‘Release papers over arms shipment to republicans’
Martin McGuinness’s campaign for the Irish Presidency was badly damaged by being overshadowed by the focus on his IRA past and his possible role in a number of murders.
Sinn Fein’s narrative on the Troubles was contested in the media in a way the party is not used to in Northern Ireland. In the wake of its disappointing performance, leading figures in the party have claimed that the issues of the past and particularly of victims need to be addressed in a systematic way.
While its proposal for an independent international truth commission is unlikely to be acceptable to the British government, some more coherent and balanced way of dealing with the past is needed.
The rationale behind the Eames-Bradley call for some form of Legacy Commission to deal with the past was that without it, past instances of violence and the victims they created would continue to cause polarisation and division as each community focussed on those incidents and victims they considered important.
The danger was that the past would become simply a resource to be mined for ammunition in a continuation of the ‘war’ by another means.
The response of many unionists to these arguments has been generally negative. Unionists tend to fear that ‘truth recovery’ will end up focusing on the agents of the state while neglecting the role of republican and loyalist terrorists. The implicit assumptions and language of those supporting some sort of truth commission have not helped.
Parallels with truth commissions in former military dictatorships in Latin America and with the transition in South Africa where the violence and human rights abuse came predominantly from state agents are inappropriate to Northern Ireland where terrorists were mainly responsible.
The peace process involved democratic politicians making significant political and ethical compromises with the paramilitary organisations in order to get and maintain ceasefires. Part of this process was the acceptance of former terrorists’ narratives and terminology so that those involved in paramilitary organisations are now ‘former combatants’ treated for all intents and purposes as playing a similar role in the Troubles to members of the security forces.
This is a flagrant distortion of history. The Provisionals were responsible for 1,781 deaths during the Troubles whilst the figures for the Army, RUC and UDR are 301, 50 and eight respectively.
From this perspective unionist negativity on proposals to deal with the past is understandable. However, unionists are overly defensive.
It is true that some of those who promote ‘truth recovery’ argue that this is part of a broader process of reconciliation through the emergence of an integrated and broadly acceptable version of the past. Given the depth of disputes over history of Northern Ireland this is most unlikely.
However, it is possible to envisage the creation of mechanisms which, while avoiding overly legalistic and expensive inquiries, would do much to provide a rigorous and comprehensive stock-taking of our past. Owen Paterson’s suggestion of the use of a commission of historians is an interesting and potentially fruitful avenue of progress.
Such an approach would enable us to take the longer term view of what occurred during the Troubles and above all to integrate all the different agencies and individuals involved into the analysis in a balanced and objective way. Without such an approach we will continue to have the knee-jerk and one-sided use of terms like ‘collusion’. Unionists tend to resent the use of the term when used only to refer to the British state and its agents.
Some unionists have pointed to the 1970 Arms Trial in the Republic as an example of collusion on the part of senior Irish politicians and agencies in the creation and arming of the Provisional IRA. The verdict of historians who have written on this episode is less clear-cut.
What is agreed is that two government ministers, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, did favour a direct intervention by the Irish army into Northern Ireland to generate an international incident and force a British rethink on partition.
They did this in the aftermath of serious violence in Londonderry and Belfast in August 1969. The Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, strongly opposed any intervention and the army command pointed to their lack of capacity to do more than hold Newry for a few hours given the overwhelming firepower of the British army and local security forces.
Despite this Haughey and Blaney used a substantial portion of the £100,000 which the government had allocated for the relief of northern Catholics displaced by the violence for the clandestine purchase of arms on the continent. These were to be imported into the Republic for transfer to ‘defence committees’ in Northern Ireland. The committees were often controlled by members of the recently formed Provisional IRA.
The main cache of arms was impounded in Antwerp but it is possible that at least some of the relief money was spent on arms and explosives that did reach the Provisionals. At this stage, without the Irish government making more of key documents of the time available it is impossible to come to any definitive conclusion on the episode.
