Ben Lowry: Up the Ra chant shows why unionists should steer clear of New Ireland

The first is to resist the flattery to ‘join the conversation’ about a so-called New Ireland, and instead to point out that, far from being ‘new’, Irish nationalism is gradually sinking into a retrospective embrace of IRA terror.

The second is to realise, at long last, the crisis that has been building on legacy for many years, in which a UK state is being blamed for a Troubles that it patiently brought to an end.

It was simultaneously unsurprising and nightmarish that the Irish team engaged in a Provo chant.

Unsurprising in that the ‘Up the Ra’ chorus has been sweeping across a younger generation of nationalists on both sides of the border.

Nightmarish in that through the long, bleak years of the Troubles, nothing as respected as an Irish national side in a mainstream sport thought it OK to celebrate, however informally, IRA violence.

Right across the Republic there was, at a minimum, wariness of the IRA, and often open contempt for it.

When Sinn Fein began to contest elections on both sides of the border from the early 1980s, it got between 1% and 4% of the vote in the 26 counties until the second ceasefire of 1997.

In Northern Ireland, the SF vote was typically around a third of the nationalist tally, and an even lower percentage of the Catholic vote (in that there was always a small but significant minority of Catholics who voted Alliance, making the SF share even smaller).

In other words, the people on behalf of whom the IRA said it was fighting, northern nationalists, decisively repudiated the violence when it was ongoing. Now 70% of a younger generation of them say it was necessary.

And the people in the state that the IRA wanted Northern Ireland, including unionists, to be compelled into by physical force, the Republic of Ireland, made clear at the ballot box their repudiation of the terror.

This is not to say that a refusal to vote SF in elections represented a total rejection of the IRA. As the victory of Bobby Sands in a Westminster by-election showed, nationalist avoidance of republican politics did not (of course) translate into support for unionists in a head-to-head contest.

And the long record in Ireland of extradition refusals to Northern Ireland of known IRA killers suggested a significant degree of establishment Irish ambivalence about republicans. People who loathed the Provisionals might have despised the Brits too.

But now the IRA campaign is receding far into the past. Even my generation, born in the early 1970s and now aged late 40s or early 50s, only has a meaningful memory of the 1980s, and has no proper recollection of the height of the Troubles.

And this then feeds into the question of why legacy is so important.

I have been writing about it for more than 20 years, and noticed where things were heading back in the Weston Park political talks of 2001. This was not great insight on my part — it was all plain to see.

Sinn Fein then made its first major push for an amnesty, beginning with the so-called ‘On the Runs’.

But even more importantly, the republican movement and its (many, and increasingly visible) helpers has been pushing the idea that the UK security forces engaged in systematic collusion with loyalists.

I know that I have repeated this next point many times but it needs to keep being said: supporters of the historic role of the UK authorities are still failing to grasp elementary statistics.

Republicans killed 60% of the Troubles dead, loyalists 30%, and security forces 10%. The latter killings were overwhelmingly legal, albeit tragic. Loyalist murders, far from being guided by state operatives, were markedly sectarian attacks on Catholics, and rarely killings of senior republicans.

The British state, far from having been oppressive, reacted with greater restraint to the long IRA campaign than almost any other society on earth would have done.

It let the well known leaders of the IRA come off their terrorism at a time of their choosing, as a consequence of which many people died, such as isolated Protestants in border areas.

There were of course instances of collusion with loyalists, but it is all young people now hear of.

Only a society as laid back as the UK would let republicans do what they did, then let them chase the security forces through the courts, funded at great expense by British taxpayers. Meanwhile there is no appetite to give republicans a dose of their own legal medicine.

Instead, London has tried to wrap legacy up, rather than challenge the IRA.

Lately UK government ministers have been talking again about consulting more with Dublin over how to handle the past. This is an Ireland in which a growing tier of politicians and other influential figures have been pushing the republican version of the past, and accusing Britain of cover ups.

Many of these same people are brushing off the IRA chanting and saying that an apology sorts it all.

It doesn’t.

All but the most obtuse unionists should now come to see that it is arguably as important as ever that we do not join an all Ireland.

One of the newest things about it is the rehabilitation of the post 1968 IRA and, I fear, that will in time come to be reflected in the official Irish history of the past.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor

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