IT WAS something of a surprise to pick up the Sunday Times in Paris and read in a column from Eoghan Harris that I come from a "rabidity republican family". This was news to me and no doubt news to my family too.
Words. They are such dangerous things in Irish life, and we use them so freely, without regard for consequence. Yet words heaped with enough obloquy, larded with sufficient double meaning, spiced with incomprehension, can cause doubt, hatred, murder. People we dislike we call rabid people with the same qualities of perseverance and single minded dedication and absolute conviction whom we admire we call unswerving, loyal, true.
Careful of Words
We should be careful of words, but we are not. Maybe it is impossible to be careful to use words accurately when we, have the continuing bizarre courtship of the twin faces of the Janus like Sinn Fein-IRA by the political establishments of both the Republic and Britain. Meanwhile, everybody is hoping that when Janus stops swirling at the altar, the groom that democracy will find itself married to is the sweetly reasonable face, all poetry and short story writing, and not the diabolical creature, son of Cain, which murders gardai, and nightly smashes limbs and joints and hammers steel rivets through soft tissue of human musculature in punishment beatings in the North.
Neither Janusian face would regard the activities of the IRA as rabid neither would regard the family of another person listed in Eoghan Harris's article, Eilis O'Hanlon, as anything to do with mad dogs. Eilis family is better known than my own modest crew her uncle is Joe Cahill, who was sentenced to, death more than 52 years ago for his part in the murder of a Constable Murphy, a Catholic RUC man in Belfast. He must be the first convicted cop killer ever to be feted on his arrival in America. His colleague, a young lad called Tom Williams, was hanged for the killing.
No doubt loyalists in Belfast called Williams and Cahill rabid I have never had the pleasure of meeting Joe Cahill but everybody I know who has met him says he is very gentle and charming, as no doubt is her sister Siobhan, constantly at the right hand of Gerry Adams.
Killer Face of Janus
Rabid is not a good word to use about human beings. There is only one thing we can do with rabid dogs and that language is the language of the killer face of Janus, the one we hope is turning away from us when this groom stops spinning at the altar rail and we are getting ready for a lifetime's matrimonial bliss with Sinn Fein-IRA. Not that "rabidly republican" ever described my family. My father was in the IRA when he was a young man. He went to the grave without ever telling anyone of this, including my mother. Only 20 years after his death did an old IRA man, Dan Foley, tell me that he had served in the same IRA unit with him. The few remarks I recall him making about the IRA of later years were only dismissively contemptuous.
My mother's family was Fianna Fail. Her brother was briefly Fianna Fail Attorney General and a less rabid, more gentle gentleman has not been made than Tom Teevan. The Tee vans, male or female, were many things, most of them good and none of them rabid. And from this blameless background has been minted a "rabidly republican family"
This might cause wry smiles among those who know me. My brothers and sister live in England, as innocent of republican rabidity as a church mouse. It can cause them no comfort to have such things said about them, be they only out of the brevity which journalism imposes on us who work this trade.
The irritation caused by sloppy words will no doubt pass. What will not pass is what provoked Eoghan Harris's anger. It is the enduring sense that the political establishment of this country, and of Britain, is so keen to keep the two faces of Sinn Fein-IRA in countenance, that it will do nothing to offend the prospective groom standing at the altar, regardless of what he gets up to. There he stands, his nuptial Armalite neatly polished, his ballot paper shimmering with the endorsement of 15 per cent of the Northern electorate, his pockets jammed with Semtex, his head spinning on his worthy republican shoulders like a roulette wheel. Watch it turn. What will we get? Nice poetry reading sessions, fleadheanna on the Falls Road, folksy gatherings and amiable reminiscences, or ruin and misery brought to more lives? Roll up, roll up, folks, and see the action.
Contemptuous Indifference
What lessons have these people learned? They have learned that when one of its, members murders a member of the Oireachtas and escapes from jail and does not do his time, he will not be expected then to serve that time. They will know that when a journalist asks the Department of Justice about this matter, as I did, the Department gives no information whatsoever, then or since. Nothing. It behaves with the same contemptuous indifference to the rule of law and to the right of journalists to ask questions that one might expect in Batista's Cuba.
The IRA blows Canary Wharf apart, murdering two people. What policy is pursued? A policy of keeping Sinn Fein in countenance, lest the Janusian head is frozen, Cain face forwards. A member of the Garda Siochana is murdered by the IRA. What is the response? Do we hear genuine anger from the Government, do we hear the cold contumely of unmitigated indignation?
We do not. Promises have been violated, understandings treated with contempt, yet still we treat with those who hold us in contempt. Government policy has been contaminated by the desire not to be beastly to the Provos. Central political will has been etiolated so that it is invisible. In the absence of clear leadership, popular opinion is bemused. The republican leaders who have done this, whatever they are, cannot be called rabid. Watch them. They are masters, and infinitely cleverer and more determined than those who oppose them.