Newton Emerson: Letting IRA exist just enough to not exist taints politics

Debate in the Republic on Sinn Féin’s connection to the IRA has centred around a 2015 PSNI and MI5 report.

This is darkly ironic, once the provenance of that report is understood.

By the summer of 2015, Sinn Féin had effectively been on strike at Stormont for three years over welfare reform. Authority was draining from the DUP as a result.

The crisis came to a head that August with an IRA-linked murder in east Belfast, following the murder of a prominent republican four months earlier.

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This made the DUP's position intolerable. Leader Peter Robinson told the UK government to suspend devolution while the matter was examined, otherwise his party would walk out and bring Stormont down.

London called the DUP’s bluff on suspension but agreed to a one-off intelligence report on the IRA. The previous panel for producing such reports, also based on PSNI and MI5 intelligence, was no longer available. It had been wound up in 2011 after concluding the IRA was committed to politics and retained only enough structure and leadership to uphold this commitment.

The one-off assessment had to stretch that conclusion around the latest murder. Published in October 2015, it found the murder was not sanctioned by the IRA leadership, which meant acknowledging the IRA still had a leadership, albeit one with a “wholly political focus”. A tortuous line about republicans “believing” this leadership still directed Sinn Féin got around the fact nobody would believe the IRA had no direction over Sinn Féin.

The DUP accepted the findings with unseemly haste and a deal to resurrect Stormont, bravely entitled Fresh Start, was signed a month later.

From the vantage point of Northern Ireland, it is bizarre for this to be cast back up in the Republic as a reason to exclude Sinn Féin from government, or for Sinn Féin supporters to see it as a plot to sullen the party's name. Those were the opposite of the report's intentions.

It is tempting to say, only slightly facetiously, that southerners lack experience in the nuances of the peace process but will soon acquire the necessary sophistication.

However, the northern approach is hardly an unqualified success.

Letting the IRA exist just enough to not exist is an absurdity that continues to drip poison into politics and the rule of law. On the specifics of 2015, neither murder has been solved and a murder attempt took place in the same area only last month.

A crucial lesson from the peace process is that republicans respond to pressure. Arguably, they have never responded to anything else

More generally, the credibility of the PSNI has been undermined by ignoring a proscribed organisation. To some extent, this issue gets worse as Sinn Féin’s engagement with the police gets better. A tipping point came last November when the new paramilitary monitoring panel set up under Fresh Start managed to report without mentioning the Provisional IRA at all.

The media asked the PSNI if its assessment had changed since 2015, the PSNI tried to duck the question and an escalating farce ensued. Two weeks ago, chief constable Simon Byrne was ridiculed after telling Stormont he could not comment on the status of the Provisional IRA, despite having commented on dissident groups proscribed under the same legislation. Alliance justice minister Naomi Long was dragged into the dispute. Unionists increasingly interpret this as bias, while loyalists use it to politicise any police action against them.

The rot has now spread to the Republic, where some are asking why Garda Commissioner Drew Harris confirmed the 2015 report when asked by a journalist, instead of saying "no comment".

His northern counterpart had tried that the week before and only made matters worse.

The toleration of the duality of the republican movement has handed Sinn Féin a Putinesque ability to disrupt and confuse. It can hardly avoid exploiting this power, granted to it in part by successive Irish governments.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil need to have a frank conversation with the Irish public about what they have considered good enough in Belfast, what more they now require of Sinn Féin in Dublin, and why.

Handled well, this could become an agreed basis for the next phase of the peace process, building on past efforts in Northern Ireland. Many in Sinn Féin would see the advantages of normalisation, or at least be prepared to bargain over them.

But any carrot must come with a stick. A crucial lesson from the peace process is that republicans respond to pressure. Arguably, they have never responded to anything else.

In 2015, it was gardaí who identified a crucial pressure point. While the PSNI and MI5 were concocting sophistries on army council control, a report from Harris's predecessor, Nóirín O'Sullivan, dismissed the IRA leadership issue "in this jurisdiction". Instead, it noted the IRA remained heavily involved in organised crime in the Republic, with €28 million recovered from more than 50 individuals by the Criminal Assets Bureau.

The best way to put the squeeze on shadowy figures might be from the bottom up.