SO if the IRA can murder a member of the Garda Siochana without general punishment, and if Fianna Fail argues even now that no measures should be taken which might alienate the militarists of the IRA, why criminals not murder journalists? Why not? Why should the use of murder not spread to those who do it not for Ireland but for themselves? Why argue that one form of murder is, well, okayish, but declare another entirely out of bounds? Do you think ordinary criminals think like that? They know that guns work. They compel obedience and instil fear and end lives, neatly and swiftly.
Kalashnikov kultur has spread outwards from the ranks of the IRA and into the criminal community. We treat with one; the example is given, and followed. Why should it not be? What logical reason is there for the organisation which murdered Jerry McCabe being treated differently from the organisation which murdered Veronica Guerin? There is none; and those who planned the killing of Veronica follow the logic of the gun, the fear it commands, the obedience it spreads, in the same sequence in which the IRA has been the gun's pioneer.
Sinn Fein/IRA are the social models for the criminal gangs in Dublin who have watched, in awe, impressed and encouraged, as the IRA runs the ghettos of the North with breeze block and hammer, baseball bat and gun. Never mind their ends being different. That is irrelevant. It is the method which enchants, beguiles; it is effective, it confers power on its user, and ultimately provides social control. Entire groups of people can be moved and urged to behave in ways they would not other wise behave.
Social Terror
It is important to realise that, though the ambitions of such nihilistic, totalitarian groups one criminal, the other political - might be completely opposed, their means mirror one another. The methods of inflicting social terror, of causing spies to be set in every community and of forming concentration camps for the politically unreliable were pioneered in this century not by the Nazis but by Feliks Dzerzhinsky the Pole who ran the Soviet secret police, the Cheka. His methods were admired by the Nazis and, in due course, were emulated.
The captive people of the working class areas of Dublin can now feel the warm breath of two forms of organised crime breaching on their future. One is the IRA. The other is the Irish mafia, who have recently murdered, in a cold and clinical way, some 15 men in Dublin. These were working class men, and they were seen as dispensable. Nobody cared. Women were murdered, mostly in unpremeditated deeds by their husbands or boyfriends, and there was a steady crescendo of alarm. The real alarm should have been about the planned murder of working class males.
There was none. Now we know we have in our midst in Dublin contract killers who murder without scruple or remorse. But we have had such killers in our midst for 25 years - and because they were IRA we did not ask serious questions about what on earth was going on that such deeds were possible; that such men were possible; that their repeated escapes from justice were possible.
Clouded Judgment
It is all possible, as now we know, and possible because we made it so. We have allowed fudge and confusion and moral uncertainty to cloud our judgment of the deed. Murder is murder is murder. Always, always, always. But our wretched pusillanimity before the hand of Cain has caused us to refine murder in all sorts of disgusting and wicked ways. Do you know it is the law of Ireland - the law - that we would not extradite the killer of such as Veronica Guerin for such a murder done in Britain if political motive were claimed? The law. She was shot with a handgun. Our courts and our laws have said that, if handguns were used in a politically connected murder, a person accused of that murder may not be extradited. That is the law. And that is contemptible.
Have governments attempted to close loopholes on this? Have they sought to tighten extradition rules? Have they genuinely attempted to bring the IRA to heel? They have not. Court proceedings are treated as if they are penalty shoot outs: if the State misses, in some detail in documentation, the case is thrown out and never heard again. We treat murder frivolously; and, treated thus, murder therefore treats us the same. There is a co relation.
Throughout the ceasefire, the Garda Special Branch reported that IRA activity, recruitment, training, drilling continued unabated. The Government ordered that no action be taken, lest the ceasefire be jeopardised, though that very activity showed that, in the long term, it was null and void. Equivocation, fudge, appeasement finally enabled the IRA to portray the Canary Wharf bomb as John Major's bomb. But for the line drawn so splendidly in the sand by Commissioner Culligan, the IRA might successfully have argued that Heavens Above, That Nasty Business in Adare Had Nothing To Do With Us. Indeed, their propaganda machinery had got the more gullible and the fellow traveller believing that the SAS had murdered Jerry McCabe.
Living in Fear
An extraordinary climate has been created in Ireland. Following a recent anti IRA column I received a large and complimentary private mailbag. Every single letter, without exception, insisted on confidentiality: those who criticise me write to the editor, knowing no fear. Nor should they know it; but why should those in agreement with me live in fear of their lives?
Fear belongs to the law abiding in Ireland and to the enemy of fascist nationalism, not to the criminal, not to the terrorist, not to the fellow traveller. The murder of Veronica Guerin is a calculated blow to democracy of the kind which only occurs in countries with fascist regimes or weak central government vainly supervising the antics of fascist gangs. For evil to triumph, it is only necessary for good men to stay silent. The circle of murder has widened to include journalists. It is on its way outward to encircle us all as the seconds slip by. It is time to speak. Midnight chimes.