insist: public admission of guilt and locations of the remains to the wretched, brutalised loved ones. No less will do, or more of same will follow.