Duty to Kill

By AM Thursday, December 5, 2013

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Yesterday the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, ignited something of a firestorm with comments widely read as incendiary. He was speaking on Newstalk in relation to the two senior RUC members killed by the Provisional IRA in South Armagh in March 1989 as they returned from a meeting with Garda counterparts in Dundalk. Adams claimed that a laissez faire disregard on the part of the two men for the obvious risk inherent in travelling through a veritable war zone led to both losing their lives. His suggestion has since been construed as meaning that the IRA had a ‘duty to murder.’

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Either Gerry Adams hopelessly fails to understand the mood of Irish society in the South or he grasps it better than anybody else. The most logical reason for him having made the comments that he did about the deaths is that he discerns underneath the voluble discourse of the chattering classes a snoozing affinity with the events of 1916 which can be aroused from its light slumber with a few stirring words as the commemorative clock prepares to strike at the centenary year. If so it is a monumentally big ask.

No researcher yet seems to challenge the common sense assumption that Gerry Adams was on the IRA’s army council at the time of the Breen-Buchanan operation, having a decade earlier served a short tenure as its chief of staff. So in one sense he is defending the operation that the guerilla army he commanded carried out. What surprises is his unusual candor. Normally he is to be found distancing himself from this sort of thing, even on occasion referring to it as murder.

Nor does it appear to have been an isolated throwaway remark. Padraig MacLochlainn, the party’s Justice spokesperson, (the portfolio alone is hugely significant) speaking on Tonight With Vincent Browne, in what looked like a well rehearsed and thought out line, ardently defended the attack on the same grounds. The people who put the RUC men to death he boldly stated:

had a duty as much as Michael Collins and the IRA of the War of Independence, as much as Padraig Pearse and James Connolly … had a right to take a war in the absence of political leadership.

Even those at odds with MacLochlainn over his contribution can hardly dispute that it was vigorous, robust, and not illogical given the sources of historical legitimation for the current 26 county state. To the disdain of everybody else participating MacLochlainn sought to explain the campaign pretty much as the IRA tended to view it. His argument failed to prevail less because of his own logic and more because of his stridency in pushing the case in contrast to the methodical but measured tone applied by a lawyer for the Breen family, John McBurney. Moreover, shooting unarmed and defenceless men, even when they are combatants as both Harry Breen and Bob Buchanan were, while they are visibly trying to surrender is laden with the imagery of war crimes rather than war acts.

As it stands, pumping up the volume about Michael Collins and Padraig Pearse is unlikely to gain traction in a society that marches to the beat of a different drum from that being martially banged by Sinn Fein. The sheer implausibility in screaming "hypocrites" at the Irish political establishment on the grounds that it honours Pearse and Collins, is to be found in Sinn Fein itself demonstrating that every Irish revolution devours its children. The party emulates the very establishment it seeks to assail in its own treatment of those current physical force republicans involved in political violence in the North. Sinn Fein emulates the Dublin establishment's treatment of itself in its unremitting hostility towards those people who shot dead two British soldiers in Masserene, who killed PSNI members Ronan Kerr and Stephen Carroll or prison officer David Black. They have called such people traitors to the people of Ireland.

Padraig MacLochlainn in trying to philosophically justify the IRA’s armed struggle in terms of some equality outcome, was ultimately reduced to explaining gains in terms of objectives never sought. As Browne caustically reminded him the IRA campaign ended with Sinn Fein gifting unionism a major victory. It is this serious discrepancy between what the IRA fought for and what it settled for that both intellectually and ethically undermines the reason for ever having waged the armed struggle in the first place, but more so its long war dimension.

As limited as what Michael Collins might have secured from a republican perspective his achievement completely dwarfs the Good Friday Agreement and accentuates the total failure of the Provisional IRA to remove one square inch of territory from British rule. The enthusiastic embracing of the consent principle which guarantees that the North will only become part of an Irish unitary state when a majority there agrees to that happening makes the deaths of RUC members killed primarily for defending the consent principle all the more futile. Given that the most influential figure on the IRA’s army council was planning such an outcome at the very time Breen and Buchanan were being put to the sword the republican duty was not to kill but to follow Pearse, and surrender in order to prevent further and futile loss of life, volunteers, civilians and enemies alike.