Lynch was forced to sack the key ministers responsible when the former head of the Irish Special Branch leaked the information about the plot to the leader of the opposition in the Dail. However, when the ministers involved and others were arrested and brought to trial the charges against Blaney were dismissed and Haughey and his co-plotters were acquitted.
Lynch, who was personally appalled at the idea of giving guns to IRA men, was hostage to public opinion in the Republic which at that time regarded the IRA not as terrorists but as defenders of beleaguered Catholic communities in Northern Ireland.
He was also a prisoner of the anti-partitionist ideology of the Irish state. The Irish Press, the newspaper supportive of Fianna Fail, was at the time edited by Tim Pat Coogan and saw the outbreak of violence in the North as an opportunity to ‘complete’ the national revolution.
The conditions were being created where for the next quarter of a century the Provisionals were able to exploit the territory of the Republic as a relatively safe haven to evade security forces in the North, plan operations, raise funds and import weapons.
Even when attitudes in the Republic towards Northern Ireland became more realistic, Irish governments were wary of being portrayed as ‘collaborators’ if they took measures to improve cross-border security cooperation with the authorities in the North.
The Provisionals’ use of the territory of the Republic was a direct challenge to successive Irish governments. The IRA killed members of the Irish security forces who got in their way and threatened and intimidated others.
The most damaging event in Martin McGuinness’s presidential campaign came when he was confronted by David Kelly, whose father, an Irish soldier, had been shot dead along with a young garda, when they came upon the gang holding the kidnapped businessman, Don Tidey.
The southern dimension of the Troubles has also been raised by the Historic Enquiries Team investigation into the Kingsmills massacre and the Smithwick Tribunal’s investigation into possible collusion by members of the garda in the deaths of Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan.
A balanced and comprehensive assessment of the role of the British and Irish states’ role in the Troubles should be a fundamental element in any ‘truth recovery’ process. Both governments could take the lead in this matter by establishing a commission of historians and legal experts to which should be made available all official documents which relate to the violence of the Troubles.
We will never have an agreed version of the history of the Troubles.
However, what such a commission could do was make it impossible to produce one-sided, self-justifying narratives and expect to be taken seriously. It would not be the sole mechanism for dealing with the past but it would be a sure foundation stone.
l Henry Patterson is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster
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Comments
There are 65 comments to this article
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Adamwilliam
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 10:18 PMLivonia I hope your counselling goes well, your case worker of course will have their work cut out in your case just to get you to admit that you have such a built in bigotry which you so far can not come to terms with. You say you will be in Hamilton next spring, we have flown in and out of there and Pearson a number when our younger son was in Queen's. Our elder son is now in Montreal and we also have family in Ottawa. When our elder son was based in Nova Scotia for two years we just loved the scenery all over the Maritimes and Newfoundland. I think you already know that the orange order in Canada is just about officially dead. In Ireland as a whole I feel that it is getting to be a better place each and every day to live in and a lot of the reason for this is that more and more there is getting to be more of a clear separation between Church & State. In NI I also would like to live long enough to see political parties that are not just defined by their religious or unionist nationalist background. In Canada away back the Conservative party was more or less seen as the protestant party and the Liberal party the party of catholics, this thankfully has not been the case for years.
Livonia
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 08:25 PMMy apologies Adamwilliam for the fact that some glich in the webpages of Johnston Publishing have converted the apostrophe and the exclamation mark into something else. I trust you will still find the post legible. The a^ is actually an exclamation mark or an apostrophe.
