Patrick J Roche: Appeasement of terrorism corrupts the political, legal and moral foundations of society

The calculation by the so-called ‘constitutional nationalists’ was that the presence of IRA/Sinn Fein in any negotiations to end the conflict would secure the ‘all Ireland framework’ demanded by the SDLP and the southern political parties and be acceptable to IRA/Sinn Fein.

The ‘peace process’ was therefore, in effect, directed to the appeasement of IRA/Sinn Fein terrorism.

This terrorist appeasement began with the December 1993 Downing Street Declaration and the Mitchell Report of December 1995. The Downing Street Declaration made absolutely clear to the entire spectrum of Irish nationalism that the British government had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland’.

This core statement of the declaration expressed a willingness in principle on the part of the government of the United Kingdom to facilitate Irish unity and it was supported by all the major political parties in Westminster. It was precisely this Westminster mindset that made it easy for the government and Parliament to impose on Northern Ireland post 2016 the Protocol/Windsor Framework which effectively undermines the UK single market established under the 1800 Act of Union and places Northern Ireland within the commercial jurisdiction of the EU without unionist consent.

The Mitchell Report established the principle that there can be no requirement to ‘decommission’ the terrorist arsenals until (if even then) the negotiation of a political settlement acceptable to IRA/Sinn Fein. This is why paragraph 34 of the report merely suggested that ‘the parties should consider an approach under which some decommissioning would take place during the process of all-party negotiations’.

The Belfast Agreement consolidated the moral sanitisation of IRA/Sinn Fein by the release of terrorist prisoners under the terms of the agreement and the fact that the agreement contained no barrier to the inclusion of Sinn Fein in the Stormont Executive without IRA decommissioning.

This appeasement of IRA/Sinn Fein was not necessitated to end republican terrorism for the simple reason that by the early 1990s the IRA had been so extensively compromised by the RUC Special Branch that it was facing defeat – this fact is well documented by William Matchett in a contribution to The Northern Ireland Question: Perspectives on Nationalism and Unionism.

But despite this indisputable fact, the Belfast Agreement required a ‘new beginning to policing’ which effectively involved the destruction of the RUC.

The effect has been a radical corruption of the body politic in Northern Ireland. The Belfast Agreement elevated republican terrorists into the top echelon of government and the oversight of policing in Northern Ireland – beyond belief if it was not actually the case. This amounted to a corruption of both democracy and the rule of law extending right up to the present and evident in the negotiations between IRA/Sinn Fein and the PSNI over the conduct of the June 2020 Storey funeral and the illegal disciplinary action taken against two PSNI officers in 2021 virtually dictated to the PSNI by Sinn Fein.

The corruption of politics and legality in Northern Ireland resulting from the outworking of the Belfast Agreement has intensified, in my opinion, the deep-rooted moral corruption within the nationalist community that sustained republican terrorism. Both the president and vice president of Sinn Fein now engage on a regular basis in the actual celebration of the activities of members of the IRA who committed barbaric acts of terrorism, without any adverse effect on the electoral standing of Sinn Fein and without moral censure from the nationalist media or leading churchmen.

These considerations have an evident political import. The appeasement of terrorism corrupts the political, legal and moral foundations of society and consequently the institutions established under the Belfast Agreement are manifestly not worthy of unionist support.

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Patrick J Roche is TUV North Down branch president