THEY haven’t gone away, you know. The boast of the mainstream republican movement about the Provisional IRA can now be applied to the threat posed by dissident republican terrorists. Last month’s rioting in a north Armagh republican stronghold along with an earlier attempt to kill three police officers has fuelled moderate Unionist and nationalist fears that Northern Ireland may face a re-rerun of the events of 1968. Dissent against the peace process is growing and history does seem to be repeating itself as the Unionist right-wing goes more hardline and hardline republicans turn again to violence.
However, in contrast to 1968, republicans who still adhere to the concept of the “armed struggle” are trying to recruit disillusioned and experienced Provos rather than looking for fresh young blood. Tactically, dissident republicans think they have no other option but to return to violence as, politically, Sinn Fein has the scene sewn up. During last year’s Assembly election, dissident republicans ran under the banner of “Concerned Republicans”. Sinn Fein wiped the floor with them.
To dissident republicans, Sinn Fein has betrayed the cause of a united Ireland by recognising the police force in the north and taking their seats in a partitionist parliament at Stormont. These dissidents are trying to evoke the anti-imperialist ethos of the Viet Cong guerrillas who pushed the Americans out of South Vietnam. As far as they are concerned, before there can be any peace settlement leading to a democratic socialist republic, the Brits must be bombed out of Ireland.
A decade ago, the Omagh massacre was a political disaster for the dissident republican cause when 29 people were killed by a no-warning Real IRA car bomb in the west Tyrone market town. Such was the outrage throughout Northern Ireland that it guaranteed the stability of the peace process, leading ultimately nine years later to the power-sharing Democratic Unionist/Sinn Fein government at Stormont.
Given the past eight centuries of sectarian slaughter, nine years is a blink of an eye in Irish political terms. The current dissident republican onslaught will run aground politically if violence is directed against the civilian population, particularly if, as in the Omagh massacre, the dead and wounded include Catholics. With the British Army withdrawn to barracks and border watchtowers dismantled, the only viable targets for dissident republicans are police officers and loyalists.
The “logic” of dissident republicans is brutally simple: the more police officers they kill, the more pressure is heaped on Stormont, the more loyalist death squads will be tempted to retaliate and the more chance there is of the British Government sending troops back onto Northern Ireland streets.
While mainstream republicans in Sinn Fein take their inspiration from the martyrs executed in 1916 in the aftermath of the failed Easter Rising, so dissident republicans trace their heritage back to the IRA which opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty which partitioned Ireland in the early 1920s.
But time is not on the side of the dissident republicans, especially if unionists and mainstream republicans can agree to devolve policing and justice powers to the Northern Ireland Assembly before Christmas.
Dissident republicans seem to forget that the pro-treaty Free State Army in the 1920s implemented an even more violent campaign against the anti-treaty IRA than Britain’s notorious Black and Tans during the war of independence. In the Irish Civil War, Free State forces executed more than 70 anti-Treaty IRA members. Modern-day Sinn Fein has become so integrated into the British police structure that mainstream republicans might “look the other way” if the SAS was deployed against dissident terrorists.
Meanwhile, hardline loyalists should not sit back on their political laurels and pretend the threat from dissident republicans will take the heat off the fact that Protestant terror gangs have failed to decommission their arsenals. While the Independent Monitoring Commission has given the Provos a clean bill of health, loyalists could yet feel the wrath of a Stormont executive armed with policing and justice powers.
Tragically, the real test for the Northern Assembly will come if dissident republicans murder a police officer, a loyalist activist or a Unionist politician. But the Assembly has an ace up its sleeve: the Dublin government has as much dislike of dissident republicans as Stormont does.
So far, support for violent dissidents has been limited to the Northern Irish border counties. To have any lasting impact on the peace process, the dissidents need to strike deep into Unionists heartlands in Belfast and County Antrim. In 1956, the then IRA launched a terror campaign, but could not expand the bombing attacks outside the border region. That resulted in the IRA having to call a humiliating ceasefire in 1962. Then the IRA lacked both the terrorist capacity and nationalist political support.
Alarm bells will soon be sounding again. But who will set them off first: dissident republicans murdering a police officer or the Northern Assembly unleashing a round-up of suspected republican terrorists?
