THE news that a recent prison dispute in the North involves yet another dissident Republican group, the New IRA, would be funny if it weren’t about people willing to kill others who disagree with them.
Brendan Behan’s old quip about the first item on the meeting of any Republican group being ‘when’s the split’ comes to mind but in reality these people aren’t funny at all.
In fact the question is, just who are these people? Who are the people who analyse the current situation in Ireland, in the North of Ireland, and believe that the one course of action that will bring about a 32 county united Ireland is to take up arms? Who are they and how do they reach that conclusion?
On reflection, though, that is clearly the wrong question. I don’t think for one minute that these people believe their actions will result in a united Ireland. What they do believe in though is the cause and the purity of the cause. What they believe is that the absence of violence on behalf of the cause of an Irish Republic is a betrayal.
In other words they believe that if there isn’t some violence going on, if something isn’t being blown up or someone being killed, then we are letting the Republic down. So the aim of carrying on a violent struggle is not to ensure the possibility of a future 32 county Republic.
The aim of the violence is to maintain loyalty to the cause. The aim of the violent struggle is to ensure the survival of the violent struggle. This is not loyalty to a 32 county Ireland but loyalty to violence.
At the moment we can watch our daily news and wonder as Israel blows up civilians or Hamas executes people outside a mosque or the Islamic State behead people in the dust in front of cameras and wonder how such violence can be.
We can only be bewildered as to how such murderous intent exists. But I can recall even in my own life civilians being blown up, people being killed coming back from church, and people being murdered in the dirt in front of the cameras.
I can recall it all being carried out in the name of the Irish Republic. There is really no need to reiterate that Britain and the British Empire carried out many injustices against the Irish people and culture and no need to debate the fine points of how and when armed resistance was justified.
But it is worth remembering that from the Fenians planting a bomb outside a London prison in 1867 that killed 12 civilians, through the old IRA killing unarmed Irish policemen between 1918 and 1921, to the Provos putting bombs in bins that killed small children, that Irish Republicanism is still a blood soaked thing. That is not conjecture. That is historical fact.
And I am not seeking for a lazy sensationalism here but those who still now, in 2014, cling to a holy belief in the purity of violence for the sake of Ireland’s cause have far more in common with the nihilistic gunmen of the Islamic State than we would like to believe.
Theoretically you could debate whether a united Irish Republic is a desirable thing and you could then debate if the best way to bring that about is through force of arms. But that is not how these people have got here, that is not how the New IRA, has come in to being.
It exists because some people have a loyalty above all to the purity of the armed struggle. They must serve their ideals through violence or betray their ideals. They must wage, on behalf of the Republic, a holy war.
In the room where I write this I have on the wall something that was once my grandmother’s. It is a 1966 copy of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. I think, for what it’s worth, that it is one of the great, revolutionary documents of the last century. It is a noble statement.
A noble, admirable set of aims. As an Irishman I am proud of it. But Irish Republicanism is as built on blood and dismembered human bodies as the British Empire. Not on the same scale, for sure, but so what? Is that all we can say? That we’re not as bad as them?
So the New IRA? It’s comical but it’s not funny. I mean, after all, you might not agree with any of what I’ve argued but does that mean you feel you can kill me?
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