You know things are tricky again in Belfast the moment you get to the airport. There, in the arrivals lounge, is a cab driver holding up a sign marked ”NBC”. If American television news cameras are back in town, you know it can’t be good.
For the best part of six years, after the Good Friday agreement, foreign media stayed away, deciding that, bar the odd glitch, Northern Ireland was done, the conflict all but resolved. The past few weeks have prompted a rethink.
It began with the pre-Christmas robbery of the Northern Bank, a £26-million (R286-million) raid, almost universally blamed on the Irish Republican Army (IRA). But it was the death of Robert McCartney, a Catholic killed by IRA gangsters in a bar, that shook everything up.
In their demand for justice, the dead man’s sisters and fiancée have blown the lid off what many describe as a culture of Provo intimidation and criminality, bullying Catholics into obedience. When the IRA issued a statement offering to shoot the guilty men, it only confirmed the picture.
The result has been more damaging to the Republican movement than years of British or unionist invective. The proof came last week in Washington, as two lions of Irish America, Senator Ted Kennedy and Congressman Peter King, turned their back on Gerry Adams. King, once a romantic admirer of the armed struggle, issued a plain demand — that the IRA be disbanded.
So what’s going on here? One very senior British official admits that he doesn’t know — and speculates that neither does anyone else: ”It’s been a downward spiral in which everyone’s out of control. Heads are whirling.”
After several conversations with key players, two conflicting views emerge of what might be happening inside Republicanism. Start with John Kelly (69), who is proud to describe himself as a former IRA volunteer, a man who served eight years in jail — and is still a Republican.
The McCartney killing does not surprise him, but he is disgusted by it. He believes that such thuggery has become widespread, with Provo ”warlords” ruling their fiefdoms through extortion and violence.
The rackets — stealing cigarettes, whiskey and the like — are polluting ”the nobility of physical-force Republicanism”, he says. ”They’re doing what [Margaret] Thatcher couldn’t do — criminalising the Republican movement.”
The Sinn Fein leadership accepts that there are a few ”thugs” who are out of line, but insists that is all they are — a few bad apples. Kelly doesn’t buy that. He traces the blame all the way to the top, to Adams and Martin McGuinness. According to Kelly, it suited the top brass to have the hardmen on the streets, cracking down on dissidents and ”policing the Good Friday agreement”.
Other Republicans, also appalled by the McCartney killing and the evidence of violent criminality in Derry and elsewhere, take a different view. They do not defend the thuggery, but insist the leaders of Sinn Fein are pitted against it in what is a struggle for the soul of Republicanism.
One well-informed Republican believes there is a faction within the IRA opposed to the peace process and bent on sabotaging Adams and McGuinness. He speaks of a ”shadow IRA within the IRA”, centred on two dissenting members of the army council. It was this faction, he believes, that authorised the Northern Bank robbery — with no nod from Adams. Their hand was strengthened after Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley came tantalisingly close to an agreement last December, only to fail — with Republicans taking much of the blame.
That image — of a titanic struggle within Republicanism pitting Adams and McGuinness against the hardmen — certainly accords with the impression left by McGuinness. At Sinn Fein’s office on the Falls Road last week he said no such thing, not explicitly. But that’s what came through.
Without saying it, McGuinness implies an ongoing internal argument, in which political progress helps him and Adams, while setbacks help the obstructionists within the IRA.
How might the current crisis affect this battle? The optimists hope that it could, perversely, benefit the leadership. The loss of support, from the streets of Short Strand to both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, could be just the shock the naysayers need.
Less sympathetic voices wonder if Adams suffers from ”Arafat syndrome”, if he lacks the courage to make the final break with the past. For the moment, the British government still has faith in him and, the polls suggest, so do his people.
But this situation cannot last for ever. Ultimately, if Adams and McGuinness are to be judged true peacemakers, their job is to deliver their hardmen — not to fight a battle against them. — Â