Pouring concrete over an arms dump of Kalashnikovs hidden in a bog is one thing, laying to rest ingrained unionist suspicions is another. As the Ulster Unionist leader Reg Empey acknowledged this week, everyone knows General de Chastelain won’t get every single republican gun (the Real IRA is still there), and it would be easy for the Provos to go out and restock their arsenal tomorrow. After the Northern Bank raid, they are not short of cash.
While Gerry Adams and the IRA intelligence chief, Bobby Storey, were said to have personally disarmed volunteers in Belfast, there has been resistance in the Armagh and Derry brigades. The whole point of decommissioning, Ulster Unionist leader Sir Reg Empey said, was to send out the message that the IRA had ‘crossed the line between a paramilitary past and a political future”. That turning point seems to have happened after its declaration in July that the armed struggle with Britain was over and all other ‘activity” would end.
So, on paper, this seems an important victory for unionists, who dug in their heels seven years ago and kept stamping until they got a kind of transparency. But many feel decommissioning — which both British military and Republicans thought a red herring — has poisoned the peace process, sapping all goodwill. Instead of magnanimity, sackcloth and ashes have been demanded, bogging the process down in standoffs that have disillusioned voters.
Ultimately, however, the wrangling has made it a more honest process and forced Republicans to confront the downside of the strategy of Armalite and ballot box, bully boys coercing Catholic communities and the murder of an innocent man. But as the loyalist rioting has shown, the IRA is not the only illegal army in Northern Ireland. Now the weapons to worry about belong to the loyalist paramilitaries.
A fortnight ago, the police and army were fired on at least 150 times during mayhem across Belfast. The irony is that many of the loyalist rifles were originally stolen from the British army by members of locally recruited militias.
The idea that loyalist paramilitaries may have to follow the IRA and decommission seems to have caused panic and was cited as a reason for the recent riots, alongside paramilitary anger at police raids to stem the loyalist feud, and a perception that working-class Protestants are losing out.
A part of that anxiety is unionist unease about their future. This a key moment in their history and they are being led by Ian Paisley, now 79 and ailing, a man who has resisted every agreement. Now he is being called on to lead unionists into some sort of power-sharing agreement with republicans, a prospect he finds abhorrent.
Meanwhile, Paisley has accused the government of a cover-up on the IRA weapons decommissioning, saying intelligence estimates of arms had been tampered with. —