Another ‘Pathetic Grubby Little War’
Parliamentary Brief December 2009
The decision of the Sinn Fein leadership to become part of the British administration it had earlier unleashed the IRA against was supposed to herald an end to all republican political violence. Gerry Adams, the alpha and omega of Provisional IRA political violence, would be allowed to dig deep into British pockets in return for getting rid of the IRA. His party would ensure that the British state got the protection it paid for. No more armed attacks on its forces or trespassing on its property.
Things haven’t quite worked out that way. Both Sinn Fein and the British state could have learned something from Harold MacMillan when he said ‘events, dear boy, events.’ And it is those pesky things termed events that are causing concern within the wider British establishment in Northern Ireland including Sinn Fein; on average one armed event a day.
One PSNI member speaking to a Belfast newspaper in November claimed that ‘nothing about the real threat on the ground comes out to the public, but the reality is that it is very, very high.’ Many times throughout the period when Hugh Orde led the PSNI the threat was also said to have been very high. But up until March it was a threat that never quite proved effective. Then in the space of a few days two of the remaining IRAs between them killed three members of the British security services. Since then they along with others have kept their state adversaries busy to the point that there are some areas where the police dare not enter without ballistic body armour. There are other regions into which they fear intruding at all as was made manifest when a PSNI patrol turned back rather than confront a Real IRA team manning a roadblock in South Armagh.
According to Suzanne Breen, one of the North’s better informed journalists currently commenting on the ‘dissident threat’, republican activists of both the military and political variety, are being targeted at a level surpassing that seen during the Provisional IRA campaign.’ Stop and search procedures under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act are on the increase with 10,265 people having been subjected to the measure in one three month period compared to 1,657 for the same period a year earlier.
A matter of weeks ago Belfast police were under instruction to carry out surveillance on ten republicans suspected of being of a military disposition. Now that number is said to have trebled. If surveillance reflects the rate of recruitment to the armed dissidents groups throughout Northern Ireland, where there are said to be 200 republicans attracting the attention of the intelligence services, then the active IRAs are signalling their intent to stay in the game. Belfast, Derry, South Armagh, North Armagh, Fermanagh – the picture is the same; all hotspots that regularly made news features when the Northern conflict was at its height are again grabbing the headlines. It was reported in the Sunday Times that ‘MI5 devotes 60% of its electronic surveillance operations and 15% of its manpower to spying on the dissidents.’ All of which uses up a lot of resources on a problem the Sinn Fein leadership was supposed to have sorted out for the British.
The Northern Irish columnist and historian Brian Feeney is not alone in saying that the strategic objective of armed republicans is to bring the British Army back on the streets so that they can have more targets, as well as causing Sinn Fein embarrassment by a troop presence the party was also meant to have saw the back of. But it is difficult to discern such a strategy amongst a disparate group of activists who belong to at least three different organisations. If there is no organisational unity it is hard to imagine a strategic unity.
The dissidents are not stupid people and it seems unlikely that they are trying to force a greater British military presence which will curb their room for manoeuvre even more than it is at present. They appear to mount operations whenever and wherever they can. They are aware that their campaigns will not force the British to up and leave Northern Ireland. Resisting rather than winning seems to be their raison d’etre. They feel an obligation to put up resistance to what they view as British occupation in Ireland.
Strange as it may seem to many who do not share their republican outlook, in reality all they are doing is following the course of action once prescribed by Gerry Adams the Sinn Fein president who told his followers that while British forces remained in Ireland armed struggle was a necessary and morally correct form of resistance. Adams unleashed a genie from its bottle which no one has been able to squeeze back in.
Nevertheless, it is important to place the ‘dissident threat’ in context rather than blow it out of proportion. The reason it looms large is unrelated to its scale but rather to it being viewed against a backdrop of a much promised peace process dividend: an end to all republican political violence. The performance gap between promise and delivery is amplifying the noise of dissident blasts and gunfire.
In terms of its overall efficacy the current campaign is roughly on the same scale as the Provisional IRA’s own armed struggle in 1997 before it called the ceasefire that led to the Good Friday Agreement. A leading figure in the RUC described that phase of Provisional IRA violence, in which the lives of policemen and soldiers were lost, as ‘a pathetic grubby little war.’
Observers, commentators and politicians could do worse than temper their alarmism.
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