"Danny Morrison, the Sinn Fein publicity director who spent five years in jail for republican activities, reads The Walls Came Tumbling Down - A Prison Journal, his book of letters." So runs the weasel-worded, slyly disingenuous words of "Pick of the Day" recommendation in the Sun- day Times last week, referring to an RTE radio programme; and so too runs the process by which terrorism is laundered into "republican activities", and those who have participated in the IRA murder machine make their stately progress into being men of letters.
Whatever Danny Morrison was imprisoned for, it was not "republican activities", but for his role in the abduction and interrogation of an alleged informer. During his trial the court regarded him as the witchfinder-general of the IRA, with little doubt what would have become of the captive had he not been rescued. This is not republicanism; it is moral stillbirth. It is the triumph of green gestapoism.
Respect
Danny Morrison belonged to an organisation which was an antithesis of republicanism, both in this suspended war and in every other wretched war it has started this century. At no stage in the actual, practical agenda of IRA deeds was there a respect for unionism or Protestantism, the true sine qua non of tolerant European republicanism. It surely should not be necessary so close to our recent Troubles to remind ourselves of the ferocious attacks on Protestants, their pubs, their culture and their traditions through 30 years of Northern War; should surely not be, yet surely is.
I grind no axe for loyalist killers; I know them and their wicked works too well. Nor do I exonerate the Northern security forces for their crimes. Nor do I embark upon the futile quest as to who started it. Not do I hunt for unicorns either. But it goes well beyond the sticking point that the most ferocious terrorist campaign in Europe in 50 years can now be consecrated from the broken flesh and the spilt blood of the thousands into the bread and wine of semi-amnesiac autobiographies of the few.
But this is not new. The IRA has lost all its previous wars, yet won the literary peace which followed. The recollections which poured from the pens of former killers after 1919-1922 travelled down the years in the way that the truths of that time never did. If you asked the young leaders of the Troubles from 1969 to name the vital texts which guided them, they would cite the works of Ernie O'Malley, Dan Breen and Tom Barry. These men told of a struggle untroubled by conscience over butchered life or truths concealed. Homicide mingled with falsehood to produce the ennobling legend of the "republican" struggle.
Counter-productive
Hidden in there were the hundreds of innocents whose lives were consumed because they were personally inconvenient, disobedient, ex-soldiers, Protestants or ex-policemen.
There was nothing "republican" about this business, merely violence of mindnumbing and utterly counterproductive futility, in which regard for humanity was sacrificed to appease the cannibal-godheads of the tribe. Even Ernie O'Malley's account of the murder of three young captured British army officers is free of both regret or remorse; it went on to serve as an enduring template of how to treat captured British soldiers.
The really revealing truth about the literature of that time is how little was written from the non-"republican" point of view. When the southern unionist Robinson family - Lennox, Tom and Nora - in Three Homes wrote of the mysterious murder of a young Protestant in West Cork in 1921, they could not, 15 years later, do more than allude to it. "There are several letters in the old steel trunk which relate stories of these times which may interest the future historian, but we are not far enough away from the events they describe to quote them," wrote Nora. "Initials would be but a thin disguise and even now in the re-reading horror revives and it seems but yesterday that these things happened. . .Too grim; too grotesquely awful, it seemed, to be true, and yet true it was."
From the victims, silence; from the seasoned slaughterers a merry stream of reminiscences. As then, also now?
What autobiographies, eagerly promoted by publishers, will there be from the innocent bereaved who, out of the haphazard catastrophe of their lives, might have been able to make sense of the murderous deeds visited on them by our next generation of unrepentant memoirists? None, probably; for in the world of letters, victims of terrorism are merely incidents in terrorist narratives. Meanwhile, terrorists-turned-essayists, with their boundless sense of continuous tense through the events which brought ruin to other peoples' lives are now existentialist chic. They are who, not whom.
Memoirs
Yet even that is true only for certain kinds of terrorist. Would RTE have broadcast any of the memoirs of terrorists who repented and did their bounden duty to bring terrorism to an end by assisting the forces of law and order - Raymond Gilmour, Martin McGartland, Sean O'Callaghan and Eamon Collins? Or is it more likely to serialise the memoirs of those who beat and knifed poor Eamon Collins to death?
The myths and the mythology of war are re-forming once again. Hands which once filled hospital wards and blameless graves might well now be hunting and pecking across the keyboard, with fortunes, respect and celebrity awaiting the successful. Once again, the IRA is winning the peace; but this time, it has not even lost the war.
As the Chinese say: Interesting times.