Three such inspections have occurred since June 2000. This decommissioning-in-drag farce would be funnier if it didn’t imperil the peace process, culminating in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, that has ratcheted down the level of violence in Northern Ireland by roughly 80 percent since 1994. Because the IRA has not relinquished a single bullet or renounced its habit of armed coercion, Ulster Unionist Party leader and Nobel Peace laureate David Trimble, an architect of the agreement, resigned as first minister of Northern Ireland’s fledgling power-sharing devolved Assembly on July 1. If the decommissioning knot cannot be untied, the Assembly could perish and with it the agreement itself.
Yet Trimble’s stance is hardly unreasonable. To unite Ireland on behalf of Northern Ireland’s Catholic nationalist minority against the will of its Protestant unionist majority, the IRA has killed more than 1,800 people, roughly a third innocent civilians. In consideration for the IRA’s conditional abstention from ritual political murder, unionists and the British government allowed 428 terrorists (including pro-British loyalists) to go free long before the end of their sentences, and paved the way for the evisceration and demoralization of a police force–the Royal Ulster Constabulary–that has lost more than 300 officers to republican terrorism.
But the IRA sees itself as uniquely noble. To the typical IRA man, purging Ireland of 800 years (give or take a few centuries) of abusive British rule and Protestant domination necessitated IRA brutality. The IRA was not defeated militarily, but has simply added politics to its arsenal. With a ballot-paper in his fist and an Armalite still slung over his shoulder, our IRA man is gradually fulfilling the republican destiny established with the 1916 Easter Rising: to rule Ireland.
The peace process, to be sure, has complicated the internal politics of republicanism. Whereas there was no daylight between Sinn Fein and the IRA before the 1994 IRA ceasefire that got the ball rolling, the republican movement has since cleaved into hawks (IRA “hard men”) and doves (Sinn Fein politicos). All republicans believe that any decommissioning should be matched by British demilitarization, some of which has already occurred. But Sinn Fein knows that decommissioning is required before unionists are content to govern with republicans, much less see the Brits withdraw.
Persuading the hawks to play along is a hard sell, but not an impossible one. The republican movement has a great deal to lose if the Good Friday Agreement goes down the tubes. It’s doubtful that Sinn Fein could sustain its unprecedented electoral strength (22 percent vs. 10 to 12 percent before 1998) absent a credible peacemaking image. Moreover, Sinn Fein needs local government to prove itself as a mainstream political party to become a serious force in the Republic of Ireland–after a united Ireland, the movement’s most cherished objective.
The volatile “marching season,” which peaks this month, is just about the worst time to try to cut a groundbreaking deal. Still, Trimble’s move cleverly relinquishes the initiative to the IRA, and could allow self-adoring republicans to cast themselves as the dramatic saviors of the peace process. And unionists don’t require the IRA to admit surrender via wholesale military emasculation. They simply need a public declaration that the war is over, a symbolic sacrifice of “product”–a theatrical “bomb in the bog” blowing up IRA arms or concrete poured over a weapons dump would likely do–and perhaps a reduction in the IRA’s violent self-policing.
The IRA will always think it’s special. But history and politics matter to Irish republicans. They may just calculate that both posterity and the ballot box will treat them better if they yield up a delicate sufficiency of arms. The alternative is to keep stonewalling on the retrograde assumption that folks who are armed to the teeth don’t have to take orders from anybody, and that anyone who gives them too much flak will be sorry. That’s just the kind of obduracy and blackmail that kept the Troubles going for 25 years.