Livonia
Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 08:15 PMThank you Adamwilliam, for your concern for my welfare. I believe you are more in need of help than I am. However my friend is optimistic and suggests that you are on the way to at least a partial recovery. He points to various indicators. For example your use of the âQueenâs Englishâ has improved immensely in the last few weeks. He believes that this is in no small part a result of our exchanges of recent months. You have learnt a number of new words, although sometimes when you use them, you appear to simply mimic the phrases of others. But that is in some ways a good thing, and is how we as children learnt to converse. You no longer rant in short ungrammatical phrases. (I havenât noticed you scream ooKKK! in recent weeks). You do occasionally indicate some logical train of thought. And you do construct quite an intelligent sentence when you try. Most importantly however there are small indications that you are becoming aware that the ânasty unionistsâ were after all not to blame for all the ills that beset the people of Northern Ireland. As I pointed out, many suffered. A little sensitivity on the part of those like you who avoided the violence would go a long way towards easing the memories of that suffering. There are even occasional indicators that you are becoming aware that schoolyard name-calling will never get you respect or consideration for your point of view. I have come to like you a little Adamwilliam â just a little, donât do cartwheels!. You respond reasonably well to some winding up. But you must learn a lot more of the history of the country you claim as your birthplace. I would not expect you to learn it formally as I did but it would help you in a proper debate. I will actually be in Canada next spring (in Hamilton or nearby probably). We should meet; it could be quite interesting. There are Orange Lodges in Hamilton I understand, would you recommend a visit to one? By the way, what is your handicap (golf â in case you think I am being rude!)? And I will leave you with a statement from my earlier post which I think you at heart agree with, (you indicate this with your comments about the de Valera era) âThe demand that the Dublin government should purge its soul must be maintained. That is where the evil that sustained the hurt to Northern Ireland began; that is where it must finishâ. And then perhaps Adamwilliam we can move on to a confederation of two Irish states within one united group of (British?) or (European?) mutual and co-operative societies with no rabid nationalism of any kind.
Adamwilliam
Monday, December 5, 2011 at 10:46 PMLivonia I think you will tie up your shrink for months if not years during and well after your golf game and I just hope he can get through to just why you are so bigoted and full of deep ingrained hatred. You are off to a positive start in admitting you have a serious problem and seeing this shrink!
Livonia
Monday, December 5, 2011 at 10:24 PMQuote from “Adamwilliam Sunday, December 4, 2011 at 11:12 PM Livonia I only reminded you that your repeated in every post anti Nationalist and unionist oo always right tripe in not required.. . . ” You irritate me occasionally Adamwilliam, not only because of your uninformed and ignorant knowledge of the situation in Northern Ireland, but through your weirdly constructed sentences and childish use of the English language. Added to this is your unimaginative use of words and phrases. You seem always to follow others and repeat their comments as if you were incapable of original thought. I have this mental picture of a frustrated ten-year old bully in a primary school playground. It is not very good at English, it is a poor communicator, it has very low self-esteem, and it has few real friends. Is it called Adamwilliam? I am meeting a friend for some golf tomorrow. He is a mental health specialist. Would you mind awfully if we discussed your case?
MOD
Monday, December 5, 2011 at 10:11 PMAw No need to look in a mirror. I just look at your posts and see all the hatred and bigotry displayed there in front of me. Every post you make is there for all to see and by no stretch of the imagination could you be described as fair-minded. Of course its nothing new, all republicans are the same, as they do no wrong and everything is always the fault of somebody else. I have never said that unionists were faultless but neither were nationalists and republicans. But you are so blinded by your hatred of all things unionist that you won't see the faults on the republican and nationalist side. But carry on with your rants its another point to the unionists everytime you post here.
Livonia
Monday, December 5, 2011 at 09:28 PMMy Dear Adamwilliam. I tend to agree with the opinion of MOD. Every post you make shows your bigotry, and more significantly, your absolute lack of knowledge of the true situation of Northern Ireland. Your strange and bitter hatred is very evidently gained from imbibing the propaganda of the Ourselves Alone organisation (Sinn Fein and their murder wing the IRA). You are beyond any reasoning. The people of Northern Ireland had a right to be permitted to live in peace. Even from 1922 and the incursions of the De Valera faction (surreptitiously backed by their bitter opponents the Collins faction – it could only happen in Ireland!), into the territory of Northern Ireland as they dealt out murder and mayhem to those they saw as “non-Irish”, the ordinary people have had to fight for their lives. Have you ever seen a child eviscerated by flying glass Adamwilliam, or the torso of what was once a middle-aged mother who thought she was at a party, now baked to a lump of cinder by bombs and incendiaries placed by your “heroes of Ireland”. You have no idea Adamwilliam, and should be ashamed of your insensitivity. The people you so blindly malign are ordinary folks born into a difficult situation. They stood against hatred, in defence of their families and their country, and many died or were horribly maimed. No argument, BY ANYONE, will justify the years of murder. What courageous stance have you ever taken for another, Adamwilliam? Would you like to tell us? The demand that the Dublin government should purge its soul must be maintained. That is where the evil that sustained the hurt began; that is where it must finish.
