Liam Kennedy: Society must probe corrupting nature of Irish republicanism - the same goes for loyalism

The context was a meeting of Foras na Gaeilge, a North-South Irish language body whose working language was an Ghaeilge, set up in the wake of the Belfast Agreement. The killer was Eoghan (“Gino”) Mac Cormaic from Derry or Londonderry.

Mac Cormaic’s fame or notoriety rested on the fact that he and another man had crept up behind a 19-year-old girl and one of them had shot her in the neck. Her name was Linda Baggley, a part-time police reservist. This was May 1976. She died 10 days later from her wounds in what must have been an agonising ordeal, not only for herself but for her family as well.

Linda Baggley was the first female police officer to be assassinated during the Troubles. Compounding the horror, her father Bill, also a police officer, had been murdered two years earlier close to the same spot.

This month, 50 years after her death, Linda Baggley’s short life was remembered at a church service organised by the victims support group SEFF. Its director, Kenny Donaldson, spoke to the heart of the matter: "Having a husband and father stolen away, to then be followed by a daughter and sister through terrorism just two years later is unimaginable.”

So, was Eoghan Mac Cormaic, deputy chair of Foras na Gaeilge, an ogre of some kind? Was murderer written all over his person and countenance? I have to confess, with some unease, that I found him likeable. He may well have been appointed to the board by the Irish minister for the Gaeltacht in what seems to have been an unacknowledged policy of buying off Sinn Féin in exchange for its continued support for the ‘peace process’. But there was no doubting his passion for the Gaelic language, which like many in Sinn Féin he had learned in jail.

There was quite a contrast with another board member, also an effective contributor to the work of An Foras, who had an IRA background but was not a killer. That was Séanna Breathnach (Sid Walsh). Breathnach had served 21 years in jail for a series of offences including bank robbery, possession of a weapon, and making mortar bombs. His status within the movement was reflected in the fact that he was chosen to read the historic IRA statement signalling the end of the IRA’s armed campaign in July 2005.

At meetings of the language board, I found that Breathnach’s perpetual frown, and a certain awkwardness and coldness, better fitted my admittedly superficial image of a terrorist in thrall to a political ideology. On reflection, maybe there is no standard persona or character structure that might link fanatics from a loyalist or a republican, a Hamas or a Hezbollah background.

Mac Cormaic had been a teenager when he committed murder. This was true also of my friend, Sean O’Callaghan, another teenage killer for the IRA. The difference is that later on O’Callaghan saw through the death cults of ultra-nationalism and sectarianism and became a fierce critic of republicanism, Irish style.

What made Mac Cormaic into a killer, I wondered? Peer group pressure as a young impressionable lad might have played a part. A vengeful memory of Bloody Sunday in his native city must have mattered (but remembrance of Bloody Friday or the bombing of the nearby Claudy village in which nine civilians were slaughtered surely did not). Intense indoctrination, building on Bogside communal rage and hatred of the ‘other’, likely smoothed the pathway to radicalisation and a long prison sentence.

I should add Mac Cormaic offered a sort of regret at his court appearance but his later active role within Sinn Féin suggests a limited sense of remorse. Becoming a Gaelic language activist may have been a necessary diversion from facing up to responsibilities of a more disturbing kind, such as the willingness to take the life of a young woman.

Recently I wrote about the existence of many different kinds of people who support the revival of An Ghaeilge, most of whom I have no doubt do not wish to see the language exploited for political purposes. But others do. To reinforce the point, I mentioned that these included some who had been murderers, ‘kneecappers’ and bombers.

Colleagues of mine criticised the claim as outrageous. But look at the evidence. This minority strand includes a number of past and present supporters of Sinn Féin and the IRA, the roll of honour running from Seán Mac Stiofáin, the first head of the Provisional IRA, to Bobbie Sands, and Derry’s leading serial killer, Martin McGuinness.

Eoghan Mac Cormaic is in good company but not my kind of company. And yet on a personal level, I warmed to him as a human being. But perhaps the real point is not the individual, although this may be of little comfort to the Baggley family, but the nature of the ideology that captured Mac Cormaic’s youthful imagination, not to mention some of his best years (behind bars).

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, writing on totalitarianism and genocide, was of the view that many of the functionaries who committed evil deeds were far from being monsters or fanatics. They were often ordinary people, insulated by ideology (and language?) from seeing the consequences of their deeds. Viewed in that perspective, many of the foot soldiers in loyalist and republican terror groups may have been more unthinking and uncritical than wilfully sadistic or evil.

If ideology is the key, then the urgent task facing Northern Irish society is interrogating these ideologies. On the nationalist side it means examining critically the corrupt and corrupting nature of Irish republicanism. The same goes for loyalism.

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l Liam Kennedy, author of Who Was Responsible for the Troubles? (McGill-Queen’s, 2021)