Talking Brownie

By AM Saturday, April 16, 2011

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In the wake of the killing of PSNI constable Ronan Kerr, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams made an offer to talk to armed republicans. Expressing horror – in a fashion that would leave the uninitiated thinking that cop-killing is a thought that never crossed the old caudillo’s mind – at the death of Ronan Kerr, he has offered to engage with those who continue to be governed by the logic he and his colleagues did so much to spawn. Shuffle and shimmy as much as the Provisionals might the ideology of physical force championed by them is the replicator that has produced the mindset for today’s actions.

Is Adams serious with his offer or just playing to a gallery south of the border where he is now a TD? It is foolhardy to assert that armed republicans should not be talked to. The dangers inherent in allowing them to grow more self-referential than they already are through strategies of isolation and marginalisation should be self evident. They are not from some other world which marches to the beat of a different drum we ourselves have never heard. Those who once did what they are doing now can hardly feign unfamiliarity. They live in a world that the current Sinn Fein leadership and the rest of us fashioned.

Few captured this better than the blogger Ardoyne Republican who in his ruminations on the Omagh killing succinctly pointed out:

those who ordered and carried it out were following the same rules of engagement which the Provies followed. They abide by the same Army Constitution as all those Volunteers did in the past, they carry-out similar operations which the Provisionals did before them and their goal is the same. There was no ‘Good Old IRA’, they all existed for the same reason all the other IRAs’ did in the past. To end British rule in Ireland and they did and do use every means at their disposal.

There is no reason that I can think of why armed republicanism might be considered the way to proceed. But to pretend that those within it are something we were not is ludicrous. We are in their genes. If we provided the template for killing Ronan Kerr it is only through a shambolic pretence that we can insist that there is a Chinese wall between we who provided the template and those who continue to use it to such brutal effect.

Adams of course will be told this if he sits down with armed republicans disinclined to listening to a lecture on ‘do as we say not as we do.’ Given past form his idea of dialogue would amount to little more than a monologue in which he would harangue and they would witness; usual hectoring and bullying. The chances of that producing the slightest evolution in thinking away from their current perspective is zilch. And given his foul tackle from behind on Eirigi it seems unlikely that he has the slightest interest in doing something with any shade of ‘oppositional republicanism’ other than goading it.

The Adams gambit seems little more than a stunt; an appeal to a better off section of the twenty six county electorate which he hopes will be sufficiently stupefied into erasing from their memories that under his leadership there were about 300 Northern cops killed compared to the two so far claimed by today’s armed republicans.

Yet it is progress of a sort. That Adams wants to speak to armed republicans in a different tone from that used when his movement spoke to Joe O’Connor earns him at least one Brownie point.