Ex-Provo: No difference in murders of Lyra McKee and Joanne Mathers

Anthony McIntyre, now an historian and author, was reflecting on his role in the Troubles after the murder of the 29-year-old journalist, a personal friend, last week.

And he starkly equated the murder with that of mother-of-one Joanne Mathers, who was targeted by the IRA because she was working as a census collector in Londonderry in 1981.

The IRA never accepted responsibility for her murder, which was carried out with a weapon used for two previous IRA paramilitary style attacks. After the shooting the IRA said that her murder was the work of people “frantically attempting to discredit the election campaign of hunger striker Bobby Sands”.

Mr McIntyre claimed that Lyra’s death was “a tangible consequence” of the failure of NI’s leaders in political dialogue.

“Lyra McKee, sadly, is highly unlikely to be the final victim of the malevolent militarism that remains both arrogantly indifferent and haughtily impervious to the twin concept that others have rights and that there is no right to practice homicide,” he wrote on his blog, the Pensive Quill.

“Citizen rights – not on their watch, just their right to kill. Lyra was not in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her killers were.”

Many dissident republicans have come out against her killing – and armed actions – but much of this of this is merely down to suspicions about the leadership of dissidents in Londonderry, not a rejection of physical force republicanism per se, he added.

Their focus, he said, is not on ending violence but on avoiding civilian casualties.

“That singularly fails to see what almost everyone else can – there rarely is any other form of casualty.”

Since 1998 the vast bulk of people killed by republicans have been “innocent civilians”.

“Falsely posing as defenders of the community they afflict, they constitute a greater threat to the lives of Northern nationalists than armed loyalism.”

Even if all civilian casualties could somehow be avoided, it is “impossible” to see what armed activities might achieve, he said.

With the IRA being “a tradition rather than a property”, he said, “they are the IRA and they draw on a logic created by all of us who were in the ranks of the Provisional IRA”.

He said: “We cannot use Easter to Pontius Pilate-like wash our hands of responsibility through bequeathment. We provided the intellectual and ideological template which is the backdrop to the events in Derry on Thursday night. Our IRA had no more right to shoot dead 29-year-old Joanne Mathers than their IRA had to shoot dead 29-year-old Lyra McKee.”

He continued: “Our IRA needs to tell their IRA that we failed outright on the defining republican question of expunging Britain from Ireland and that they will do the same ... we failed not because we chose to but because we set ourselves an imposssibilist goal. At the heart of our armed struggle discourse was an irrepressible contradiction: in fighting for an Ireland that rejected us, we were fighting against Ireland. We had either forgotten or ignored [James] Connolly: ‘Ireland without her people is nothing to me’.”

Those in the IRA during the Troubles did not realise it but “we made the wrong call in going to war in pursuit of the unwinnable. The fate of Lyra McKee, a personal friend, is not the first time I have had cause to reflect that we rose up to right a wrong, and in the course of righting that wrong we violated too many rights ourselves. We did more harm than good.”

He added: “Lyra McKee did not believe in dying for Ireland. She was an advocate of people living long enough to see it get better ... One unassailable and inalienable right of every Irish citizen is to be protected from the threat to life posed by homicidal republicanism and its infernal gun culture ... The republican brotherhood have butchered our sister...”.