IRA refuse to talk to Eames / Bradley and add another layer to the Provo Irony Cake

Considering that the Eames / Bradley Consultative Group on the Past commenced its work by suggesting that the Troubles constituted a “war” and hinting that amnesties might be given to those involved in terror if they were to come forward and tell the truth about their crimes, it is hard to present the group as deeply antithetical to republicanism. Nevertheless it seems that although the police, MI5 and even the UVF have been prepared to appear before the group, the IRA will not follow suit.

This will intensify suspicion amongst non-republicans that the search for truth which republican representatives pay lip-service to is very much conceived by them as a one way process. There is little or no appetite in republican circles, and certainly from those who were directly involved in violence, to acknowledge their own actions or to accept responsiblity for the consequences which sprang from those actions. Instead history remains a battleground on which the republican movement must seek to impose its own version of events to the exclusion of all others.

Imposing a partial historical narrative with a range of convenient excisions is not a search for truth, nor is it a recipe for reconciliation. The IRA is simply adding to the many-layered cake of republican irony whereby they demand one thing from everyone else and refuse to reciprocate in kind.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more