William Matchett: IRA victims have been cheated by dirty peace politics, and abandoned by the media

A Sinn Fein MP speaking in south Armagh to commemorate its patriot dead, is the follow-on to removing memorials to fallen police officers in the same area. It is two sides of the one coin and a preview of the Sinn Fein vision of Ireland’s future.

South Armagh and North Louth Provisional IRA (PIRA) by the early 1990s was the last functioning super-gang of the insurgency. It was a tight knit cartel as merciless as anything in Mexico. There was nowhere on the island more suited to exploiting the chaos that erupted in 1969. The cartel was a terrorist organisation within a terrorist organisation.

It generated finance in international smuggling operations, using these routes to import illegal munitions. It committed sectarian atrocities in the Tullyvallen and Kingsmill massacres of innocent Protestants, detonated large bombs that flattened Protestant towns and grabbed world headlines with spectacular explosions in England.

Posters of crude ethnic profiles of police were pervasive, desensitising its support base to killing cops, soldiers and anyone the cartel decreed the enemy. The enemy was okay to kill as they had a lesser right to life. Sean O’Callaghan, ex-PIRA chief turned informer: “Towards the end the IRA was on its knees, its last redoubt in South Armagh on the verge of collapse.” Of the security forces, particularly the RUC: “They were often frustrated by having to observe the rule of law – but it proved the right way.”

Sean deeply regretted joining PIRA, as many did and made a hasty exit. Contrast his remorse to the cartel sniper team cheering as they were given stiff sentences. The irony within a year of their 1997 capture, Tony Blair fearful of bombs in England struck a peace deal that saw them walk free.

Prosecuting active terrorists did not result in political prisoners, as they self-define. These were dangerous villains convicted of serious crimes. But when do you ever hear a journalist ask them, what was the political offence? Invariably, it was murder or attempted murder, not leading a civil rights rally.

In the ‘peace process’ the British government gave republican leaders, essentially, licence to downgrade PIRA murders to political acts. Here, the loyalist killing of Mr Finucane’s lawyer father, Pat, is murder but not that of the top law official Maurice Gibson and his wife Cecily killed by a cartel bomb. How is it possible for both atrocities not to be murder? What is the correct answer in a Sinn Fein Ireland in asking a Yes or No question for each in a history test?

Extrapolate that out to some 3,700 total deaths in ‘the Troubles’ – most by PIRA – in the full curriculum and what merits an A*?

In democracy, neither a political party nor the Godfathers of an unlawful terrorist group decide what is and what is not murder. The law does. Anything different is tyranny.

Of Sinn Fein: “They see no ethical difference between the killing of a hundred enemy soldiers and the killing of a hundred enemy neighbours in cold blood, except that the latter is the safer and therefore preferable course. It therefore arouses, not simulated, but honest and genuine surprise and indignation when those convicted of unprovoked murders are not treated as honourable prisoners of war. Though defeated in the field, the Sinn Fein organisation gained strength instead of losing it. Its exact aim in its new military character was obscure, but this did not affect its popularity.”

The quote is out of The Soul of Ulster (1916).

Over a century ago, the author Ernest Hamilton describes the perilous situation facing those who opposed Sinn Fein in border poll mode. He relates it to ‘Tammany’ America, a flourishing system of political corruption, immorality and financial inducements: “With all the so-named civic forces leagued together in one direction, all that is further needed is to secure the support of the Press.”

With a traditionally sympathetic press “all goes merrily for Tammany, but the lot of the plodder in the dull ways of righteousness becomes hard indeed.”

They are “fleeced and swindled at every turn” and there is “no medium of publicity left” to articulate their case. “The victim can lay bare the evil practises” under which they groan, but such protest “touches a very small world.”

The plodders are not just the unionist community, but everyone who stood up to PIRA and every proscribed terrorist organisation.

Victims and survivors of PIRA have been cheated by dirty peace politics and largely abandoned by the media – north and south.

This will continue because Sinn Fein cannot state that a premeditated attack resulting in fatalities, like killing Maurice and Cecily, is a crime called murder that was wrong.

It’s not real peace. It’s Tammany.

William Matchett, Author of, Secret Victory – The Intelligence War that Beat the IRA