Adamwilliam
Monday, December 5, 2011 at 09:01 PMMOD when you want to see a bigots bigot you just have to look in the mirror ! You and your like minded friend Livonia likely could get in the Guinness Book of World Records as two of the biggest bigots in the world.
MOD
Monday, December 5, 2011 at 08:31 PMNah Aw don't think I would need them to handle you. If you want to keep openin your mouth and showing yourself up for the bigot you are...be my guest.
Adamwilliam
Monday, December 5, 2011 at 05:54 PMMOD despite what bigoted ignorant people like you say I have zero intention of "keeping my trap shut" as you threatened in your post number 52. Now if this still was the old non democratic Northern Ireland where only some had rights I guess you could have had "your" b specials special branch of the RUC UDR harass my family or me.
Adamwilliam
Sunday, December 4, 2011 at 11:12 PMLivonia I only reminded you that your repeated in every post anti Nationalist and unionist oo always right tripe in not required.
Livonia
Sunday, December 4, 2011 at 10:48 PMAdamwilliam I must remember to keep my posts brief. As you have pointed out long sentences and detailed responses are a little too much for you. You did once before remind me of this but I am afraid I forgot. You have my apologies; I tend to mix with much more erudite people. By the way I did once suggest you read a little Oscar Wilde.
Livonia
Sunday, December 4, 2011 at 10:27 PMSo I am “pro-unionist” then Adamwilliam? That would appear to be crime in your book. But then you clearly believe Unionism and Unionists never had a place in your “Ireland”. I agree with you that we could have had normal government in Northern Ireland years ago, from 1922 in fact. But the hatred and bigotry and illegal claim on Northern Ireland territory of the neighbouring country ensured there could be no normal relationship. You know Adamwilliam that that is where the blame lies – but you cannot admit it of course. As MOD points out things like the stupidity of the Roman Catholic Church in 1923 in demanding that staff of their schools in Northern Ireland should be paid by the new and virtually bankrupt Dublin government in a futile attempt to checkmate Stormont (who were perfectly happy to pay those salaries – and of course did and still do), contributed to much of the ill-feeling. Why do you hate so much Adamwilliam?
MOD
Sunday, December 4, 2011 at 10:25 PMLivonia, thanks for pointing that reference to me by Aw. Doesn't seem to be there now though. Its only to be expected from him. He has shown his narrow bigoted hatred towards the entire Protestant people no matter how hard he trys to dress it up otherwise. Aw you still continue to talk tripe when you go on again about the 'un-democratic' unionists. The fact is the unionists were elected democratically. That is a fact no matter what spin you put on it. They were democratically elected and you talk rubbish. Come out of the playground and grow up and learn to be a grown-up instead of continually crying about imagined wrongs all committed on the one side only. But as I say its the typical rebublican nationalist to get off a 'sticky wicket' and twist the subject round to the old 'bad unionists' again. The article concerned the behaviour of the Dublin regime not the unionists of Ulster. But you seen fit to ramble on again about something that had nothing to do with the above article. You have no defence of the Dublin goverment to offer. If Livonia is right about you not living here, then you'd be better shutting your trap and letting people who do live here get on with their lives without a busybody from Canada sticking their nose in.
Livonia
Sunday, December 4, 2011 at 09:58 PMQuoted from “Adamwilliam Sunday, December 4, 2011 at 05:17 PM Now MOD I want an answer from you . . . . . “ That sounds ominous MOD. Perhaps if you would like to retain your kneecaps you should comply! “I want”, the eternal cry of the bullyboy.
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